Thu Jun 19

Sussan Ley has her first big outing with the national media next week, so here are some questions for her

Written by: Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

On Wednesday, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley will front the National Press Club. So why is that a big deal?

For one thing, her predecessor Peter Dutton never appeared there as opposition leader. For another, it’s a formidable forum for a new leader.

It could all go badly wrong, but she’s right to make the early appearance. It sends a message she is not risk-averse.

Ley wants to establish a better relationship with the Canberra Press Gallery than Dutton had. He saw the gallery journalists as part of the despised “Canberra bubble” and bypassed them when he could. That didn’t serve him well – not least because he wasn’t toughened up for when he had to face daily news conferences (with many Canberra reporters) on the election trail.

Ley’s office has set up a WhatsApp group for gallery journalists, alerting them to who’s appearing in the media, and also dispatching short responses to things said by the government (such as links to ministers’ former statements). This matches the WhatsApp group for the gallery run by the Prime Minister’s Office. One of Ley’s press secretaries, Liam Jones, has also regularly been doing the rounds in the media corridors of Parliament House, something that very rarely happened with Dutton’s media staff.

To the extent anyone is paying attention, Ley has made a better start than many, including some Liberals, had expected. She came out of the tiff with the Nationals well, despite having to give ground on their policy demands. Her frontbench reshuffle had flaws but wasn’t terrible. She’s struck a reasonable, rather than shrill, tone in her comments on issues, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s failure thus far to get a meeting with US President Donald Trump.

Her next significant test will be how she handles at the Press Club questions she and her party are confronting. So here are a few for her.

One (the most fundamental): How is she going to thread the needle between the two sides of the Liberal Party? Howard’s old “broad church” answer no longer holds. The church is fractured. In an era of identity politics, the Liberals have a massive identity crisis. The party’s conservatives are hardline, have hold of the party’s (narrow) base, and will undermine Ley if they can. Its moderates will struggle to shape its key policies in a way that will appeal to small-l liberal voters in urban seats.

Two: How and when will she deal with the future of the Coalition’s commitment to net zero emissions by 2050? She has put all policies on the table (but made exceptions for several Nationals’ core policies). There is a strong case for her staking out her own position on net zero, and getting the policy settled sooner rather than later. With younger voters having eschewed the Liberals, Ley told The Daily Aus podcast ^[1] this week,“I want young people to know first and foremost that I want to listen to them and meet them where they are”. One place they are is in support of net zero by 2050. If the Liberals deserted that, they’d be making the challenge of attracting more youth votes a herculean one.

For the opposition. net zero is likely THE climate debate of this term – and such debates are at best difficult and at worst lethal for Liberal leaders.

Three: Won’t it be near impossible for the Liberals to get a respectable proportion of women in its House of Representatives team without quotas? Over the years, Ley has been equivocal on the issue. She told The Daily Aus: “Each of our [Liberal state] divisions is responsible for its own world, if you like, when it comes to [candidate] selections”. This is unlikely to cut it: she needs to have a view, and a strategy. Targets haven’t worked.

Four: Ley says she wants to run a constructive opposition, so how constructive will it be in the tax debate Treasurer Jim Chalmers launched this week? Ley might have a chat with John Howard about the 1980s, when the Liberals had internal arguments about whether to support or oppose some of the Hawke government’s reform measures. Obviously, no total buy-in should be expected but to oppose reforms for the sake of it would discredit a party trying to sell its economic credentials.

More generally, how constructive or obstructive will the opposition be in the Senate? This raises matters of principle, not just political opportunism. In the new Senate the government will have to negotiate on legislation with either the opposition or the Greens. If the opposition constantly forces Labor into the arms of the Greens, that could produce legislation that (from the Liberals’ point of view) is worse than if the Liberals were Labor’s partner. How does that sit with them philosophically?

Five: Finally, how active will Ley be in trying to drive improvements in the appalling Liberal state organisations, especially in NSW (her home state) and Victoria?

The Liberals’ federal executive extended federal intervention in the NSW division this week, with a new oversight committee, headed by onetime premier Nick Greiner. But the announcement spurred immediate backbiting, with conservatives seeing it advantaging the moderates. Ley is well across the NSW factions: her numbers man is Alex Hawke - whom she elevated to the shadow cabinet – from Scott Morrison’s old centre right faction, and she has a staffer from that faction in a senior position in her office. The faction has also protected her preselection in the past.

In Victoria, the factional infighting has been beyond parody, with former leader John Pesutto scratching around for funds to avoid bankruptcy after losing a defamation case brought by colleague Moira Deeming. Some Liberals think the state party could even lose what should be the unlosable state election next year.

That’s just the start of the questions for Ley. Meanwhile, the party this week has set up an inquiry into the election disaster, to be conducted by former federal minister Nick Minchin and former NSW minister Pru Goward. Identifying what went wrong won’t be hard for them – mostly, it was blindingly obvious. Recommending solutions that the party can and will implement – that will be the difficult bit.