# Liberals and Nationals reunite in Australia after a week-long Coalition split
*Event date: 2025-05-28*
Australia’s Liberal and National parties have reached an agreement to reunite the Coalition after a dramatic split that lasted a week and exposed fresh friction over leadership, policy and party discipline.
The Guardian report said Nationals members backed the deal at a virtual party room meeting, allowing Liberal leader Sussan Ley to prepare to unveil a new shadow cabinet later on Wednesday. The new frontbench is expected to include 14 Liberals and six Nationals, with Ley already contacting MPs about their roles.
The reunion followed a volatile stretch in which the Nationals had broken away from the Liberals for the first time in 38 years before returning to the negotiating table within 48 hours. Talks focused on policy safeguards the Liberals wanted attached to Nationals priorities, including nuclear power, a $20 billion regional future fund, divestiture powers and regional telecommunications.
The report said the Liberals insisted divestiture powers would be a last resort and would be subject to a public-interest test. That detail shows the deal was not a simple restoration of the old arrangement but a negotiated reset with limits built in.
Personnel changes also signaled that the post-election landscape remained unstable. Former Nationals leaders Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack were reportedly dumped to the backbench, and the coalition reshuffle was expected to look very different from the one Peter Dutton took into the May 3 election.
Even after the agreement, internal criticism had not disappeared. Some Nationals MPs were openly questioning leader David Littleproud, and Colin Boyce accused him of misleading the party room. The dispute suggested that unity at the top did not necessarily mean peace within the ranks.
For Australian federal politics, the reunion ended an immediate crisis but did not solve the underlying one. The parties had chosen to come back together, yet the terms of that return made clear that trust remained fragile.
The reunion does not erase the political damage from the split. A week of public disagreement left clear marks on the Coalition’s internal trust, and the criticism of David Littleproud shows that policy compromise did not automatically produce party-room unity.
Even so, the restored agreement matters because it keeps the Liberal-National alliance intact at the federal level. The new shadow cabinet will be both a practical reset and a test of whether the parties can coexist after an unusually public rupture.
The coalition’s reunification also matters because it restores a familiar parliamentary structure after an unusual rupture. That can help with opposition messaging and frontbench discipline, but only if the parties can stop re-litigating the split. The new cabinet lineup will show whether the reunion is a durable truce or just a pause in a wider argument.
The week-long split had also created a practical problem for opposition politics: without a functioning Coalition, the parties would have had to defend separate brands and separate strategies. Reuniting solves that immediate problem. It does not guarantee harmony, but it restores a common parliamentary vehicle at a moment when the government side would otherwise have had an easier time exploiting division.
