The first irony of Sussan Ley’s great reunification of the Coalition is that the only partner in the marriage that apparently retains support for net zero is the Nationals.
How this will inflame the extremes on both sides doesn’t require much imagination. And considering the problem the Liberal Party has with women voters, the second contradiction is in the new Liberal leader’s decision to dump four of the most senior women from shadow cabinet.
Ley has rewarded her supporters, and the enemies she needed to, and has appeased as many transactional members as she could in a Coalition partyroom so diminished by its poll loss that few could have been left without a trophy.
The new leader has punished one of the former Coalition’s most senior women, Jane Hume, by dumping the former finance spokeswoman to the backbench following the party’s admission that the work-from-home policy cost it votes. Hume, a senator from Victoria, has become the sacrificial lamb for a policy that had more than one author and was rubber-stamped by a leadership group that included Ley.
She has also dumped another Victorian senator, former education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson, who had the temerity in the wake of the election defeat to challenge the party’s decision to shelve key education policies.
Considering the deals Ley had to make to shore up her leadership challenge against Angus Taylor, none of this should be a surprise.
Taylor loses Treasury but is rewarded with defence – the price for silence and compliancy.
Ley’s economic team is male-dominated. Not a single woman in a Treasury portfolio. And sidelining Jacinta Nampijinpa Price may work for a while, but the Band-Aid will eventually peel off.
Moderates dominate the leadership team, which makes Ley’s refusal to commit to a net-zero position more bizarre and reveals how spooked she remains about where the party needs to land on this issue.
The make-up of her frontbench is a highly defensive move by the new leader. She has sought to lock in her moderate support base but in the process has guaranteed there will remain a bunch of “pissed off other people”, according to one Liberal source.
“This just ensures there will be a round two in all this,” they said.
Queensland senator James McGrath is back in the tent, a member who claims to be conservative but is known to be a moderate organiser. Unsurprising were the elevations of Julian Leeser and Tim Wilson.
Part of the problem will be that this now constitutes a shadow ministry that represents the divisions going on inside the Coalition. The promotion of conservative West Australian senator Michaelia Cash to foreign affairs makes sense, considering Penny Wong is in the Senate. But rather than shutting down the outriders, Ley may only embolden them. This is true on the Nationals side as well.
Doubtless, things will now go quiet for a while but at some point the proverbial will hit the fan.
As leader, Ley’s task was to consolidate a sense of unity within the party. Instead, she risks institutionalising divisions. The new appointments and the equivocation on climate policy will guarantee a continually divided partyroom.
Having been papered over for three years under Peter Dutton, the divisions remain real and will become more apparent over time.
All to the delight of Anthony Albanese, who appears in a semi-permanent state of being struck in the backside by the same rainbow.
More Coverage
Time and training could be the making of Ley’s new team
The future for the Coalition looks bleak but, as George W. Bush famously said, you’d be wise to ‘misunderestimate’ it.
Fresh eyes on Indigenous policy
Senator Liddle is right; her people do not all think the same.