Building competitive coalition a balancing act for Ley
The coalition led by Sussan Ley must focus on winning back moderate voters and also include conservative MPs to have any chance at the next election, an expert says.
MPs are trying to determine how the opposition can regroup and become competitive at the next election, amid tensions among the Liberals following the coalition’s worst election defeat in May.
While some within the Liberals are considering a further shift to the right as support for parties such as One Nation grows, one academic says the party must return to the center of politics in the future.
“Australians like centrism, they don’t like the far left or the far right,” Monash University politics lecturer Blair Williams told AAP.
“If the Liberal Party went down this conservative route they might get One Nation votes, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to win back the seats they need in the metropolitan areas.”
Friction has emerged in the party since Conservative NT senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was sacked from the front bench and MP Andrew Hastie resigned as a shadow minister over policy differences.
Dr Williams said Ms Ley as leader should focus on returning the Liberals to the centre, but said the party would be most effective at accommodating a broad range of views.
“The Liberal Party is strongest when there is a broad church with a broad range of views, from conservatism to liberalism,” he said.
“But right now the situation seems pretty difficult for them, so it’s not an easy way forward.”
A post-election post-mortem of the coalition is currently being conducted, and policy reviews in portfolios such as energy and climate are also ongoing.
Dr Williams said the lack of policy meant some MPs were finding it difficult to express the party’s position.
“It would be good for them to have some kind of policy base that they can go back to and talk about,” he said.
“There has been a policy vacuum for a long time, for several years, even in the 2022 election, there wasn’t a lot of policy.”
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