Anthony Albanese shifts tactics to target Sussan Ley
The Marrickville brawler, a nickname once bestowed on Anthony Albanese by union colleagues for his political pugilism, knows he cannot apply the same aggressive tactics to Sussan Ley as he did to Peter Dutton. So he’s trying something else entirely.
There was no shortage this week of senators and MPs out to prove Napoleon was right in his assessment that stupidity in politics was far from a handicap. The street theatre antics from the Australian Greens over Gaza and the juvenility of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation senators in turning their backs on a welcome to country kicked off a rush of sophomoric banality from the fringe on day one of the 48th parliament.
Mercifully, few Australians would have been watching. And fewer still might have tuned into Wednesday’s show when question time resumed for the first time since the May 3 election as the new Liberal leader and a renewed Labor Prime Minister engaged across the dispatch box for the first time.
But if the Coalition’s strategy was to set a new tone in the lower house by whacking the chamber with a boring stick, it may well have succeeded. While there may be merit and some potential advantage for the tenderfoot Opposition Leader in taking this approach, there is also significant risk that the Coalition plunges further into irrelevance as a result.
This will be Anthony Albanese’s objective. The Marrickville brawler, a nickname once bestowed on him by union colleagues for his political pugilism, knows he cannot apply the same aggressive tactics to Ley as he did to Peter Dutton, aka Mr Potato head or Voldemort.
He is seeking a different approach as well.
Albanese barely looked at his opponent across the chamber this week, refused to address her on occasion as required and, when answering questions, turned his back to speak to his troops among the sea of red that now occupies more than 62 per cent of available bench space in the lower house.
This was a tactic that looked suspiciously like that of Bob Carr when NSW Labor premier, who mercilessly deployed such a posture in the chamber against Kerry Chikarovski when she took over the leadership of the NSW Liberal Party in 1998.
Like Ley, Chikarovski had become the first woman to lead her party. Carr would routinely waltz into parliament and completely ignore his rival. Rather than engage, he would pretend she wasn’t there. The aim was to render the opposition and its leader completely irrelevant.
A cheeky Daily Telegraph poll of 100 people last week returned a zero recognition rate for the new federal Opposition Leader, which raises the question as to whether the Coalition’s problems can be solved by going passive.
Ley would argue that politics has changed, the economy has changed and society has changed, demanding a new style of opposition. And to some degree she is right. But history shows the most successful opposition leaders – Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Malcolm Fraser, John Howard, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott – were anything but passive players. Nothing kills you faster in politics than being starved of oxygen.
And with the Nationals stealing headlines all week over their calls to dump the net-zero emissions target, Ley’s authority has been undermined from the outset.
While former warring Nationals leaders Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack have pounced on the right issue for the Coalition to pursue, they have gone about it in the wrong way. All they have done, argue sympathetic Liberals, was assist Labor’s cause. As one senior Liberal put it, half of Australia would probably think net zero was a low-alcohol beer. What the Nationals are achieving is simply steering the Liberals away from energy as an economic and household cost imperative and back to an argument over pointless ideology.
Either way, energy – moreover, its cost and abundance – once again looms as an issue that will define a key political contest for this term and remains the Coalition’s fundamental challenge.
As goes the energy debate, so goes the economy. A passive approach from Ley and the Liberal Party on energy will be insufficient. Not only will there be a further split between the Liberals and Nationals over this, there will be a split within the Liberal Party itself along the net-zero lines.
This is hardening at a state and federal level within the party. So, Ley’s biggest political test is yet to come. And it may come sooner than many on the opposition benches realise.
Before net zero, it will be forced to deal with the 2035 emissions target. The government will need to release its 2035 targets within the next couple of months. Albanese could well take the more adventurous path to ensure he can secure the hosting of the UN’s COP31 climate change conference in Adelaide next year.
Nothing demonstrates the irony and division within the Coalition more than the fact that it will be former NSW Liberal treasurer Matt Kean who is designing the 2035 target for the Albanese government as the climate change tsar in Canberra.
The Nationals, and conservatives within the Liberal partyroom, will resist any agreement on the 2035 target, let alone an ambitious target that Albanese will likely seek to legislate.
The energy shadow cabinet subcommittee being run by opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan to settle Coalition policy and a position on net-zero could quickly be overtaken by events.
So where does this put Ley? The Coalition agreement could easily be tipped back into turmoil while Labor is afforded cover for its own failures by simply exposing the Coalition’s divisions. What should be a political opportunity could result in an even more damaging split.
Underwriting these significant political challenges is the reality of the dramatic electoral decline for the Coalition, particularly among younger voters and women who have a greater stake or interest in the resolution of the climate change debate. And while two-thirds of the voting population didn’t vote Labor either, the Liberal Party has not yet worked out how to talk to these voters.
Ley will soon become conscious of the reality that the Coalition can’t wait 12 months to come up with a policy on energy.
And this is just one piece of the policy puzzle. In the aftermath of the election defeat, there is little on offer that is consistent with the party’s values that is also popular, at least in a superficial sense.
There is no easy pathway to politically align the principles of smaller government with the electoral demands that since the pandemic have skewed further towards greater dependency on the state.
If anything demonstrates the need for Ley to put some stakes in the ground early more than its hobbled numbers in the parliament, it is the further drift in the Coalition primary vote since the election. While it is not surprising considering the lack of attention the average person pays to politics, opinion is being driven by casual anecdotes rather than ideology and this is becoming only more pronounced.
