She went from punk rocker to pilot. Now Sussan Ley wants to be Liberal leader

Sussan Ley has trekked the wilderness before. Before gap years were a rite of passage, an 18-year-old Ley “hitched up a horse and a pack horse and decided to ride from Yass to the Ninety Mile Beach”. She rode through Kosciuszko with no phone, just a topographical map on her saddle to guide her through to the other side.

Ley will need to rely on the same grit and instinct if she becomes the next opposition leader. There is no map to guide a shattered Liberal Party through its worst defeat in history. But if she takes the reins, it will be keeping with the adventurous bent she inherited growing up in Nigeria, the Middle East and Britain as the daughter of a British intelligence officer, before arriving in Australia.

Sussan Ley was elected deputy leader of the Liberal Party in 2022.Credit: James Brickwood

“Travelling, and being at boarding school on my own, I think you either sink or swim,” Ley has said in previous interviews. “Obviously, I was someone who decided very early on in life that I wasn’t going to sink.”

The prospect of being Australia’s first federal female Coalition leader only heightens the stakes. Ley has prepared for that too. She cut her teeth as one of two women in Tony Abbott’s famously male-heavy cabinet. Before that, she tried and failed to become one of Australia’s first female commercial pilots. Ley arrived at her first university class aged 30 with a baby in tow, and studied part-time for 10 years while raising three children.

Now 63, she is one of the longest-serving female MPs in today’s parliament. But Ley enters the Liberal leadership contest as the candidate considered most capable of appealing to both rural and city voters, as well as women who have deserted the Liberals over the past six years. She was one of few frontbenchers to frequent teal seats after Scott Morrison’s 2022 loss.

A party that has lost the political centre and multicultural Australians could also see value in Ley’s more moderate streak and approach to diversity. “I think [my childhood] helped me accept a lot of differences in people and cultures, and I think it’s also helped me become less stressed than I might otherwise be about things when they’re completely outside the square,” she told SBS in 2014.

“Sometimes, in politics, I think people often feel a need to be liked or a need for their views to be endorsed. While I know that’s nice, it’s not something that’s a need in me, and maybe that traces back to the time where I simply had to just rely on myself.”

Ley was 13 when her family arrived in Australia. They bought a hobby farm in southern Queensland before moving to Canberra, where Ley embraced the capital’s punk rock scene. She had spiky purple hair, wore a dog collar around her neck and “a razor blade in one ear with a nose piercing that went to [it]”.

That was when Susan became Sussan, with the extra s guided by numerology.

Ley set her sights on becoming a pilot. At 19, she worked three jobs – in the public service, cleaning and waitressing – to pay for flying lessons. Despite gaining her commercial licence at 20, she could not land a role; few companies accepted female pilots. Instead, she became an air traffic controller, where one day a male co-worker said: “How does it feel coming to work every day knowing you’re not wanted because you’re a woman?”

When a shearing contractor in Queensland called her in as an emergency bush pilot, mustering stock from the sky, Ley jumped. “I packed up my whole life in 48 hours. I squeezed everything into my 1969 Holden and left Sydney. I went from about as city as you can get to as country as you can get … They used to call me ‘City Sue’,” she has said.

Ley met her future husband in the shearing sheds and spent two years working 4.30am to 10.30pm as a rouseabout and cook. Her life until that point had been “privileged and a little spoilt”, Ley has said, but the manual labour did her good, and the couple settled on a farm in Victoria.

Ley’s interest in politics burgeoned over the decade as she studied tax law, economics and accounting while raising three kids under five, and owning a small business in a rural community. “What brought me into politics was this slowly dawning realisation that people in the Canberra bubble, a long, long way from where I was, didn’t understand what my life was like,” Ley told The Betoota Advocate podcast earlier this year.

Peter Dutton and Sussan Ley on the campaign trail.Credit: James Brickwood

She joined her local Liberal branch, but failed her first attempt at preselection, before her shot at Farrer came through. Ley campaigned in a caravan painted bright blue, winning by 206 votes in 2001.

Her political career from then is better known. She became a parliamentary secretary in the Howard government and assistant minister under Abbott. She was promoted to cabinet in 2014, as minister for health and sport, and added aged care when Malcolm Turnbull took over.

Then her career stumbled. She resigned from the frontbench in 2017 over an expense scandal that sprung from buying an $800,000 investment property while on a taxpayer-funded trip to the Gold Coast. But she was back as environment minister under Morrison in 2019, and has been Dutton’s deputy since 2022.

When she took up that role three years ago, Ley told this masthead she wanted to help the party connect with women.

Her specific goal was to win back the six seats that fell to teal independents. As Saturday’s vote attests, that has fallen well short. It is one of many tasks waiting for the Liberals, and Ley, if she takes the helm.

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