On the day Sussan Ley was elected Liberal Party leader, her friend Judy Brewer sent her a text. Ley had impressed Brewer since the moment she walked into her economics class at La Trobe University in Wodonga in around 1991, aged 30, a baby in a basket beside her. “I don’t think I ever had another student who brought a baby to class, and I thought, ‘Wow, good on you.’ ” Brewer went on to marry the late Tim Fischer, the former National Party leader who held the enormous NSW federal rural seat of Farrer before retiring in 2001. And it was in that year that Ley, by then a married farmer with three children, won the seat from the Nationals by a couple of hundred votes, astonishing everyone, including her own party. When Ley became leader, Brewer wanted her to know how proud she was of her, sending her a text to the effect of: “This is in itself a wonderful thing. Even if it’s as far as it goes, it will be a huge achievement.”

As far as it goes. Ley’s election as the first female leader of a party forged in 1944 by Robert Menzies shouldn’t be a big deal in 2025, but because the party is so male-dominated, it is. Of the 34 parliamentarians representing the party and the associated Queensland Liberal National Party in the lower house, just seven are women. Some Liberals have struggled to get used to a female leader, particularly a feminist with an empathetic persona. She’s no “Iron Lady” Maggie Thatcher (thank goodness, say some; what a pity, say others).

“The truth is the Liberal Party is very conservative and no one has ever imagined what our first female leader would look like,” says NSW MP Alex Hawke, Ley’s key factional supporter. “Was she, 10 years ago, considered as a leader? No, but only because there was no woman being [seriously] considered.”

To take the helm after the worst defeat in the party’s history – rejected by just about every demographic, bar male Boomers and those who own their home outright, and riven by “irreconcilable differences”, as one Liberal put it – has a streak of the crazy-brave. There was no honeymoon for Ley, forced to patch up the Coalition after the Nationals threatened a split just days after the election and at a time when her mother, Angela, was dying.

In the six months since, Ley’s leadership has never settled. She has made some unforced, slightly odd, missteps, but mostly they have had little to do with her, and everything to do with internal brawling and a crisis of party purpose. Two ambitious shadow ministers, leadership aspirant Andrew Hastie and conservative darling Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price – unconvinced by Ley’s conviction that the party’s future must be through the “sensible centre” – shuffled to the backbench to speak their minds.

The National Party, with little interest in winning city seats the Liberals must appeal to, abandoned net zero emissions targets early this month and all the tensions within the Liberals bubbled over. With her leadership being questioned – Victorian Senator Sarah Henderson claimed Ley was “losing support” among her colleagues – she has summoned MPs back to Canberra on Wednesday to resolve the party’s position on net zero by 2050. This will be pivotal for her leadership but, more importantly, for the party and its prospects as an effective opposition to a dominant government. Some contemplate whether the party could collapse, not over net zero, but because the most successful federal political party in Australian history isn’t sure any more what it is, who it’s for.

“No one in the Liberal Party should rationally want to be leader at this time,” says Victorian Senator James Paterson, who did not vote for Ley in May as leader but, as shadow finance spokesman, is a member of her leadership team. “She has accepted the burden and responsibility of leading us at a very difficult time, and she deserves a lot of credit for that.”

I don’t normally feel sorry for politicians, but I watch Ley, 63, over several weeks and wonder how she does it, always showing up with a high-wattage smile, wispy blonde hair blowing in the wind, peppered with questions about tumult in her own party. Her leadership was greeted with scepticism even as it was announced. At her first press conference on May 13, it was suggested that she was a transitional leader, and was asked whether she would last the term. “One hundred per cent,” she said with a determined nod. “I will be here in three years.” I ask what drives her, and she thinks for a few seconds. “I don’t like the word ‘resilience’, it’s overused these days,” she says. “‘Persistence’ is what I call it.”

