This week’s Roy Morgan Poll confirmed the downward spiral for the Coalition. Less than three months into her time as opposition leader, it does not bode well for Sussan Ley. John Adams writes.
Since election night, where the ALP secured 55.2% on a two-party preferred basis, several opinion polls already show that the Coalition under Sussan Ley has gone backwards anywhere between 2% – 4% when compared to the ALP, including this week’s Roy Morgan opinion poll.
It may be just a matter of time before the Liberal-National Coalition parliamentary party move from a state of wait and see, to a state of concern and ultimately to a state of panic culminating in a leadership challenge.
On election night, the consensus among political pundits was that the major factor in the Coalition’s greatest defeat since the 1943 election was the unpopularity of Peter Dutton, his policies and his poorly executed election campaign.
If this were true, one would have expected the Coalition to receive an immediate bounce in the opinion polls as Dutton exited the political stage, but the opposite has happened. And in her first 75 days as Leader, Sussan Ley has made every conceivable mistake in the political book, demonstrating that whatever strategy she has formulated is woefully ill-conceived.
Liberal Party Squid Games. How secure is new opposition leader Sussan Ley?
Sussan’s story
Her first mistake is the rollout of the current public relations campaign centred around her personal story, which has now been in train for weeks.
The logic of this campaign lies in the assumption that the Australian people have little understanding of Ley, and thus the campaign is designed to fill an information gap, even though she has been in Federal Parliament for over 20 years.
However, voters have little time or interest in Ley or her personal story.
At a time of great economic hardship and distrust in our institutions, where many statistical measures show that Australia is in a state of perpetual decline, Australians want political leadership that is in tune with their concerns and hopes. Someone who understands and feels their pain and frustration.
Not reading the (strategy) room
Her second mistake is her inability to recognise that the strategic landscape of western politics has fundamentally changed, especially since 2015-16 with the entry of Trump and the success of Brexit.
The political contest no longer operates in the left-right paradigm, but rather in a populist paradigm of the elites versus the citizenry.
Especially among young Australians, a demographic in which the Coalition is struggling to gain traction with, it speaks volumes that last year think tank, Think Forward, published survey results showing that 97% generation Z and millennial Australians believe that Australia’s
political leaders are self-interested, shortsighted, and corrupted by donors and special interest groups.
In her first 75 days, Ley has done nothing to dispel the common perception of the Labour-Liberal uni-party that is in league with both Australian and global establishment institutions, whether they be in government, business, media, or academia (e.g., the World Economic Forum).
This was reinforced last week by the Australian Financial Review who reported that Ley has already held private meetings with some of Australia’s most powerful CEOs in an effort to woo them back from Labor.
Moreover, the appointments of former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg as Chairman of Goldman Sachs’ Australia and New Zealand businesses and former Coalition Minister Simon Birmingham as the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Banking Association only reinforce the perception of a symbiotic relationship between the Coalition and Australia’s elites.
Ghosts of the past
Ley’s third mistake is her inability to recognise that the Coalition bears a significant portion of the responsibility for causing and perpetuating Australia’s national problems, of which she has been a major contributor.
In the post-Howard era, not only has the Liberal Party brand been trashed by poor policy design and execution (e.g., Robodebt and the working from home policy) as well as repeated scandals (e.g., last week’s criminal conviction of former Liberal Minister Gareth Ward, the Moira Deeming defamation litigation and the Brittany Higgins saga), but also by a party organisation that has been crippled by entrenched factionalism and process corruption (e.g., the NSW Liberals local council debacle).
While these factors have no doubt played a major role in the Liberal Party’s collapsing and aging membership base, Ley went out of her way to praise the efforts of her predecessors in her recent National Press Club address, including the Morrison Government’s disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, believing they did a good job!
While Ley has ordered two comprehensive reviews – one of the 2025 election and the other into the Liberal Party organisation, there are immediate steps which she could have already taken to rebuild the Liberal brand and to arrest the collapse in the party’s membership.
First amongst these is a public admission of the Liberal Party’s long list of sins and swift action to hold people to account for these sins.
However, Ley continues to lead a party which, for example:
- continues to promote former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian on the party’s website, a politician who was found to be corrupt not only by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, but also by the NSW Court of Appeal;
- continues to bankroll the Member for Hawthorn, John Pesutto MP, even though the Federal Court of Australia found that he caused a female colleague to experience significant damage by accusing her of associating with neo-Nazis without any evidentiary basis; and
- has taken no steps to address the damaging perception caused by allegations of improper conduct, in relation to water licences, for example.
The company she keeps…
Sussan Ley’s fourth mistake is her decision to surround herself with political hacks.
The staffing ranks of the political and parliamentary wings of the Liberal Party are full of people who lack intellectual depth, broad skill sets, a willingness to take risks, or any track record of achievement.
Many of these people have never held a non-political job, never operated a small business and have lived their adult lives as financial leeches continually sucking on the long hours and hard toil of Australian taxpayers.
If Ley were committed to breaking from the past, she would recognise that the Coalition needs a fundamentally different political and policy operation, which can turn around the current sinking political ship.
Politics is not complicated brain surgery. As a foundational cornerstone,
political leaders need voters who respect, trust and believe in them.
Only then will they be willing to listen to the specific policy prescriptions that a political party has to offer.
However, at her core, Sussan Ley represents more of the same malaise that has led the Coalition to its lowest point since 1943.
John Adams is an internationally recognised independent professional economic and political analyst, freedom fighter and social provocateur. He has written on economic, political, cultural and public policy matters for a variety of news outlets.