Vikki Campion: Why Sussan Ley is one of the most formidable performers on opposition frontbench
Sussan Ley is not an unrecognised messianic figure, but a hardened political operative who will climb through the ropes every day knowing she can take a hit, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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In any opposition, most are ignored and utterly irrelevant.
Worse still, some opposition members cuddle up to the Labor government, cracking beers in the prime ministerial suite with Anthony Albanese, fawning all over the other side, both in the chamber and on social media, because they are too cowardly to take a punch in the political boxing ring.
Beware of underestimating Sussan Ley for this reason because few get under the government’s skin like she does. How do you judge that? By the Prime Minister’s visceral responses to her.
In 2015, Mr Albanese urged his colleague Catherine King to “smash her!” as she was rising to grill the then health minister, to the laughter of their Labor colleagues. In 2022, this antipathy erupted in the form of a “dismissive shooing gesture” with the back of his hand towards her, like a king dismissing a servant.
The point is, he pays attention to her. For other unfortunate members of the opposition, far from raising the temperature, they cannot even raise the government’s eyes away from their phones.
But they stare down Sussan when she asks irritants they don’t wish to answer such as in February: “Prime Minister, by what percentage has the cost of food increased since the election of the Albanese Labor government?”
No figure was ever given but it broke their patter.
Anyone who has tuned into question time in the past four years would understand Ms Ley is one of the most formidable performers on the opposition frontbench. In opposition, you have a limited armoury, especially during question time. The government ministers get three minutes to answer the question. You get 30 seconds to ask.
You have to share your time with the crossbench and around about 70 backbenchers reading out Dorothy Dixers written by their frontbench Labor staff.
The government chooses the Speaker (who in Milton Dick is very fair) but the theatrics are about the government. You are starting on the back foot. A Labor Party brimming with staffers and resources will find the weakest link in a depleted Coalition frontbench and take them to the mat every day.
When the government is on a roll and dancing in front of their own crowd, it’s up to the person from the opposition to bring the jig to a stop. If you want to get under their skin, it might be the right interjection, the right question, to make them stumble, or crack. And Ms Ley has had two decades to perfect this craft.
All those making snide “token woman” comments haven’t paid close enough attention to the longest serving member of the Liberal Party, who won Farrer after the retirement of former deputy PM Tim Fischer in 2001.
You need a warrior for this next term. Someone who wears scars from her scandals past wisely and who turns up knowing they will probably cop a bruise and a blood nose but will not chicken out of fight.
She will not only be facing more than 90 Labor MPs in a chamber where you can be deafened by the howls of derision and mocking laughter, but there will be so many of them that when she goes to the dispatch box, they will curve all the way to her side of the chamber.
Her friends are few. The Nationals partyroom has dwindled from 22 to 19 since 2022. The Liberal partyroom has dropped from 63 to about 54. (At the time of writing, some seats were yet to be declared.)
This leader needs to dig in with vastly less resources than Peter Dutton had. Less still when the Nationals Senate team lose major party status after July 1.
Ms Ley has already shown herself more strategic than those who thought it was a cunning little plan to poach a person from the Nationals to be deputy leader of the Liberal Party, and smart enough to say straight away she would pick people to serve with her in the shadow cabinet who were not her friends. Beware of casting her into any particular ideological mould, because she has shown a pragmatic deftness to alter cause and change position when needed.
You need a person who is experienced, has served in a breadth of portfolios in government and opposition, can articulate their beliefs, and who can coalesce disparate views and wounded egos, but most importantly, is adroit in their pugilistic political ringcraft.
Ms Ley is not an unrecognised messianic figure, but a hardened political operative who will climb through the ropes every day knowing she can take a hit to the cacophony of a jeering crowd. The worst thing that could possibly happen is if some in the Coalition believe they should start jeering as well.
THOSE WHO CALLED FOR A REALITY CHECK ON NET ZERO HELD THEIR OWN
Imagine the Labor colleague’s reaction when they found out Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen had won them the election.
Bad luck Anthony. Sorry Jim. It was Cousin Chris who emerged this week to claim he telepathically moved the election result to be a referendum on renewables.
If it were a referendum on renewables, as Mr Bowen would have you believe, the question would have been do you believe in Labor net zero or Coalition net zero?
Anyone with a passing interest in the Liberal and Nationals’ campaign would know they campaigned heavily on support for more renewables, which says more about why they lost than why Labor won.
Campaign headquarters attempted to intercept and rewrite an editorial, penned by New England MP Barnaby Joyce, a furious fighter of intermittent power, to incredulously claim he supported a “balanced energy mix”. He turned an interesting colour that day.
North of the border, punters went to their letterbox and discovered glossy brochures in LNP blue and yellow promising more renewables, complete with illustrations of transmission lines.
In Wentworth, some women stopped door-knocking for the Liberals when they were delivered blue brochures promising “more renewables”. Much of the Coalition HQ election material was more aligned with Chris Bowen than with their members in the field.
The alternate view was articulated by some troublemakers such as Flynn MP Colin Boyce, who spent the better part of the last term fighting for a reality check on net zero.
Why did Mr Boyce, in a green hydrogen hub, get a swing to him of 7.5 per cent while his colleagues rolling out the pro-renewables lines drowned in a sea of red?
Why did towns like Kilkivan and Goomeri vote overwhelmingly for a LNP MP who vowed to fight the transition stomping over their property rights?
That doesn’t suit Bowen’s narrative.
Nor does the sworn statements heard in the NSW REZ inquiry this week, where all landholders who gave evidence on Tuesday experienced trespass by EnergyCo.
The first time they found out about transmission lines being built on their land was when they found contractors there.
Shooters MLC Mark Banasiak described EnCo’s evidence as being so detached from reality it was a “wilful blindness”.
LIFTER
President Donald Trump, who in his trade wars has unwittingly given Australia the best advance of beef exports to China in history as they bar American beef.
LEANER
Fortescue swindling $60m in taxpayers’ money for green hydrogen in Gladstone only to mothball it, plus the massive transmission lines built to plug Twiggy into the grid and popped on everyone’s electricity bills as network charges.
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