Long-time Liberal Party strategist and former adviser Tony Barry observes the self-destruction. He says Ley is doing her best to stabilise the party “despite the efforts of self-harm by some in the joint party room”. Six months in, it’s too early to judge her. “The truth of it is, we crashed the station wagon into a brick wall and threw the car keys [to Ley]: ‘There you go, baby, it’s all yours.’ ” Barry believes it’s got to the point where “there has to be a fight for the heart and soul of the Liberal Party.” He’s not the only one who thinks so.

Ley embodies that fight for now, a fight that’s not going well. It’s a test of whether she will wobble in her determination to make the party electable again, especially in the cities, or whether she will be derailed by her own shortcomings and a roaring minority who look to the anti-immigration populist Nigel Farage in the UK as inspiration for a revival of right-wing politics in Australia. “Labor-lite,” they call her, in a world where “moderate” is an insult. Alex Hawke says Ley “is up for it ... she’s underestimated in terms of her experience and her depth and her ruthlessness as a politician”. Underneath Ley’s personal fate are questions about what “modern Australia” – as Ley refers to it – actually is in 2025 and whether harder-right conservatism, on the march overseas, will take hold here.

It’s frustratingly hard to get Ley to address these questions beyond generalities. I ask her about what a tough job she has and she looks surprised. “Oh, no, no,” she says. “It’s a privilege to do. It’s a privilege to be the leader of the party.” We are in her electoral office in the NSW border town of Albury, just a few minutes from where she watched the “huge loss” on election night.

“If I had a conversation with the people who didn’t support us and I introduced it as, ‘What is liberalism, conservatism?’, I don’t think they would have the slightest interest in that, but it’s an intellectual conversation that is probably worth having.”

Ley’s tenure has been dogged by speculation about the leadership ambitions of others, such as West Australian MP and hypermasculine former SAS captain Andrew Hastie, although his disruptive style has annoyed many MPs. Hastie spectacularly quit the Coalition front bench to speak his mind on issues such as immigration and climate change. The less provocative Angus Taylor, who Ley narrowly defeated to become leader after the election, is a contender, as is Deputy Liberal leader Ted O’Brien.

Ley is either unconcerned, or is feigning it. “Differences of opinion are not differences in values,” she insists. “I accept there’s a variety of views in my party room, and I’m very relaxed about what people say privately and publicly.” I am sceptical, so she offers an analogy. “You’ve got the Christmas lunch. Everyone comes to the big table in the backyard. Everyone has different views. Everyone disagrees vigorously and agrees furiously about a whole range of things, but you touch our family or the principles we stand for as a family and you’re in trouble. I’ve watched the Labor Party. They sing from the same song sheet, they stay in their lane. And that is not good for public policy or public debate.”

It is true that members of defeated parties often vent personal and policy frustrations, although this family barbecue is a doozy of hurling sausages and storming off. And it is also true that defeated parties can revive rather quickly and hand-wringing about “existential” challenges can be tiresome. One thing Ley is given credit for is having a more consultative approach than previous leader Peter Dutton in the shadow cabinet room and in developing policy. A reason for the public disagreements is that, as Paterson explains, “some people feel like they were passengers in the last term or held their tongue or didn’t speak up, and they regret that.” There was a facade of unity because they thought they could defeat Labor after a single term, and they were wrong.

Ley strides from her electoral office in Albury, on the north bank of the Murray River, towards an outdoor table for lunch. She wears a white jacket, blue button-down shirt and black jeans, the epitome of smart country casual. The only hint of quirkiness is her signature gold aeroplane earrings that remind her of her passion. How are the local shops going, I ask, struggling to keep up with her as we walk along Dean Street. “Terrible,” she says, adding that small businesses are closing because people haven’t got enough money to spend.

Ley has been vegetarian at different stages of her life since her frugal teenage years, but today orders a salmon salad, “and can I have a small almond flat white in a takeaway cup and can you make it extra, extra hot?” After lunch, we take off to the Albury airport to see the single-engine Cessna 182 she bought last year. She tosses off her town pumps for boots – “I wouldn’t be seen dead on an airfield with these flimsy shoes” – and proceeds to single-handedly push open the heavy hangar doors and drag the plane out. The 2007 four-seater is the “ute of the skies”, she says with pride, a workhorse she bought to help her get around her electorate, an area as large as Greece.

