The first appearance of a federal opposition leader at the National Press Club in three years saw Sussan Ley showing her personal side and eating humble pie, as she tries to find a way to bring a fractured and bruised Coalition back from electoral disaster.
Led by Sky’s Tom Connell, the journalists who joined Ms Ley for lunch seemed willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, on the whole, although there was little of substance to hold on to in her remarks, which avoided any mention of climate change, Donald Trump, Peter Dutton, Gold Coast real estate investments or numerology.
Instead, there was a heavy focus on the new leader’s unusual CV, which includes time spent as an air traffic controller, pilot, shearer’s cook and ATO bureaucrat. ‘It’s an enormous source of pride that in this country, any Australian from any walk of life can make a contribution to our national story,’ she said.
Born in Nigeria to British parents, Sussan Ley talked about her time at Campbell High, just up the road from the Press Club in Canberra.
‘If you had ventured there nearly five decades back, you’d find a shy young student with a British accent, Susan Braybrooks. If you had told that girl she would be standing here now, she wouldn’t have believed you. No one told her she could rise to a position of political leadership. Like many Australians, she never considered running for public office.
‘She did have dreams, but they involved steering planes, not steering the government.’
Trust and aspiration
So what will Sussan Ley do differently?
Top of the list is apparently ‘rebuilding trust’ in the Liberal Party, via a comprehensive review of the May election catastrophe, to be conducted by Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, the results of which she promises to share publicly.
From there Ley went straight back to the language of John Howard, with a lot of talk about aspiration and the rewards of hard work. She said her party would ensure ‘that government backs its citizens, not burdens them.’
In terms of energy, always a problem for Coalition leaders, she danced around the nuclear question by saying, ‘Our task will be to develop a plan underpinned by two goals, having a stable energy grid which provides affordable and reliable power for Australian households and businesses, and reducing emissions so that we are playing our part in the global effort.’
Regardless of the chaos enveloping the USA, Ley says she wants to build on alliances like AUKUS, the Quad and the Five Eyes Partnership, and increase defence spending ‘including space, drones and missiles’.
Ley didn’t say where the revenue for these plans would come from, but said she would seek to lower taxes, attract more women to the Liberal Party, do something about domestic violence and better represent modern Australia. After some prodding, she also said, ‘I see supporting Indigenous Australians as a priority.’
Her leadership would be ‘inclusive, consultative and collaborative’.
The problem is that since her teen punk period and the exciting jobs which followed, Sussan Ley has been involved in the grimy world of politics for almost 24 years, and has not emerged smelling of roses.
She served in the Howard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments, and was best known until recently for using taxpayer’s money to fund flights to charter jets for private purposes, leading to her resignation as health minister in 2017.
As environment minister, she was challenged in court for her assertion that she had no duty of care to protect children from climate change when assessing fossil fuel projects. In 2022, she scrapped recovery plans to prevent the extinction of threatened species, including the Tasmanian Devil, and incorrectly stated that no one in the world was making electric utes.
In 2024 she falsely tweeted that a crime incident in Frankston was linked to ‘foreign criminals’, and refused to take it down even after her error was confirmed by Victorian police.
Media not the enemy
Tweets aside, Sussan Ley’s attitude to the media seems to be a great improvement on Peter Dutton.
Last week she said to the assembled press, ‘Sometimes we will agree, sometimes we will disagree, but as long as you hold both the government and opposition to account, then our democracy and our freedoms will be well-served.’
Ley may need some practice with the autocue, but so far she seems more honest and authentic than previous Liberal leaders.
Since her sudden elevation following the election, the new opposition leader has managed to simultaneously deal with the death of her mother and a tinpot rebellion from the Nationals. She will have to walk a barbed wire tightrope to maintain her position, and has a seemingly impossible number of seats to regain before she can contemplate the government benches, but she does at least seem open to the possibility of change.
Unfortunately it will take more than being female and a survivor to overturn the cruelty, scientific illiteracy, greed, hypocrisy and sheer stupidity of her predecessors.
As was the case with Peter Dutton, ascension to the leadership of the Liberal Party has come with a new pair of glasses for the captain of the creaky Coalition airliner. Whether Sussan Ley has any vision for Australia is yet to be seen.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
You can find more of his writing at Patreon and Gumroad.
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