Strap in. We are about to see the worst of Australian politics.

Sussan Ley started 2026 much like she left 2025 – extending her tenuous hold on the Liberal party leadership by politicising tragedy. 

Ley, and others in her increasingly small circle, mistook Josh Frydenberg’s win in forcing the Albanese government to call a royal commission into the events which led to Bondi, as a personal victory.   

It became obvious that was a mistake, almost as soon as it happened.   

The Liberal party may have found brief unity in its feverish lust blaming the government, and anti-genocide protesters for the actions of deranged terrorists, but that unity was never going to hold. 

After losing the summer, Anthony Albanese is playing the long game. In throwing together a little of what everyone wanted into a bill no one wanted, he got to say he tried.  

It is a well worn Australian political tactic – wielding power through failure.   

‘We tried to do something, and just couldn’t and that’s someone else’s fault’ becomes the narrative, with the focus then shifting to who is not letting the government do as it wishes, rather than the government failure to find the support it needs to get it through. 

In this case, Labor itself didn’t want the ‘something’ it was attempting to do. It played a high stakes game with liberties to own the right, aided by the Greens who saw the lay of the land and made the smart choice. 

Now Ley must own the Coalition walking away from legislation it said it wanted, while the government gets to pretend it tried to meet its expectations. 

In more crass terms, Ley f*cked around.  And now she is finding out. 

It would be wrong to assume that a bad summer for Albanese (and no one can deny it was bad) meant a good summer for Ley and the Coalition.  

Ley received a brief reprieve for her leadership woes, but she did not cement anything beyond her natural political instincts to protect herself and her own ambition above all else. 

Despite all the favourable media coverage, the name recognition (a value beyond measure for an opposition leader) and the illusion of leadership, there’s been no net benefit for the Coalition in the polls. 

While news has focused on the rise of One Nation’s vote, less focus has been applied to the fact that it’s been at the expense of the Coalition.  

Psephologist William Bowe, who writes The Poll Bludger has the Coalition receiving just a 0.1% bump in the aggregate polling over the last month, and a 4.7% drop since the last election. 

In shorter terms, the Coalition’s vote has not yet bottomed out.   

And now it is the recipient of some wedge politics in return from Albanese, who has been playing these games since he camped out on Sydney University lawns in protest of what economics could be taught, that unity that saw the opposition slither through the summer is done.   

In splitting the omnibus bill – something anyone actually watching what was happening knew was coming – to ensure just the gun laws got through, the hollowness of the Liberal’s politics was laid bare.   

Albanese didn’t even have to try too hard. He was banking on the Greens being the grown ups on gun laws, and when the last 48 hours of negotiations proved they were, he announced the bill was split.   

Victory in the failure.  The bill that has actually spent weeks being prepared, across state and federal lines, will pass without too much fuss and the bill Labor didn’t want to do, but wanted to use to trap the Coalition, goes back to the drawing board.   

Depressing?  Very.   

These games hurt people who see what is at stake if bluffs aren’t called and they become law.   

Political? Absolutely. And on that, Albanese is better than Ley, helped immensely, by Ley not knowing who she is fighting, or for what.   

The answer is pretty obvious though – the calls are coming from inside the house. 

The Nationals ape-ing of One Nation culminated in its natural conclusion of its’ biggest baboons, Barnaby Joyce, officially switching sides.  

But that will make his former troop even more determined to out monkey their former leader.   

In doing so, it will continue to make it impossible for ‘moderate’ Liberals (if you believe in such things in 2026) to win inner-city seats.

Some of the heroic assumptions in the recent DemosAU poll which had One Nation sitting at a 23% first preference vote (as outlined here, by psephologist Dr Kevin Bonham) may have made that result over-stated, but there is no denying Hanson’s outfit is riding high.  

And it’s at the expense of the Coalition.   

History would say that won’t hold until the next election, and even if it did (like Queensland’s high watermark vote for the party in 1998) it will fall shortly after.   

One Nation is more of a convenient receptacle for grievances rather than a political unit.   

But history also tells us that rather than set itself apart from One Nation, the Coalition, led by its junior partner, will try to outflank it on its worst instincts. 

We’ll see that in the coming ‘free speech’ debate, which is again shaping up into who deserves protection from hate speech and who doesn’t. 

We’ll see it become even dirtier when it comes to migration, with the foundations for that already being laid.   

And the Liberal party will hasten its demise in the race to the bottom.

So we enter the parliamentary year sure of a few things; politics is about to get so much worse, the Coalition’s vote hasn’t finished bottoming out from the 2025 election, and Labor sees an opportunity to take more seats from the Liberals – all of which is going to drag the Overton window even further to the right. 

Labor, wounded from the brutal politics post-Bondi has sharpened its own tactics against the Coalition – there are to be no gloves, or good faith applied.   

With the Liberal party falling victim to One Nation’s taunting, Labor is identifying the outer suburban seats it can take from the party at the next election (having mostly maxed out what it is getting from the Greens) and in seeking to appeal to those Liberal voters – the former Howard battlers, as it were – it’s going to design policies with them in mind.   

That doesn’t bode well for anyone holding on to any remaining hope of progressive reform.  

Deputy Liberal leader Ted O’Brien (who will fall back into political obscurity when Ley falls) may have tried to make his fictional voter ‘Jess’ (a tactic borrowed from Mark Textor who came up with ‘Phil and Jenny’ before Howard’s successful 1996 win) the party’s centre, but it’s clear that the actual voter the Coalition is chasing is Pauline.  

So strap in. We are about to see the worst of Australian politics, normalised. No one wins from that.