Her two uncles were killed in World War II, which led her to read children’s adventure books about flying. ”That led to just amazement about the craft of the aeroplane, what it could achieve, how it was built, who invented it, and what it was like to fly, and that sort of ignited the passion.” It taught her something about life, too: “discipline and focus”, and how to fight for what she wants – qualities she needs now.

Ley has held the seat of Farrer for nearly 25 years, through nine elections and seven PMs, starting with John Howard. Before politics, she lived a rollicking, girls-own-adventure story, not without hardship and struggle. She’s been broke, she’s been a cleaner, worn Vinnies clothes to save money for flying lessons, got up at 4am to cook breakfast for shearers, studied for degrees part-time and sat across from a bank manager threatening to close her farm. “She’s had to fight for everything she’s got,” says NSW Liberal Senator Maria Kovacic. “She hasn’t grown up in the way that some people in the party room have, with opportunity and affluence.”

Her adventurous streak must have been inherited from her globe-trotting parents, Edgar and Angela Braybrooks, English people who loathed England. Before they met, they travelled independently to Australia in the 1950s, her father working as a crocodile hunter in the Northern Territory and her mother as a midwife on Thursday Island. Ley was born in Nigeria, and as a small child moved with her parents and brother John to Qatar, then Sharjah, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Al Ain, because her father was advising the sheikhs who were setting up what would become the United Arab Emirates. At the same time, he was also a British spy. Ley got a scholarship to an English boarding school before the family moved to Australia in 1974 when Ley was 13. They settled in Canberra, where Edgar worked for the Australian Federal Police.

Ley says her toughness came from her mother and her focus on the future from her father. As a young woman, she was obsessed with becoming a pilot but found commercial airlines resistant to women in the front of the plane. But she still took lessons, paying for them by working part-time jobs, including as a cleaner in a department store. While she worked as an air-traffic controller in Melbourne and Sydney for a time, she was determined to fly. At one point she thought she’d do crop dusting, but “the crop-dusting trainers said, ‘No, I’m not going to teach you – the chemicals will affect your unborn children.’ ”

So she trained to be an aerial stock musterer, and it wasn’t easy: lurching around in a small plane close to the ground made her airsick. She got her licence, and was offered a job on a sheep farm in Thargomindah, 1000 kilometres west of Brisbane. She packed up her 1969 Holden to drive the two days to get there.

That’s how Ley frames life challenges, then and now. “I’m not just going to stand here and scream and yell and say, ‘The world’s unfair,’ ” she says. “My approach has always been, ‘OK, so what’s next? Let’s work out a way around this.’ I’ll show them. I’ll do mustering, and I’ll show them.” She doesn’t worry about criticism because her mother always told her that “it’s none of your business what people think of you.”

Ley is determined to “show them”. Since the 2025 election, she has been methodical. She’s set up a conventional review of what went wrong on May 3 and a longer-term probe, headed by Queensland Senator James McGrath, for a “deeper look at the existential issues we face”. That will include how its state and territory divisions, with their own constitutions and power over preselections of candidates, can lift anaemic membership numbers and begin to look vaguely like the Australian population. All policies bar a couple – including a commitment to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP – are up for review.

Then there’s a short, sharp working group into energy policy, led by spokesman Dan Tehan, formed to tackle the bitter issue of whether to dump the net zero emissions target by 2050, a target then prime minister Scott Morrison signed up to in 2021. Already, Ley has rejected the Labor government’s reduction target of between 62 and 70 per cent by 2035 as too costly and unachievable. For some, the 2050 target – 25 years away – is the defining issue of principle, a signal of whether the Liberals understand the diabolical challenge of climate change, or believe serious action and economic prosperity are incompatible. Net zero by 2050 is not arbitrary - it is the international target that climate scientists say offers the world the best chance to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. If the Liberal meeting next week resolves the policy, it will be an uneasy resolution if the party is perceived to be only half-heartedly committed to the challenge of climate change.

