Ley says Liberals must ‘meet the people where they are’, but how can a divided party do that?

Cynics point out that when a party turns to a woman leader, it is often handing her a hot mess. That’s certainly so with the federal Liberals, now choosing their first female leader in eight decades.

For the Liberals, and for Sussan Ley, 63, this is a bittersweet milestone. The odds are overwhelmingly against her chances of taking the Liberals from opposition to government.

Given Labor’s massive majority, it will be virtually impossible for the Liberals to regain office in under two terms (when Ley would be in her late 60s). The way these things go, there’s likely to be more than one opposition leader in the next half dozen years.

Most immediately, Ley has to put the meagre talent pool available to best use. This is not just fitting the right people into the right spots but containing ambitions and discontents.

Peter Dutton didn’t have to look over his shoulder in three years. Ley will be constantly glancing behind. Given the closeness of the vote, and his personality, Angus Taylor is unlikely to regard the result as closing the book. But for the moment, he said on Tuesday, “We must unify […] I will contribute the best way I can to help get us back in the fight.”

Jacinta Price, after defecting from the Nationals in a bid to become deputy to Taylor, has had her hopes of dramatic advancement dashed. In the end, she didn’t even contest the deputyship. She said later she was “disappointed” Taylor was not elected. Talked up by the conservative base, she may also find her new Liberal kennel more flea-ridden than her previous fairly-comfy Nationals one. Certainly Price, used to running her own race, will require careful management. She told Sky on Tuesday night she looked forward to “robust debate” in the party room.

Over coming days, there’ll be the opposition’s pain-filled policy overhaul. The nearly evenly divided leadership vote (29-25), in which the moderates supported Ley and the conservatives backed Taylor, highlights differences over policy.

A large cloud hangs over the controversial nuclear policy. Some will want to ditch it entirely; others will argue it should be recalibrated. A complication is that Ted O'Brien, the new deputy, was its main architect.

More seriously, the commitment to net zero emissions reduction by 2050 will be on the table.

Ley told her joint news conference with O'Brien: “There won’t be a climate war. There will be sound and sensible consultation”. That sounds like wishful thinking. It certainly goes against the Coalition’s history.

While there are some Liberal critics of net zero, this is particularly a debate for the Nationals, among whom there will be a strong push to ditch the commitment.

Within the Coalition, the Nationals will have greater clout because they held almost all their seats. What they do on climate policy will substantially affect the joint party room. But will there be pressure to break the Coalition?

Especially challenging for Ley – and at present looking almost impossible – is how the Liberals manage to appeal to two vital constituencies, women and younger voters. Many professional women in what were once solid Liberal areas have gone off to the teals. The under-50s have comprehensively rejected the Liberals.

Ley said: “We have to have a Liberal Party that respects modern Australia, that reflects modern Australia, and represents modern Australia. And we have to meet the people where they are.”

That’s exactly right, if the Liberal Party is to be successful. But the reality is that the party, as things stand, appears incapable of “meeting the people where they are.” The fundamental problem is that these constituencies – younger voters and women – are increasingly progressive in their politics, but the Liberals are not.

It’s not as if Ley, when deputy leader, didn’t make an effort with women. After the 2022 election, she embarked on a “women’s listening tour”. But such efforts didn’t work, and the Liberals then further alienated women with the working-from-home debacle..

Pitching to women in future will require the Liberals to consider whether they should swallow their objection to quotas for female candidates – and that will encounter fierce resistance.

The Liberals need to thread the needle between the so-called “leafy” urban areas they must win back and the outer suburbs that Dutton thought, wrongly, could take him to power.

Ley is a centrist and a pragmatist. She told her news conference she believed government “is ultimately formed in a sensible centre”.

She will probably be able to navigate issues such as “welcome to country” and the flag better than Dutton, and she said that at the Liberal Party meeting “I committed to my colleagues that there would be no captain’s calls”.

She has changed her views on issues, ranging from her previously strong support for the Palestinians (she was in the parliamentary friends of Palestine) to her opposition to the live sheep trade (she had a private member’s bill in 2018 restricting these exports).

A massive problem Ley will confront is the weak and in parts feral Liberal organisation, which is a federation of states. Variously, these divisions are riven by factionalism, depleted, and incompetent, or all of those. In contrast, Labor excels in its ground game at elections. Ley won’t be able to drive the needed reform, and the party lacks the strong figures in the organisation to do so.

Few people want to join political parties these days, and when a party is on the ropes, the traffic is the other way. This gives the ideologues and factional players even more power over candidate selection, often with bad outcomes.

Adding to their organisational challenges, the Liberals will also likely have to find a new federal director, with Andrew Hirst, who has been in the post since 2017, expected to move on.

When Ley was young she put an extra “s” in her name. She describes it as a joke in her rebellious youth. She told journalist Kate Legge in 2015, “I read about this numerology theory that if you add the numbers that match the letters in your name you can change your personality. I worked out that if you added an "s” I would have an incredibly exciting, interesting life and nothing would ever be boring.“

However it turns out, her time as opposition leader won’t be boring.