Newly-appointed Liberal leader Sussan Ley is having a tough few weeks. As if the election and following leadership vote wasn’t hard enough, now she’s presiding over a party that today has seen the once-famous Coalition between Nationals and Liberals collapse. 

Nationals leader David Littleproud today announced that the party would not re-enter its agreement with the Liberal Party to form the famed Coalition.

The news comes as the two leaders - Ley and Littleproud - have been locked in tight negotiations over the last few weeks on the future platform of the party.

Reportedly, three issues were dealbreakers for the Nationals:

• The controversial nuclear power policy that was a cornerstone of the Liberal's latest election campaign;
• The power to compel major supermarkets caught engaging in dodgy conduct to divest parts of their business (also known as supermarket divestiture), and
• The creation of a $20 billion regional "future fund" to pay for rural investments.

It has also been reported that the leaders were also tensely negotiating over the future of live exports from Australia. Littleproud said in a Q&A this morning he would never get back together with the Liberals if Ley's party supported a ban on live animal export.

But not every breakup is forever. Littleproud fronted the press to announce the news in Canberra today and shared that he hoped the two could come back together before the next Federal election.

And this is not without precedent, either. The current Coalition between the two parties came back together in 1987. That was when Liberal leader John Howard (remember him?) came together with National Party leader Ian Sinclair to take on the Hawke Labor government in the famous double dissolution election that saw every seat in Old Parliament House up for grabs. The two were unsuccessful in that tilt, however.

How did we get here?

The news is set to be a bitter pill for Ley’s tenure as Opposition Leader, but not one that watchers couldn’t predict was coming.

The most-recent Federal election saw the Liberal party not only lose its bid for government, but also lose its leader. Now-former leader, Peter Dutton, was ousted in the Queensland seat of Dickson with a devastating 7.7% swing to Labor candidate Ali France. It had previously been retained by Dutton with a 1.7% margin.

And Dutton wasn’t the only Liberal to lose his seat that night.

If the Coalition had held together, they would be in command of 43 seats in the House of Representatives. Separately, however, the two parties - Liberals and Nationals - now have an outright hold 18 and 9 seats, respectively.

The other 16 seats belong to the Liberal National Party of Queensland and their members are split between city and country MPs who sit with the Liberals and Nationals respectively. We’re sure to see a few fence-jumpers declaring themselves for either party following the news, as MPs are technically free to sit in either party room once elected.

We saw this with Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price who defected from the Nationals’ party room over to the Liberal party room in a tilt for deputy leadership before Ley’s elevation. 

Meanwhile, as the Libs and Nats consciously uncouple, of the 150 available, Labor now holds 92 seats in the House of Representatives.

You can watch Littleproud's comments before the media in Canberra this morning below.