Ley has entered the most dangerous moment of her leadership – how much of it is her fault?

7 hours ago 4

How much of the current chaos engulfing the Liberal Party is Sussan Ley’s fault?

To paraphrase Julia Gillard when she lost the prime ministership, it doesn’t explain everything, but it does explain some things.

Ley has entered the most dangerous moment of her short leadership. There were only three topics that Liberal MPs and their Nationals cousins were talking about.

First, what position the Liberal Party will eventually adopt on net zero by 2050, a day after being gazumped by the Nationals’ decision to abandon the policy. Second, whether Ley can survive as opposition leader. And third, would the Liberals and the Nationals divorce (again)?

There are plenty of examples around the world of opposition parties working together to form coalitions, even when the parties fundamentally disagree on key policy questions: Germany, New Zealand and Canada are three obvious examples.

The formal coalition agreement here in Australia between the Liberals and Nationals is arguably less common, as is the insistence that the two major parties agree on every policy issue.

Some Coalition MPs claim there is work underway on a less formal agreement that would keep the parties loosely aligned despite policy differences, though senior Liberals and Nationals have told this masthead the idea is a non-starter.

It was not Ley’s fault that Nationals’ leader David Littleproud decided to break up the Coalition weeks after an electoral thrashing, and then reverse that decision in the same week after pressure from party elders.

She might have been better off if the Liberal-National split had stuck, so she could get on with shepherding her party back towards where she wants it to be – the political middle ground.

Instead, from the moment Ley took over as leader in May, conservative MPs have briefed against her and questioned whether she was the right choice rather than a more conservative option like Angus Taylor – the man she beat by four votes in the leadership ballot in May.

It is not Ley’s fault that Jacinta Nampijinpa Price insulted Indian-Australians and was disloyal, forcing the opposition leader to send the hard right’s favourite to the backbench, nor that another leadership aspirant, Andrew Hastie, decided to resign from the frontbench after extensive freelancing outside his portfolio.

But Ley, the first woman to lead the Liberal Party and only the second woman to lead a party of government, must carry the can for a series of missteps, including her call for Kevin Rudd to be removed, claiming the prime minister’s T-shirt was antisemitic and suggesting Labor may have stopped her visit to the Tomago smelter last week.

And now her own MPs – even some of her supporters – are questioning her judgment, some of the decisions taken by her office and whether she can survive in the job.

Steering a political party can be a dreadful business. Once the mistakes and own goals start, the leader begins to question their own judgment, second-guess every call, and more mistakes follow. Labor elder Kim Beazley’s second stint as opposition leader is a good example.

Most voters will forgive a politician who admits a mistake and moves on. Anthony Albanese’s gaffes on the first day of the 2022 election didn’t stop him from winning.

But Ley hasn’t fessed up to her missteps, either privately or publicly.

Nor has she addressed the mistakes made by her predecessors Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison on policies in opposition and government, such as the short-lived but damaging debacle over the push to wind back work from home or the epic failure of Robodebt.

No one from the Coalition has taken ownership of these and other mistakes, and the Australian public knows it.

She still has a chance to level with voters and tell them the truth about what she stands for, what the Coalition got wrong and what she would do as prime minister, though that window is closing.