Fresh opposition leader Sussan Ley is already feeling the heat days into her job. Will her marginal party-room win be enough, or will the News Corp wing of the party get her out? Andrew Gardiner.
A kind of Squid Game was unfolding at Liberal Party HQ. In the aftermath of its election drubbing, the right-wing echo chamber wasn’t fully prepared, and it was every blue-hued pollie for him or herself as the dark, hulking frame of Peter Dutton disappeared in the rear-view mirror.
With the ambitious Andrew Hastie biding his time, and self-promoting Jacinta Price punctured in a corner somewhere, it eventually came down to moderate Sussan Ley and “great move” Angus Taylor. Ley prevailed in a tight 29-25 vote, with Ted O’Brien her deputy. Ted represents Fairfax (Qld), in case you hadn’t heard of him.
Observers hope Ley will be given enough time and space to put forward policies more appealing to the mainstream. Historian Paul Stangio had his take.
Ley “could begin (her) journey back towards the centre by never darkening the doors of Sky News,” Stangio wrote. He’s talking about the unholy alliance binding the LNP to News Corp, bringing “ideological amplification”, as he puts it, but on the Faustian proviso that the pact’s political wing stays firmly in the right-hand lane.
Do you see the problem? If Ley strays from that lane (adopting mainstream policies she and middle Australia would likely prefer), Albrechtsen, Credlin, and the entire ‘Outsiders’ crew will descend on her like a ton of bricks.
That’s a scary thought when you’ve only just achieved party leadership on the finest of margins. “One false move and you’re in a world of hurt,” Ley may well be thinking.
End of The Culture Wars?
The Liberal Party’s pact with News Corp could condemn it to the opposition benches for many years. This election showed Australians have had enough of Dutton’s (and Abbott’s, and Howard’s) 30-year diet of culture wars and grievances.
But culture wars and grievances just happen to be News Corp’s bread and butter. How does a political party that has to go mainstream, but relies on an intransigent Murdoch for its messaging, solve this dilemma?
Will Ley have enough time to contemplate such problems before News Corp strangles her leadership in its infancy? If the first few days of Ley’s leadership are any guide, the answer is an emphatic ‘no’.
As always, Rita Panahi was first out of the blocks. “If the Liberals are to be a credible alternative to Labor, they need to do better than electing … Malcolm Turnbull in a skirt as leader”.
Sky’s Senior Reporter Caroline Marcus chimed in with the old “some are saying” chestnut: “A lot of people feel that Ley is, perhaps, a ‘place holder’, or a ‘token woman‘”. Meanwhile, Prue McSween tossed in some trademark, lazy labels: she’s a “woke”, closet Palestinian sympathiser.
Leave it to Sharri Markson to add some scanty meat to the bones of Ley’s alleged Middle Eastern sympathies: “an internal Liberal Party investigation found Ley failed to declare expenses paid by the Palestinian Authority during a trip to the West Bank in 2011.” That oversight was 14 years ago, and Ley – like so many others in Canberra – has since morphed into one of Israel’s staunchest supporters.
A close contest
Making matters worse for Ley are question marks over how she became a leader. One right faction MP (a likely Taylor backer) didn’t vote in Tuesday’s 29-25 ballot because his seat was in doubt, while two moderate candidates, in Ley’s camp but in similarly precarious positions, did.
Tensions weren’t exactly allayed when the conservative (Terry Young of Longman, Qld) wound up comfortably winning his seat, while the two moderates (Gisele Kapterian of Bradfield, NSW, and Tim Wilson of Goldstein, Vic) remain in electoral limbo at the time of writing. If things don’t go the Liberals’ way in those two seats, Ley’s winning margin could have been just one vote had the leadership ballot been held just a week later.
It gets worse, with the ABC reporting all three of the Liberals’ ‘lame duck’ Senators (who aren’t returning after their terms end next month) voted for Ley. Two weren’t replaced as the party’s Senate numbers took a hit, but in NSW, Taylor-bashing Hollie Hughes will make way for a conservative, Jessica Collins.
In a matter of weeks, her four-vote advantage last Tuesday will, at the very least, turn into a one-vote deficit on Tuesday’s numbers. The legitimacy issue gives News Corp talking heads a cudgel for finishing Ley, but with the thin ice she’s on, they might not need it.
Another ‘place-holder’ following a heavy election defeat, Brendan Nelson (2007-8) lasted nine months in Ley’s job, while Alexander Downer’s eight-month tenure (1994-5) is another cautionary tale. With her precarious numbers and foes in the Fourth Estate, Ley could undercut both.
What’s next?
Realistically, they’ll let Ley linger longer as Liberal Leader than, say, Liz Truss, who lasted a whole seven weeks as UK Prime Minister. News Corp’s blitz on Ley lacked one prominent name on the right: Andrew Bolt, who’s decided he’s playing the long game. He wrote:
Can we please give Sussan Ley a chance to show she can fix what’s been smashed. I mean, more than a day?
“She’s not stupid. Got three degrees after becoming a mum (and) at 63, a grandmother, she must have learned a few things along the way – and changed”.
In truth, Bolt has no more time for Ley than his News Corp colleagues, but perhaps he sees the need to carry her a few rounds and take all the stick the leader of a struggling opposition takes before she drops. His long game, and that of some in the party, is to have their best-presented, most photogenic right winger “offering new hope” and in the leader’s chair before the next election, due in 2028.
That could be WA’s Andrew Hastie, who stayed out of Tuesday’s race but insisted he still has “a desire to lead”. Watch this space.
Moderate or malleable?
Ley may be a moderate Liberal, but she’s also malleable. Maybe that’s what Bolt meant when he said she’d “learned a few things along the way – and changed,” pointing out, “She was a fierce defender of Palestinians before becoming just as passionately pro-Israel. She was against live sheep exports before she was for them.”
Perhaps the most jarring demonstration of her chameleon-like qualities came when, as Peter Dutton’s loyal deputy in the lead-up to a tightly-contested by-election last year, Ley showed her chops as a down-and-dirty culture warrior. Forty-eight hours out from polling day, she posted this: “If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor”.
With charming efforts like that, the Sky After Dark crowd needn’t worry too much about Ley’s capacity to feed their 24-hour grievance cycle, much less fret about her quashing the News Corp-LNP pacto con el Diablo. Ultimately, however, as Peta Credlin points out, “she’s been in the Parliament for 24 years (and yet) most punters wouldn’t even know who she is.”
It’s demeaning to be promoted by anything other than hard work (and) ability.
That lack of profile, of personality and strength may well be code for something. Perhaps the women reading this can explain what it is, suffice to say such pre-defined “leadership qualities” seem much more the province of, say, a former SAS commander like Hastie.
Sussan Ley doesn’t appear to quite cut it with either the News Corp commentariat or the party room, given her minute majority. She’ll last longer than Liz Truss and her lettuce, but perhaps no longer than the humble onion (with its three-month shelf life).
An Adelaide-based graduate in Media Studies, with a Masters in Social Policy, I was an editor who covered current affairs, local government and sports for various publications before deciding on a change-of-vocation in 2002.