The pressure Ley faces is not really about her. It’s about what modern Australia is. Ley pitches the Liberal economic traditions of smaller government, lower taxes, lower spending, private sector-led growth and productivity, and a tightly targeted welfare system. It’s an economic program, and she frames issues such as climate change and immigration as economic, not cultural, challenges. She has no problem with Welcome to Country acknowledgements. She doesn’t prioritise interviews with conservative Sky presenters who champion Hastie and Price; one called her “Malcolm Turnbull in a skirt” (a devastating insult to the Sky audience). She turned up at the National Press Club in Canberra, a venue Dutton shunned.

An alternative Liberal vision, embodied for now by Hastie, argues that the party must stand for moral and social values alongside an economic agenda. He warns of the “repudiation of Christian, Western values” and wrote after the assassination of American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk that “the radical left are evil and will use violence to win. Let’s stop pretending they act in good faith.” There was a hint of Trump in that. He rejects “climate alarmism”, championing the advantages of coal and gas.

In terms of his party’s future, Hastie told the ABC’s Four Corners program just after the election that there’s “no reason to think that we won’t disappear over time if we don’t get our act together. That’s how serious this challenge is for the Liberal Party.” John Roskam, a party member for 37 years and unashamedly conservative, says “the more thoughtful ones [in the party] are thinking, ‘Well, you know, what is this thing called the Liberal Party? ... Regardless of whether it will or won’t, maybe the party should split.’ ”

James Paterson says it need not be an existential crisis, “but it could be existential depending on how we respond to it”. Paterson is one of the few Liberals who can speak of the party’s challenges beyond platitudes. In a speech last month, he put the case that the economic and the cultural weren’t incompatible, but essential to the party’s success. Labor would win any spending war, and without cultural issues of identity, such as the importance of the flag and national unity, “we would be left with a soulless, hollow party which spoke to only the narrowest material aspirations of Australians.”

“Marginal voices” arguing that the party should split must remain marginal, Paterson says. Nigel Farage’s approach in the UK was not suitable as a model because, crucially, Australia has compulsory voting, which means the Liberals must appeal to swinging voters, not just the “base”. It was time, Paterson said, “to call time on the apology tour” and get on with it. To date, Ley has not made such a defining speech, and the party is not getting on with it.

Talk to any Liberal, and at some point they will pay homage to Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest-serving PM. I ask Ley whether the Liberals now are in some ways like the Democrats in the US: rootless, unsure of who they appeal to, and wondering why they have lost so much support. “No, we’re not like the Democrats,” she says. “I would say we need to explain our values better. They’re clear. They’re enduring. They haven’t changed since Menzies.”

Albury has deep Liberal roots, and Ley points out the imposing Mate’s building on the corner of Dean and Kiewa Streets. This was where Menzies convened a three-day meeting in December 1944 to sort out the machinery of the new Liberal Party – its draft constitution, the state divisions, federal executive – the dull but crucial structures many Liberals now say are no longer fit for the modern era.

Menzies’ vision was of a party for individual rights over the collective Labor Party, for the “forgotten” middle classes in the suburbs, the “salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers”. But the Menzies suburban middle class has fled the party. Twelve of the 15 seats the Liberals lost in May were in the cities, where most seats now are. The details are terrible: of the 88 seats classified as inner and outer metropolitan, the Liberal Party holds nine. After the 2022 wipeout in the cities to Labor and the Teal independents, the party held just four inner metropolitan seats; now it holds two. Ley and her deputy Ted O’Brien represent rural seats. Overall, the Coalition has just 43 lower house members to Labor’s 94.

“The path to victory is through every single seat,” says Ley diplomatically, “and clearly it’s through metropolitan Australia because we’ve lost so much in metropolitan Australia.” Her supporters agree, and think people like Hastie and Price don’t get it. “We will never win without Melbourne or Sydney,” says NSW Senator Kovacic. “In the UK, in the US, you can win without the cities; you can’t here.” Sydney and Melbourne tend to be more progressive than the regions and the country on issues such as climate change.