If the election result proves anything, it is that the days of Labor or the Coalition ever getting above 40 per cent at an election may be over for good.
While the Coalition won the 1998 election on a primary vote of 39.5 per cent and lost the two-party-preferred vote, it did so only because of the landslide victory in 1996 that delivered Howard the same number of seats Labor just won in May. Can it expect to win an election with a primary vote below 40 per cent ever again?
Labor has worked out how to win government on a low primary vote through its preference arrangements. Labor, the Greens and now the teal independents, while in competition with each other, have worked out a model to ensure progressive governments are re-elected.
This is now the fundamental challenge that Ley must address.
And posture matters. The Coalition needs to get back on to the playing field.
The story beyond the theatrics of parliament is this steady loss of appeal and declining trust in the two major parties across the past two decades. The total primary vote for Labor and the Coalition combined has been in decline since Newspoll began in 1985.
While the Coalition has dipped below 30 per cent for the first time in the post-election polls, Labor won the election on the second lowest primary vote it has recorded at an election to form government – the lowest being the 2022 election. Newspoll has recorded only a slight rise since the election of around 1.5 percentage points to a primary vote of 36 per cent.
By historical standards this is still low. And the gap of seven points over the Coalition isn’t as significant as it may appear.
In 2010, the Gillard government was re-elected in minority government on a primary vote of 38 per cent, compared with the 2007 election when its primary vote was 43 per cent.
The steady decline in support for the two major parties is undeniable and shows no sign of reversing. At the 1984 election, the combined primary vote for Labor and the Coalition was 92.6 per cent – Labor at 47.6 per cent and the Coalition on 45 per cent. The Australian Democrats secured 5.4 per cent while the vote for other minor parties or independents was just 2 per cent.
In 1987 the combined major party vote was down slightly to 91.7 per cent. Three years later, this dropped significantly to 82.9 per cent with the Democrats doubling their vote to 11.3 per cent.
The major parties never went back above 90 per cent again.
There was a small recovery at the 1993 election to 89.1 per cent, with a collapse for the Democrats and a shift to other independents to more than 7 per cent, dropping back again to 85.7 per cent at the 1996 election.
With the explosion of the Greens and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation on to the political scene, the 1998 election saw the major parties shrink further and dip below 80 per cent to 79.6 per cent.
This remained static in 2001 with 80.9 per cent before ticking back up again in 2004 at 84.3 per cent.
Even the Ruddslide of 2007, when Labor’s primary vote returned to above 40 level at an election after a period of decline, produced only 85.4 per cent for the two major parties. The decline was locked in.
The 2010 election produced a second watershed moment. The combined vote for the majors began to chart a new course of decline, at 81.6 per cent, with the Greens securing what was then 11.8 per cent of the primary vote – only slightly less than it commands today. By 2013, the combined vote was back down below 80 per cent and has continued its decline ever since, dipping to 76.8 per cent in the double-dissolution election of 2016 and then 74.7 per cent in 2019.
The 2022 election, and the return of Labor to government, marked the beginning of the third phase of the deterioration, as the combined vote collapsed to 68.5 per cent and with the emergence of the teal independents. Labor won that election on its lowest primary vote. While the first two phases of this political realignment wrote the story of the decline of Labor’s primary vote, the teals appear to be writing the first chapter of the Liberal Party’s decline.
At the same time One Nation continues to erode the Nationals’ vote with a primary vote in some states of more than double that of the Nationals.
What is clear is that the Coalition is now suffering the same problem that Labor had grappled with on the left side of politics for a decade and was exposed so dramatically in the 2019 election when it fumbled over how to appeal to its blue-collar base and the inner-metropolitan socialist elite.
It is now the Coalition that is struggling to juggle the competing constituencies on the moderate side of the centre and its traditional centre-right base.
Ley is conscious of this but is more inclined to believe that the Liberal Party can better navigate this challenge than Labor did on the progressive side, owing to a uniting set of universal values that should in theory appeal to all people of all ages.
Yet the 2025 election broke all records – the most notable and obvious is the number of seats Labor managed to secure. It now has its largest caucus in the party’s history with 94 seats. But it was also a record for the Liberal Party, which recorded its lowest primary vote at an election.
While Labor had been responsible for the collective decline of the major party vote since the 1980s, it is now the Coalition’s turn to add to the erosion of the combined major party vote.
The 2025 election saw this number fall further to 66.4 per cent. Compare that with the 93 per cent of the 1980s.
This week’s Newspoll, the first to be conducted since the election on May 3, shows this shrinking even further to 65 per cent.
The electorate is now almost evenly divided into thirds – those who vote Labor, those who vote Coalition and a third who vote for anyone else.
It is the first time that the number of people voting for a minor party or independent was higher than those voting Coalition, and only slightly less than those voting Labor. This isn’t unique to Australia. This is a phenomenon shared to different degrees across the decades throughout Western democracies.
But this shift is disguised by the thumping majority that Albanese now commands in the lower house. It offers Labor in government a false sense of assured longevity.
For the Coalition, the lessons are drawn from the 2019 election, when the conservative side of politics, including One Nation and Clive Palmer, were united with the Coalition to ensure Labor leader Bill Shorten wasn’t elected.
Ley needs to find a new model that can accommodate the right again without blowing up the suburban vote.
She can’t expect to achieve this if no one knows who she is.
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