Angus Taylor v Sussan Ley for Liberal Party leadership shapes up a box-office bomb
You will have difficulty selling tickets to this little entertainment.
If it were a movie, even the trailer would be difficult.
It started with a not-so-annoying question: Will Angus Taylor or Andrew “Tasty” Hastie be the lead thespian?
Oh, no need to hold your breath. This is Angus. It was decided days ago at a top-secret meeting where a photographer was on hand to take promotional photos.
Will Angus-elect storm the ramparts to destroy the Liberal Party’s first female leader, Sussan Ley?
Not right away. It remained undecided until commercial TV news programs ran out and half the first editions of the tabloids were taken off the air on Wednesday.
And then he just resigned from the front row. No real statement of defiance. Actually, it’s not worth the term “mockery”.
A Sydney tabloid editor hurried off the front page with a headline that screamed “No Gus, No Glory”.
This was supposed to be a play on Angus’s little-spoken warning that the Liberal Party was done without him.
However, “No Gus, No Glory” looked very crude, splashed over a photo of Gus trying to look extremely determined before saying much at all.
And so the nation slept through the night, only to wake up to the news that Claire Chandler and Matt O’Sullivan had resigned their portfolios to back Angus. Claire and Matt? It didn’t ring many bells.
Over the next few hours, several of those described as the “Liberal heavyweights” – Jonno Duniam and James Paterson – left the front row and Angus eventually declared his hand.
He did this through an Instagram video. What a modern man he was, and the challenge proceeded casually. “Great. Great move. Well done, Angus” made the social media universe chuckle.
Susan responded, if we can all call it that. with his own social media post“We will take the pressure off families, fix the budget and keep Australia safe,” he said.
Oh, and he chose an old Labor Party slogan as his own. “Easing the squeeze” was last used in 2004 to support Mark Latham’s losing election campaign. Splendid.
A meeting will be held on Friday to decide the fate of Sussan and Angus.
In the grand tradition of leadership showdowns, you sympathize with the promotional team trying to drum up excitement for this one.
Can we blame viewers for longing for the days when a blockbuster lead movie featured more assertive contestants than Monty Python’s ridiculous King Arthur, who planned to storm a French-held fortress and found himself repelled by the immortal insult: “I generally farted in your direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries”?
In the days of sufficiently fascinating challenges, Paul Keating was telling Bob Hawke to his face that he was coming for him, and when he failed he gleefully said: “I wanted his job and tried to take it away from him; it’s that simple. The truth is I just took one shot at the closet and fired him.”
In fact, he took another shot at the ammunition locker and duly took down Hawke six months later, after events played out like a disjointed adventure movie day after day, night after night.
John Howard, a veteran of clashes with Andrew Peacock in the 1980s, had to barely challenge for the leadership in 1995. The unfortunate Alexander Downer had already brought the house down around his own curly head with a series of howling sounds.
Downer and Howard sat down for a meal at the Athenaeum Club in Melbourne (eerily, where Tasty Hastie chose to stay last week before joining Angus) and presumably drank a red wine or two and decided it was time for Lazarus Howard to rise from the dead.
Among the more spectacular efforts that were nearly Oscar-worthy for stunts was Simon Crean’s 2013 work.
Crean, himself a veteran of leadership fandangos, decided it was time to shock Labor into giving up on Julia Gillard and reinstating Kevin Rudd, who was furious at her previous sacking and wasted time for undermining Gillard to the point of barely surviving.
Tony Wright is associate editor and feature writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