And the Liberals have to win back women. Menzies’ emphasis on the central role of the home, in contrast to Labor’s pitch to working-class male unionists, meant the Liberals were the natural party for women for decades. But women changed and, since the 1996 election, have shifted towards progressive parties. None of this is new. After the 2022 loss, Ley, as the new deputy leader, was tasked with making the Liberal Party more appealing to women. She went on a “listening” tour aimed at “restoring their faith” in the party.

Nothing changed, and Ley is again “listening”. “I do understand what the life of a modern woman is like because I’ve lived that myself. I’ve had three children. I’ve piled them in the car in the morning, I’ve gone to childcare, I’ve gone to uni, I’ve got home, I’ve tried to cook at dinner. I’ve tried to help with the books. I’ve tried to deal with someone who’s sick.” In her speech to the National Press Club, Ley said: “I understand the fear you feel when you go for a walk alone. Because I have felt that fear, too. I understand the pain that comes with coercion and control because I have felt that pain, too.” She says now that she “wanted women to know that I understood”, but she won’t elaborate. “There are some quite distressing legal and personal reasons why I will never do that.”

What policies will flow from listening to women are not known, but one example Ley offers is opposing Labor’s proposal for universal childcare. This is typical Labor, she says, “standardising so much of the offerings that are there for the Australian people, limiting choice, limiting opportunity”.

Ley has supported some form of quotas for female representation for many years, and says she’ll be a “zealot” as leader, having “tough conversations” with state divisions about promoting women. She can’t do much more than talk tough as she has no power over the divisions on preselections. Again, none of this is new. But she is wielding what influence she has, says Kovacic, and there are likely to be changes, perhaps different approaches in different states.

You have to go back to the 1970s to find a time when about half of all new voters chose the Coalition. Now, according to this masthead’s pollster, the Resolve Political Monitor, the average age of a Coalition voter is 54 (it’s 46 for Labor). According to Professor Ian McAllister, the director of the Australian Election Study, young voters really began to abandon the Coalition in 2019, when just 15 per cent of new voters chose the conservatives. A key reason, says McAllister in a paper to be published next year, Generational Change and Party Support in Australia, is that younger Australians are far more educated now, and people with tertiary qualifications are more likely to support taking stronger action on climate change, for instance, and are more comfortable with immigration and multiculturalism.

“A lot of people would say the Liberal Party isn’t really the party for young people,” says Ley, “but I would completely disagree ... young people want to get ahead. They want choice in how they live their lives.”

In her youth, Ley wasn’t focused on a political career. She met John Ley, a shearer at the time, in Thargomindah, and they spent two years working on rural properties in western Queensland. It was tough. As a shearers’ cook, she rose at 4am to light the wood-fired stove to make breakfast, lunch and dinner. The couple married in 1987 and returned to John’s family’s mixed livestock and dairy farm outside Albury. The only time Ley comes close to tears is when she recalls mustering sheep to be shot in the early 1990s (about 10 million sheep were culled nationally after a huge surplus meant they were worth nothing).

“It still upsets me to talk about it [the sheep being shot] ... because you know them, and you know that they’re going to be shot, and the sheep knew, too,” she says. She loved farming, but it was “unbelievably stressful” when times were bad. The need to find another way to make money was the reason she began studying economics part-time. She started to put it together, how the economy worked, or didn’t work, for farmers and the nation. Over 10 years, she earned a master’s in tax law and a master’s in accounting.

She remembers going to see then Liberal senator Bronwyn Bishop give a speech at the Memorial Hall in Tallangatta, in north-east Victoria. She was struck that the Liberal values articulated were so similar to her own. “There’s that moment in your life where you know, ‘That’s me, that’s my tribe,’ and now I’m going to do something about it.” She joined the local branch in 1994. As her political interests grew, her marriage faltered. Ley is private about her personal life, but will say that politics “may have hastened up something that was inevitable”. She and John divorced in 2004 and Ley says she’s “happily single”, living alone in Albury, her grown children and six grandchildren, aged six and under, visiting often. “I’m not sure where I’d fit a partner in my life.”

