Piers Akerman: Sussan Ley is a hard worker with the skill to help Liberals fly high
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley deserves to be given a fair go as she takes on the task of picking up the pieces of a smashed Liberal Party after an election loss, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The toughest job in politics is picking up the pieces of a smashed party after an election loss.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley deserves to be given a fair go as she takes on the task.
She’s had plenty of parliamentary experience at every level since she won Farrer, traditionally a National Party seat, after the much-admired Tim Fischer retired in 2001.
When the Liberal Party’s federal vice president Fiona Scott made a stupid offhand remark about Ley’s hold on the job (“Well, you know – it could be a day, it won’t be a day. I mean, cheeky, but look you don’t know what the political tides will bring”), Ley shrugged it off.
But beating Angus Taylor, 29-25, for the job means there will be a significant number of colleagues hoping she will fail.
Taylor’s putative running mate, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, played a formidable role in the National Party’s principled position against the push by Anthony Albanese to enshrine a racial division in the Constitution and her admirable stance was shared by 61 per cent of the population.
Her switch to the Liberals and open admission of her ambition to take a significant leadership role rankled with enough of her new colleagues to kill the Taylor-Price ticket option.
Ley has more than a couple of things going for her.
She’s demonstrated a toughness.
Her private life should remain just that but she was better out of the marriage she left 21 years ago.
She has risen to challenges, learning to fly and, when unable to get a job as a pilot with the major airlines (when women weren’t considered for such roles), she became an air traffic controller, then an aerial musterer – a job that demands judgment and skilful low-level aerobatics.
As former shearer and well-respected former Nats senator John “Wacka” Williams told me: “She’s a hard worker and she’s not afraid of getting sheep shit on her hands.”
Ley was his rouseabout, picking up the fleeces when Williams was one of 300 shearers using hand shears (they went click) at the historic North Tuppal woolshed.
I confess to a great admiration for country women. I worked as a young man with two in particular, widowed and left with children to raise.
Neither flinched faced with the responsibility of managing vast properties, organising station hands, the vagaries of the seasons (including cyclone), thousands of livestock and the never ending cycle of windmill and fence maintenance. Truly hardy and beyond capable.
Ley may not be as smoothly articulate as Taylor but, when she has stood in Question Time, Labor takes notice and has gone on the attack.
Since her elevation, her few remarks have been considered. She hasn’t shied away from addressing issues Labor hopes will divide us such as the overdone Welcome to Country and the push for even more affirmative action programs.
“If it’s meaningful, if it matters, if it resonates, then it’s in the right place,” she said of pay-for-Welcome rituals.
She acknowledges the need for more women in the party room but didn’t rise to the bait when asked whether she’d support quotas.
While cost of living is foremost in the minds of most people, nothing comes close to energy as the greatest single issue facing the nation.
The Labor Party’s resident buffoon, Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, continues to lie about the cost of nuclear, but when the lights go out – as the normal demands plus increasing AI and more EVs knock unreliable solar and wind supply and short-lived batteries out – gas and coal will become even more important. And Ley’s deputy, Ted O’Brien, knows more about energy than anyone in Canberra.
From a bad place, the Liberals may find Labor is not unbeatable at the next election.
More Coverage
Credlin: Why didn’t the Libs call out Labor’s super tax?
The Liberals should have fought tooth and nail against Labor’s coming tax on unrealised capital gains, writes Peta Credlin.
Tiny face of our road toll: Driving is a privilege that comes with a pulse
She was five. Blonde. A mouthful of baby teeth. Grinning and wearing a flower crown. But that was another life. Because now she’s gone. Another world turned upside down in an instant.