Opinion
So this is how the Liberal Party’s first foray into female leadership ends. Not with a bang, but with an underwhelming sense of inevitability.
Sussan Ley is out after nine months, and the architects of her downfall are wasting no time in telling anybody who’ll listen that there was no choice, they had to do it.
“We must change, or we will not continue to exist,” Senator James Paterson said last week.
It’s not as if people were betting their life savings on the good ship SS Ley making it to the next federal election. But in appointing Angus Taylor as leader and Jane Hume as deputy, the Liberals have once again shown that their version of generational change bears a striking resemblance to the past. And watching a group of men wheel and deal in the shadows until they got their way doesn’t feel like an evolution so much as a return to regular programming.
The truth is, though, even without the industrious efforts of her colleagues to undermine her, Ley was never going to be the solution to the Liberal Party’s women problem because serious women never took her seriously.
For decades, the Liberal Party has not had to look hard to understand why it has been losing once blue-ribbon heartland seats. Voters in these electorates, particularly women, have been clear about their reasons: they are choosing successful, competent and formidable female candidates who ran on platforms of addressing climate change and energy, economic sensibility, and integrity and accountability. These independents also offer a more balanced and representative parliament.
Ley in particular was qualified to understand what women wanted – not just because she is one, but because she served as the shadow minister for the status of women after the 2007 election, when the downward trajectory of female voters began in earnest. She was then the shadow minister for women between 2022 and 2025 when the party’s problem reached crisis point. She had three years to understand how teal independent candidates who once would have been natural fits to sit alongside her in Canberra outmanoeuvred the party, and even more time to influence her colleagues and help lead a course correction to win these kinds of women and their supporters back.
And yet, come 2025, a further 15 Liberal seats were lost, including Peter Dutton’s. And wouldn’t you know it, just like John Howard losing to Maxine McKew before him, voters in Dickson decided to go for a Labor candidate who just so happened to be a competent, capable woman.
It’s entirely possible that Ley was tireless in her efforts to make her colleagues see reason. Given the average Australian is a 37-year-old woman and that the typical Liberal Party member is a man in his 70s, it’s plausible that her colleagues refused to listen and insisted they knew best. But it’s hard to see why, if they so greatly disagreed, she was then elected leader.
After winning the leadership last year, Ley was overt about her plans to steer the party back towards what she called “the sensible centre” and win back traditional Liberal voters who had defected to independent, One Nation or Labor candidates after decades of growing frustration.
“The road to government for us goes through every single teal seat,” Ley said during her address to the National Press Club a month after the party’s worst ever election result. “The voters in those teal seats, we are determined to reconnect with … I know that we will have an agenda that delivers for them in the next three years.”
She talked a big game about change and offered some hope to sceptics. Then … nothing.
Ley said the Liberals must be a party “proudly for women and made up of women”, but she refused to support gender quotas or any other tangible measure that would formally commit the party to seeing its representation change for the better.
On the environment, Ley went to the 2025 election standing next to Dutton as he tried to make the case for nuclear energy, and ditched net zero when she became leader. Ley, who has a masters in accountancy and tax law, failed to deliver a policy platform that outlined her plan for long-term economic success.
She said a lot in nine months, but produced virtually nothing. Is it any wonder women weren’t interested?
Ley may not have been the right person for the times, and it might be true that a man would have been rolled for less. But most would agree that she was not given the respect that a leader should be entitled to.
If the Liberals really think replacing Ley with a man described by his former boss Malcolm Turnbull as the “best qualified idiot” will somehow bring back lost female voters, they’ve been at sea too long. Because even if they didn’t support Ley directly, women will not forget that on the morning of former Liberal MP Katie Allan’s funeral last month, shortly before a distinguished, widely respected woman was laid to rest, an all-male group of Liberals met to strategise on how to knife their first female leader and share the spoils when it was done.
Taylor says he’s a Liberal in the traditional sense, and his supporters say his success meant the party averted the crisis of a more right-wing leader in Andrew Hastie. Maybe, but Taylor’s treatment of Ley, unintentionally or otherwise, was a dog whistle to the far right that the party’s brief foray into at least pretending they were interested in new-age woke politics like letting women have a go and earning back the trust of women is over.
If that’s the case, the Liberals’ biggest problem still has two X chromosomes and the right to vote, and Paterson is right to be terrified of a looming extinction.
Katy Hall is a senior editor and regular columnist.
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Katy Hall is deputy state topic editor. She was previously the deputy opinion editor for The Age.