Andrew Bolt: The most underrated federal Liberal leader can now prove she can fight
The past two weeks have been Sussan Ley’s best in her six rugged months at the top, and Labor’s failure is now so obvious that just by ditching the net zero target she has new ground from which she can attack, attack, attack.
Sussan Ley has bought herself time – which means the most underrated federal Liberal leader since whenever can now prove she can fight.
That’s started already. The past two weeks have been Ley’s best in her six rugged months at the top.
She’s finally found her line and length, plus her targets, and for the first time seems to be having fun.
She’s gone for the Prime Minister on cost of living. She’s gone especially for Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen on his climate policy disasters.
This week she even went for Pauline Hanson, whose One Nation party has grabbed a quarter of Coalition voters at the last election.
Ley gets no credit, but now deserves some.
She’s the first Liberal leader in years to dare talk about reforming industrial relations, and promise a tax cut.
Most of all, she’s got the Liberals to dump the net zero by 2050 emissions target – the most consequential, brave and risky change in Liberal policy for a generation.
She may have been forced into it herself, but got it done without a split in the party.
That’s massive. Remember the tantrum-chuckers in her party’s Left, threatening to quit if she did?
She did, they didn’t. So could Ley at least get some thanks? Hello?
True, the Liberals still haven’t got a worked-through plan to cut the power prices that are strangling the economy. That’s not done in a week.
Besides, as Ley now highlights daily, the Albanese government’s more worked-through plan has produced only disaster – soaring power prices, a growing scarcity of supplies and warnings of worse to come.
Labor’s failure is now so obvious – add collapsed green hydrogen schemes, stalled gas projects, cancelled wind farms – that just by ditching the net zero target, Ley has new ground from which she can attack, attack, attack.
Chris Bowen sure knows it, being mocked by Ley in parliament this week for being named the United Nations’ president for climate negotiations – mocked as a “part-time energy minister” and “full-time president”.
Ley also demanded to know how much time he’d spend outside Australia as a UN president, and how much it would cost us.
Bowen had no answers. For the first time in six months, Ley had a Labor minister rattled, and angrily spluttering and snarling.
She has also led an attack on Hanson, after the One Nation leader wore a burqa in the Senate to protest against being stopped from debating her bill to ban the burqa in public spaces, only to be banned herself from wearing the burqa in parliament. Irony, much?
Ley didn’t get personal. She said only that the Hanson stunt proved One Nation was “brittle”. Other Liberals jumped onto Hanson, who was banned from the Senate for a week.
The Coalition seems to judge that Hanson blew up her credibility with her burqa stunt, and this is how to stem the blooding of their supporters to One Nation.
I’m less sure. I suspect Hanson’s stunt turned off only voters who’d never vote for her anyway, while making the poor and marginalised think the political elite again united to shut down a game outsider.
Still, maybe the Coalition had to hit Hanson, because Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, the former deputy prime minister, is expected to announce within days he’s joining her One Nation. Ley’s Coalition needs to paint that desertion as a jump into a circus and not a jump from a sinking ship.
Meanwhile, Ley has had some luck, if you can call it that. The latest Newspoll showed, yes, the Coalition trails Labor by a disastrous 42 per cent to 58, after preferences, with Ley backed as preferred Coalition leader by just 21 per cent of people polled.
Those figures would normally get a leader sacked, but the poll also showed there was no messiah to replace Ley. Her closest rival, Andrew Hastie, scored just 15 per cent.
This poll also showed Labor isn’t that liked, winning just 36 per cent of primary votes. No wonder, with inflation rising again on Wednesday, house prices soaring, government debt rising and mass immigration adding to a sense of growing division.
I still don’t think Ley can last. But if she adds more punch to her delivery and uses talented backbenchers, such as Hastie, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and the Nationals’ Matt Canavan, she’ll be harder to dump than doubters thought last month.
And she’s nice. Could that count, too? Doesn’t it make Ley an unthreatening agent of the change we need?
