Opinion: Sussan Ley paying the price for Libs’ lurch to the Right

Sussan Ley is not the cause of the Libs’ woes but merely the symptom of an arch-conservative virus introduced by Howard, Abbott, Morrison and Dutton, writes Paul Williams.

To say the Coalition is in crisis is a bit like saying Andrew Windsor is in a spot of bother.

Never in Newspoll’s 40-year history has the Coalition – today on just 24 per cent support – been rated so lowly by Australians. And that number includes a Nationals vote that, when subtracted, would see the Liberals poll just 19 or 20 points. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation did better at the 1998 Queensland election.

The blame, of course, has fallen – largely unfairly – on leader Sussan Ley’s shoulders. But to blame Ley entirely for the decay of a party increasingly out of touch with urban Australia is like blaming a firefighter for a razed house because the water pressure is low.

Ley is not the cause of the Libs’ woes but merely the symptom of an arch-conservative virus introduced by John Howard, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton – all hoping to drag Australia back to the 1950s without the economic growth or security that decade offered.

More recently, brawling between and among the Liberal and National parties on everything from carbon emission targets to Australian cultural identity has reduced Australia’s most successful political union to a shotgun marriage of misery.

No, Ley is not wholly to blame and, yes, I’ve defended Ley on this page because the Liberals need a moderate leader if they are to recapture city seats. Elections in a compulsory voting system are always won from the centre.

But even I have limits.

When Ley, as deputy Opposition leader, implied the Albanese Government and not the High Court was somehow responsible for releasing refugees into the community, I dismissed it as “just politics”. When Ley recently demanded Australian ambassador to Washington Kevin Rudd be recalled because Rudd hurt Donald Trump’s tender feelings, again I said “just politics”.

But when Ley recently thought the most pressing issue of the day – when countless Australians face food and housing insecurity – was the (falsely) alleged antisemitism of Albo’s T-shirt, I was out.

It isn’t just Ley’s lack of focus or untuned political antennae that’s the problem. It’s the opportunistic hypocrisy and distortion of cultural history that reveals Ley’s unfitness to lead.

Ley, a former punk, would surely know Joy Division, a late 1970s band, was named not to endorse Nazi exploitation of sex slaves but to remind a younger generation of man’s inhumanity to man. If anything, lead singer Ian Curtis was too sensitive to human suffering, and he took his own life in 1980.

So let the Joy Division puns pour: for Ley, she’s lost control; for the Coalition, love will tear (them) apart because government for them will be an unknown pleasure.

In short, Ley must go, lest Coalition support dwindles to single figures, thereby risking Pauline Hanson’s One Nation – today on 15 per cent – becoming the major party of the right. And God help us then.

So, as we enter the political killing season of a lazy summer, Ley’s job is on the line. When she does go – this year or next – she will almost certainly be replaced by a member of the National (or hard) Right faction, with Andrew Hastie (now aligned to a MAGA-like sub-faction) and Angus Taylor (a traditional conservative) pegged as favourites.

But will either fix the Coalition’s polling woes? In the short term, probably yes. Those who deserted the post-Dutton Coalition for One Nation will likely come home if both the Libs and the Nats agree that net zero by 2050 is dead.

But dumping a cornerstone environmental policy supported by three in four Australians will lock the Coalition out of the capital cities and, of course, government – probably indefinitely.

My advice? Dissolve the Coalition. Set the Nats free so they can adopt policies as loony as they like. Teach creationism in schools? Fine. The earth is flat? Go for it. At least that way One Nation will be quelled.

More importantly, a Liberal maintenance of net zero will appeal to urban Australia and allow the party to perform as an opposition should: to keep the government genuinely accountable.

The tragedy of this is not just the fossilisation of the once-great liberal movement founded by Robert Menzies. It’s also that Sussan Ley is carrying the hopes and dreams of Liberal women everywhere. The failed Ley experiment means it will be a long time before a very masculine Liberal Party again invests in a woman leader, let alone actively pursue quotas for women candidates.

As Ian Curtis once said, “The present is well out of hand”.

Paul Williams is an associate professor at Griffith University

Originally published as Opinion: Sussan Ley paying the price for Libs’ lurch to the Right