The foundering Liberals easily lend themselves to descriptions of nautical disasters. Voyage of the damned, ship of fools, all at sea have all been used to describe the party’s recent tribulations.
Now Angus Taylor hopes to help himself to a deckchair on the Titanic.
But the challenge the Liberals face in yet another leadership vote on Friday is whether a change of face will make any real difference.
Taylor seeks the dauntless task in full knowledge that Liberal Party leadership has become something of a poisoned chalice, where personality has replaced policy as a marker of political identity.
To that end, a Liberal Party internal review of what went wrong in the May 2025 federal election remains unreleased nearly 10 months down the line.
Instead of offering a new vision and learning from their mistakes, self-indulgent MPs have continued factional wars and flirted with constant threats of a leadership challenge while allowing their junior partner to dictate and deflate the Coalition. Meanwhile, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party is rapidly eating away at their heartland, who just want Australia’s major conservative parties to get a grip and reunite.
One Nation only received 6.4 per cent of the national vote last year but stunningly has overtaken Coalition support and is now second to Labor.
The National Party retains support in their shrinking and aged bush heartland, but the Liberals desperately need to repair the rupture with women voters, who fled to teal candidates, and appeal to more centrist urban voters.
However, Taylor is from the Liberal conservative faction, and his National Party-lite candidacy sends Liberal deserters the message that the party think Sussan Ley, a moderate and the first woman to lead, is not good enough.
Taylor had a brilliant career before Canberra: Squattocracy, Rhodes scholarship, McKinsey & Co, Port Jackson Partners. But his parliamentary career was less stellar, with his ministerial achievements hampered by hesitancy and constant controversy, and close association with Peter Dutton as the Coalition’s fortunes dimmed.
Taylor even shilly-shallied about his leadership aspirations at a bizarre media conference immediately after he resigned from the Liberal front bench on Wednesday, before finally and forthrightly declaring he was standing the following morning. “The Liberal Party has lost its way,” he said. “I’m committing myself to the cause of restoring our party so that it can be the party that Australians expect and deserve, because we’re running out of time and Australia is worth fighting for.”
But whoever emerges victorious from Friday’s vote faces a rampant Labor and the prospect of more internecine battles before the 2028 federal election.
The leadership ballot is taking place at a time when many Australians seem to have already made up their mind who could best lead the Liberals into the next election.
West Australian Andrew Hastie topped the YouGov poll as the most popular choice, but he baulked at taking a shot at leadership, raising the possibility that if things continue to go pear-shaped, he is waiting in the wings.
Prepare yourself for more rounds of Liberal leadership Russian roulette.
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