These rogue MPs are smart and effective. Now here's a scary thought

The Liberal-National Coalition was already in opposition when it was trounced at the 2025 election.

Its task was hardly insurmountable - eclipsing an unpopular government struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, the aftermath of a demoralising referendum debacle, and a worsening housing crisis.

Instead, the Coalition maintained rigid party discipline as it marched into the desert with barely a dissenting eyebrow.

Now though, when the recovery calls for solidarity, it has evaporated.

A new frankness has emerged which might have been useful three years ago when Peter Dutton's cunning plan meant surrendering women, young voters, professionals and inner-metropolitan residents in pursuit of suburban converts who would never materialise.

Andrew Hastie, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, and the National Party, were fully onboard with Dutton's odd plan despite its unorthodoxy.

It says everything about the contemporary Liberal Party that since Dutton's right-wing adventurism, its new leader - a first ever woman in that role - has been given no "leeway" at all to chart a recovery.

Sussan Ley aims to "modernise" the party by putting female candidates in winnable seats, dumping macho policies like government-owned nuclear power plants, and generally seeking to reflect Australian society.

Yet she is the one fighting to hold her job whereas Dutton was never required to. Perhaps Ley's gender, a plus in voter-land, makes her more vulnerable in a party where power still wears a suit?

In the wake of Hastie's melodramatic resignation 10 days ago, a challenge to Ley is considered possible this year.

In both its manner and its reasoning, his withdrawal from the frontbench raises difficult possibilities for the party and, potentially, the nation. These range from a marked shift to the right under Hastie or Angus Taylor, to the creation of a whole new party of distinctly populist-nativist character.

A party unapologetically campaigning against immigration and therefore multiculturalism, opposed to net-zero, and in favour of government support in "Australian" industries.

If dramatic changes such as the collapse of the Liberal Party are hard to imagine, consider the emaciation of centre-right establishment parties in Europe, the UK and the complete takeover of the GOP by Trump's MAGA movement.

It is true that the Liberal Party has survived the rise of the New Right and the "Joh for PM push" in the 1980s, as well as breakaways on its left flank like the Liberal Movement in SA and the Australian Democrats.

But a splintering to its right flank at this juncture would fit the post-pandemic pro-Trumpian zeitgeist.

The next move of Liberals like Hastie, Nampijinpa Price, and others, may be to leave. Both exude that crazy-brave unfiltered vibe which seems to draw more on the vogue than on the Menzian traditions of the post-war Liberal Party.

Sometimes, major historical direction shifts flow from minor and ostensibly unrelated decisions.

Take James Comey who was in the news this week. Trump now wants the former FBI director jailed even though Comey is considered by many to have put Trump in the White House in 2016 by publicly reopening the Hillary Clinton's emails investigation in the final days of that campaign.

Without that first victory, Trump may have remained a mere footnote in history rather than the most consequential figure in global affairs in the 21^st century.

From a career standpoint, Hastie's peremptory departure felt confected - as if trumped up for attention and attached to some downstream event yet to be revealed. He claimed it was because he had been prevented from speaking on immigration policy as shadow home affairs minister, flagging an intention to use his backbench freedom to think and write about this and more.

Ley says he never even raised immigration or any other policy matter in their discussions.

Just weeks earlier, Nampijinpa Price had forced her way onto the backbench by pointedly refusing to declare loyalty to the leader. That came as she attempted to survive the reaction to a racial slur against Indian Australians whom she characterised as somehow aligned with Labor.

It is no coincidence that both renegades have fallen out of Ley's tree over immigration differences, the populists' cause celebre.

In September, Hastie had complained in a social media post that Australians were "starting to feel like strangers in our own home".

"In the last two years, we've added nearly a million extra people to our population," he wrote, declaring "Australians are feeling the impact of Labor's immigration policy".

These are the same sentiments being spoken by surging nationalistic parties around the world.

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Here though, they have been consigned - at least in public discourse - to the far-right fringes roamed by One Nation and Clive Palmer.

The experience abroad suggests that one such statements go mainstream however, divisions can deepen exponentially and social cohesion - until now, Australia's super-power - can fracture.

The signs may already be there. Polls show Pauline Hanson's One Nation has doubled its vote share since the May election raising a scary thought. What if it is the unpopularity of the inarticulate Hanson that is holding One Nation's vote down rather than pushing it up?

It's a question the smarter and more communicationally adept Hastie and Nampijinpa Price might well be pondering.