Is Sussan Ley’s position as opposition leader untenable?
He might have been better off if the Liberal-National split had remained, so he could continue to steer his party where he wanted it to go: towards the political middle ground.
Instead, from the moment Ley took over the leadership in May, conservative MPs briefed against him and questioned whether he was the right choice over a more conservative option such as Angus Taylor, whom he defeated by four votes in the leadership vote in May.
It is not Ley’s fault that Jacinta Nampijinpa Price insulted and was disloyal to Indo-Australians, that she forced the opposition leader to relegate the far-right favorite to the backbench, or that another leadership candidate, Andrew Hastie, decided to resign from the frontbench after extensive freelance work outside his own portfolio.
But Ley, the first woman to lead the Liberal Party and only the second woman to lead a government party, will have to pay the price for a series of missteps, including her own. Calls for Kevin Rudd to be sackedby claiming Prime Minister’s T-shirt was antisemitic and suggests Labor might have stopped him Visit the Tomago smelter last week.
And now his own lawmakers, and even some of his supporters, are questioning his judgment, some of the decisions his office has made, and whether he can survive in the job.
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Running a political party can be a scary job. Once mistakes and self-goals begin, the leader begins to question his or her own decisions, second-guessing each call, and more mistakes follow. Labor elder Kim Beazley’s second stint as opposition leader is a good example.
Most voters will forgive a politician who admits his mistake and moves on. Anthony Albanese’s gaffes on the first day of the 2022 elections did not prevent him from winning.
But Ley did not admit his missteps, either privately or publicly.
Nor did he address the mistakes made by his predecessors Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison on opposition and government policy, such as the short-lived but damaging fiasco to roll back working from home or the epic failure of Robodebt.
No one in the coalition has owned up to these and other mistakes, and the Australian people know it.
He still has a chance to level with voters and tell them the truth about what he stands for, what the Coalition has done wrong and what he will do as prime minister, but that window is closing.
Because now Ley is as convincing as she was when Gillard promised to be “The Real Julia” at the 2010 election.
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