Price is now able to freelance on whatever policy issues she wants to, and she mentioned at least three outside her former portfolio – Indigenous affairs, net zero and the Chinese Communist Party – in a statement on Wednesday.
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She will be warmly welcomed by her fellow ideological travellers on Sky News After Dark, whose solution to every problem Australia faces seems to be to move the Coalition further to the right, after Australians voted for left-leaning parties and candidates in record numbers.
Price has insisted repeatedly that the point she was trying to make in her disastrous interview on the ABC was about community concern for Labor’s “mass migration” agenda. But her original suggestion that Indian migrants were coming to Australia in large numbers “and we can see that reflected in the way the [Indian] community votes for Labor at the same time” was an insulting slur.
She cited a comment by Labor-aligned pollster Kos Samaras that 85 per cent of the Indian community voted Labor. Samaras has now clarified and says the diaspora’s vote for Labor across Australia was in the “mid-60s” on a two-party-preferred basis at the last election.
No one who came to Australia from India or any other country as a permanent resident in the first term of the Albanese government could have voted in the last election, unless they managed to have their citizenship application fast-tracked by several years.
Community concern about immigration is real, as the polls and recent anti-immigration rallies prove, and it’s true that migration boomed, before easing back, when Australia’s borders re-opened after the pandemic.
A debate about Australia’s immigration intake is a legitimate one to have. But how you have it matters, as Indian-Australian community leaders and Price’s own colleagues have pointed out repeatedly, at a time of rising anti-immigrant sentiment.
Tapping into community anger over a given issue – immigration, tax, wind farms, whatever – works in opposition but only gets you so far, as Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton found to their cost.
There are three factions in the Liberal Party: the moderates, the centre right and the hard right conservatives, and understanding them helps explain this omnishambles. Price is in the hard right. Ley is a moderate. Her key political ally, Hawke, is the leading member of the (small but kingmaking) NSW centre right. The hard right loathes the centre right, and in particular Hawke.
Of the party’s three most recent leaders, Scott Morrison was installed in 2018 with the support of the moderates and centre right, Dutton was installed by the hard right in 2022 when the faction had the numbers, and Ley was installed by the moderates and the centre right in 2025.
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The last leadership ballot saw Ley beat Taylor 29-25. Since then, three senators – David Fawcett (conservative), Hollie Hughes (centre right) and Linda Reynolds (moderate) – have left the Senate, with Hughes replaced by Jess Collins (hard right) on July 1. (The other two were not replaced.)
The unfortunate Gisele Kapterian (moderate) was allowed to vote for Ley in the leadership ballot against Taylor before her own election was overturned and sidetracked by a recount in Bradfield and a court challenge. In a theoretical ballot, the numbers could be as tight as 26-25 now, though loyalty to the incumbent leader, concern about tearing down the first female leader and anger at Price mean Ley may have picked up a couple of votes.
But Price still has powerful allies in the hard right faction of the party room who will want her back on the frontbench. And she is adored by sections of the Liberal Party membership.
Ley is not facing an imminent challenge but bigger fights loom. The Coalition remains hopelessly split on net zero and climate policy and the government will soon release its 2035 climate target and plans to reduce emissions across the economy. Ley has ordered an internal review of climate policy. She understands the moderates and centre right regard a commitment to net zero as the price of entry to start winning back metropolitan seats, and is sympathetic to that view.
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Whether she can keep the party room together (there has already been a trial separation with the Nationals) over climate policy shapes as the biggest test of the term for Ley.
I got a message from London this week from my friend and predecessor David Crowe. He wrote: “I find it fascinating there is a Jacinta Nampijinpa Price protection squad in the conservative media – [they] cannot admit she misspoke or try to pretend it’s no big deal. Her flaw is not that she is right-wing. That is her strength. Her problem is she is clumsy when she needs to be cunning.”
He’s right. Price is talented, smart and speaks with passion. She also has a huge personal following on social media and a ready-made TV platform, and she is now free to throw policy bombs from the backbench.
Will Jacinta Nampijinpa Price choose to work quietly from the backbench, or will she use her freedom to speak out and weaponise anger about net zero and become a proxy for MPs with leadership ambitions? On the evidence of her time in parliament so far, the latter appears more likely.
And that spells trouble for Sussan Ley.
James Massola is chief political commentator.
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