Queensland opposition leader Jeff Seeney has brought on a leadership spill today, after revelations that he had lost the support of his deputy, Fiona Simpson, and a bout of head counting by former Nats leader Lawrence Springborg. But yesterday, Seeney announced that the state National and Liberal parties will disappear, being folded into a new “United Conservative Party”, billed by the Nats as not an amalgamation but “A New Party with one plan, one leader and one voice”.

Confused? The voters will be.

Seeney’s “top secret” announcement was concocted with a number of Liberal MPs. But the Liberal organisation believed that negotiations were for a merger – and that this would take place in an orderly process over several months.

These are basically identical tactics to those Springborg used when he last tried for an amalgamation in 2006 – when he was stymied by John Howard’s intervention. Seeney is banking on the fact that the federal leadership of both parties will be easier to roll now that they’re in opposition. So confident (or hubristic) is he that the move is being sold as a template to be adopted nationally down the track.

But the real fly in the ointment last time was the unwillingness of many urban Liberals to subsume themselves in a new party dominated by their country cousins.

Seeney has been inserting himself into the tortured internal politics of the eight Liberal MPs – whose hard right faction last year risibly tried to resort to getting its way over a 4-4 split on leadership by suggesting tossing a coin. The eventual losers, closely associated with the group led by erstwhile powerbroker and disastrous Howard Minister Santo Santoro, think their ambitions may be more easily fulfilled in a new entity.

The case for a new party rests on the Labor party’s clever exploitation of optional preferential voting in the last few state elections – with many voters taking Peter Beattie’s advice to “just vote one”, disunity on the conservative side has allowed Labor to pile up massive majorities in what has become akin to a first past the post system. Coalition and Liberal disunity has also been a godsend for Labor.

But, as Spiros remarked at Larvatus Prodeo:

“It’s hard to see the orthopaedic surgeons in Clayfield joining together with the sugar farmers from Innisfail and the real estate spivs from Robina, as one big happy conservative familly.”

There’s a lot of irony in the name of the putative new party. It’s not united. And a lot of urban voters who are actually liberals aren’t going to be happy about big C country conservatism.

Anna Bligh will be laughing her head off. And so will Kevin Rudd – well aware that federal Labor’s vote in Queensland, despite an impressive swing, was still the lowest outside WA. A further 2% swing to the ALP would see another four seats fall over. And last year’s result proved that it had been impossible to maintain the firewall between the federal arena and the deeply dysfunctional state Tories.