Ley has been in politics a long time, serving as minister for aged care, sport, health and the environment. Her colleagues say she was a hard-working, competent minister, but it’s hard to find a major reform she championed, or a major political fight she took on and won. She did back the net zero target again and again as environment minister, a role she held until the defeat of the Morrison government in 2022. “I think we should achieve net zero. I think it is absolutely achievable,” she told Sky presenter Paul Murray during the pandemic. Now, she says, “it’s not about what I may have said in the past or what others may have said. It’s about where we are now.” Her principles are about lowering energy costs and Australia playing its global role in reducing emissions.

I ask her what she is most proud of as a minister. Ley takes time to think about her answer, and names finding $1 billion as health minister in 2016 to subsidise a breakthrough medication for hepatitis C. “I’m particularly proud of that because I didn’t need to do it and there would have been others who thought that money could have been spent elsewhere.”

Ley’s policy consistency and political judgment are being tested. Her views on Palestine have flipped; having once strongly supported Palestinian statehood, she is now vowing to revoke the government’s recognition of a Palestinian state. ”History is dynamic,” she tells me. “Events have changed the views that I’ve had.” Her call for Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, to be sacked after President Donald Trump said jokingly that he didn’t like him and “probably never would” appeared knee-jerk and she quietly dropped it. Many of her own colleagues thought it bizarre that Ley, a self-described “punk” in her youth, demanded PM Anthony Albanese apologise for wearing a Joy Division T-shirt because the band’s name was used to describe women kept as sexual slaves in concentration camps in World War II. Jewish groups didn’t share the outrage.

Ley likes to say, “our policies are up for review, but our values are not.” The first value is “aspiration”, the “single, shining thread that connects every single part of Australian society, every demographic and every journey in life”. Wouldn’t Labor say the same? “I don’t know if they would say that. They would say it’s OK to rent because they’re spending all this money on build-to-rent, entrenching renting.” (The government passed laws last year that give incentives for developers to build homes for 80,000 long-term rentals.)

“High taxing, high spending and high interference is how I would describe the Labor Party, and that’s critically different from us,” Ley says. Labor was for equality of outcome, she says, the Liberals for equality of opportunity, “and that’s connected to my own personal story in Australia”.

Both Labor and the Coalition promised more spending before the election, with little if any fiscal restraint. In a speech to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia in September, Ley raised the more conventional Liberal position of reducing spending and debt, a greater focus on private sector-led growth and productivity and more targeted welfare that should not be available for high-income earners. There were few specifics, but the tone was clear. “We must move from a time of dependency to empowerment,” she said. “We believe government support should be a safety net, not a hammock.”

“I don’t like the expression ‘cutting’,” Ley tells me, “because I think it’s suggesting to people there was some benefit you were getting from the government that you’re no longer going to get. That’s not what it’s about. So I prefer to use ‘realising efficiencies’.” To her supporters, the Liberals lost their way over the past decade by ceding the mantle of better economic managers to Labor, symbolised by promises of higher taxes at the last election and a pledge to publicly fund seven nuclear power stations.

NSW Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg, a member of Ley’s economic team, says “the ambition on the economic policy side is essential for the Liberal Party to become a government again.” The last ambitious Liberal proposal from opposition was John Hewson’s Fightback! in 1993, a sweeping plan that included a goods and services tax, tax cuts and a reduction in spending – the Coalition lost that election. “It doesn’t need to be Fightback!,” says Bragg, “but it needs to be something very substantial that’s going to move the needle on tax and small business and those core economic issues.”

The economic question is at the heart of the party divisions. Is modern Australia attracted to smaller government, lower spending, lower taxes and for governments to “get out of the way”? Academic and historian of the Liberal Party, Judith Brett, says the balance has shifted. The 1980s and ’90s were when both major parties embraced smaller government, privatisation and the free market. That era has ended, with the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 epidemic and a more dangerous world, including the impacts of climate change, heralding a yearning for an enhanced role for governments. “When there’s a flood or when there’s a fire, people don’t say, ‘Oh, well, what business is going to come and make money out of helping us out of this flood?’ ” Brett says. “People look to the government.” The listing of timeless Liberal values “just indicates to me a lack of any real intellectual depth”.

