In 2019, Angus Taylor made a now-famous Facebook faux-pas, when he posted a reply to his own post, on his official Liberal Party account.
Sadly for him, the Labor dirt unit was watching, and publicised his self-congratulation.
“Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus,” Angus Taylor MP commented on a post from the account of Angus Taylor MP.
He has been mocked for it, but the social media mistake perhaps offered a telling glimpse of the inner monologue of the new Liberal leader. It must be nice to have such a confident and supportive internal voice.
The Nationals, led ignominiously by David Littleproud, took that capitulation to the bank, and continued to undermine her leadership.
Ley released no policy to speak of (not that she had any time or space to), and she mishandled the opposition response to the Bondi massacre.
That mistake precipitated the Nationals’ second storm-off within her short tenure, by which time the woman deserved a medal, and must have needed a stiff drink.
Temperamentally, Ley was stoic. Politically, she was cooked.
Any man who had similarly mishandled things, and whose polling numbers were in the same deep pit as hers, would also have been replaced.
We kept hearing, notably from Senator James Paterson, one of the smartest and most decent operators on the opposition frontbench, that this was an “existential” crisis for the Liberal Party.
It is undoubtedly true – conservative Senator Alex Antic said the quiet part out loud when he appeared on the ABC’s 7.30 on Thursday night, and openly contemplated the idea of the Liberals going into coalition with One Nation.
Paterson batted away any suggestion that gender was an issue in Ley’s non-success.
“Some people have been making this argument over the last couple of days,” he said on Thursday.
“My observation would be that that argument was not successful for Julia Gillard in the Labor Party. I don’t believe it will be successful for Sussan Ley in the Liberal Party.”
Define “successful”?
Did he mean that Gillard’s prime ministership was entirely unaffected by the issue of her gender? Because the heavyweight historical record skews otherwise.
Or did he mean to say that any female leader, who points out that her gender might impact how she is treated, will get short shrift?
Because that is certainly the case.
On her last press conference in 2013, Gillard remarked that there had been a lot of media analysis of her “playing the so-called gender card because heaven knows no one noticed I was a woman until I raised it”.
Gillard said that her gender “doesn’t explain everything” about how her prime ministership unfolded, but “it doesn’t explain nothing” either.
Back to Canberra during the week, when Paterson insisted that “political leaders are judged on their performance, not on their gender … I think it’s now very clear what the verdict on Sussan Ley’s leadership is”.
He was absolutely right, and the party room vote (34-17) was resounding in Taylor’s favour.
And yet.
How to explain away the fact that the man who replaces Ley has an underwhelming record of his own?
Taylor was a senior member of the Dutton-led team that steered the Liberals to their catastrophic 2025 election result.
He was shadow treasurer for three years, yet famously failed to come up with an economic agenda for the Liberals to take to that election, a void so large it verged on awe-inspiring.
He failed to land a blow on Treasurer Jim Chalmers during a cost-of-living crisis and, under his watch, the Liberals lost their crown as the preferred economic managers, according to the Australian Election Study.
And how to explain away the vague feeling that a man in the job would have accrued more natural authority from his party room colleagues than Ley ever did, and been accorded more basic respect?
Women know that most sexism does not announce itself, and much of it is probably unconscious, anyway.
Gender discrimination is not always as raw and vile as the misogyny Gillard copped, and it is not always as trollishly silly as an article about why you are unmarriageable (which Ley copped, from a male journalist, a few weeks back. No doubt she wept into her pillow that night).
It mostly lives in the under-the-radar, difficult to prove beyond-reasonable-doubt, gut-instinct stuff: being talked over in a meeting, or being interrupted more than your male colleagues, or not being invited to the pub with workmates because, oh sorry, it’s a boys’ thing.
It lies in being paid less than your male co-worker, or, at least, strongly suspecting you’re being paid less, but never being able to know for sure because systems that protect one group’s power at the expense of others’ are rarely transparent about it.
It lives in the suspicion that you are not always given a fair go – despite that being cited as the most Australian of values.
If you know, you know, and it often appears that the men of the Liberal Party don’t know, and have never tried very hard to understand, which goes some way to explaining their shrinking share of the female vote (just 28 per cent of women voted Coalition at the last election).
That is one of the problems Taylor inherits.
Did Ley lose the leadership because she is a woman? Almost certainly not. No one would make the case, and even if you did, it would be impossible to prove. But still, the suspicion still hangs in the air, perceptible to some more than others, that her gender was not an entirely neutral factor either.