Brett is politically progressive and John Roskam is about as far away from that as you can get. He’s a former head of the libertarian Institute of Public Affairs, thinks net zero is “fantasy” and noted with concern that the Australian flag was nowhere to be seen at Ley’s televised National Press Club address in June. But he agrees with Brett that the party is “verging on becoming actively anti-intellectual”. “The thing the Liberals have struggled with is [that] the neoliberal paradigm is collapsing,” he says, with Labor more economically attuned to modern Australia than the Liberals.

Roskam is aligned with Hastie and Price’s view of the world. “Ley will need to talk about topics Liberals have tiptoed around for years, namely culture and values,” he says. Hastie and Price – in Price’s case, literally – wrap themselves in the Australian flag. Unsustainable immigration means that “we’re starting to feel like strangers in our own home,” Hastie has said. Ley wants a cut in immigration numbers, too, but she doesn’t put it that way. “If somebody’s passion is a certain area that someone else would call ‘the culture wars’, then I think that’s a matter for them,” she says, not in reference to Hastie specifically. “But for me, the main game is our economy, and the main game is growth.”

Alex Hawke agrees there’s been a shift in public expectation of governments. He joined the party aged 19. “I’ve always been a sceptic that government ultimately can do for society what it says it can. It’s better for society to look after itself, and then the government can pick up the pieces.” That idea has been “inverted” post COVID, where people expect governments should do more. He’s convinced it will be temporary, pointing to the US embrace of tariffs, anathema to a free economy. “The world economy is going to struggle with that in a way that we haven’t seen for a long time, and there will be a resurgence of freer economic markets, less government.”

Ley is sceptical of the idea that modern Australia wants a greater role for governments. “There are situations where people expect government to step in where they might not have in the past,” she says. “But I think the low primary vote of both major parties indicates a lack of trust in our institutions and a lack of faith in governments to fix it.”

Roskam and other conservatives often point to John Howard as their model of a successful leader who, alongside the economy, focused on cultural questions such as scepticism of multiculturalism and feminism and an embrace of the “history wars”, stressing patriotism and pride in colonial history. Howard was against “political correctness”; now it’s called “woke”.

Tony Barry sighs. Howard was prime minister from 1996 to 2007. “There’s too much of a habit in the Liberal Party to pull out the John Howard playbook which, though incredibly successful 20 years ago, it was 20 years ago ... It’s a very, very different Australia [now].” The focus needs to be economic reform, especially intergenerational fairness, and “then you can indulge in the culture wars. At the moment, some Liberals are putting the cart before the horse.”

Ley says she never thought about being prime minister when she was elected to parliament a quarter of a century ago. She just wanted to represent the people of her sprawling electorate, to “fight for them”. She goes out there, day after day, taking awkward questions about her leadership, the state of her party, the latest distraction.

The Liberal Party is not friendly to women, but Ley’s woes are not because she is female. She struggles to unite the party because the divisions are so deep. However, Maria Kovacic believes Sussan Ley could be prime minister one day. “This isn’t about being the leader, this is about making sure that we can become electable,” she says, adding Ley gives the party that chance. Roskam isn’t so sure. He mused to a Sydney Institute audience in late May that by the end of the term, “I would say that the Hastie/Price leadership team of the opposition is giving [Treasurer Jim] Chalmers and take-a-pick a run for their money.”

A senior frontbencher, who declined to be quoted on this, said Ley may not get to be prime minister, but there’s no shame in that. She’s 64 in December, and the Coalition winning back more than 30 seats to form government next term would require a “political earthquake”. “But there’s a lot of honour in being the leader who saves the Liberal Party, that keeps it alive for the next generation,” the MP says. “If that’s her achievement, I’d be proud of that.”

That’s an achievement Ley would relish. Whether she reaches it is partly up to her. But it will be more about her party, and what it wants to be.

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