Hollowed out of thinkers, Sussan Ley’s party dreams of nothing other than opposition

Research consistently shows trust and authenticity to be a potent influence over voter behaviour. It’s little wonder Liberal leader Sussan Ley spent around a third of her June appearance at the Press Club telling her backstory.

It’s a compelling yarn that winds its way through shearing sheds, crop-duster cockpits and university campuses. Yet it cannot fill the void where a resonant vision and credible policies should be if she’s to succeed in her mission of rebuilding trust in the Liberals as a party of government.

It’s a monumental undertaking. Trust in former leader Peter Dutton was so low before the May election that he sat below Clive Palmer and Donald Trump on Roy Morgan’s Trust & Distrust Index. The disastrous result that followed was the worst ever performance for the Coalition or their predecessors, going back 115 years.

The task of detoxifying the Liberal brand is only growing. The Resolve poll published in July showed the Coalition’s primary vote has fallen a further three percentage points since the election.

Ley’s promise to lead a “constructive” opposition hopefully marks a return to the groundbreaking, bipartisan reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Productivity growth has more than halved since 2000, a slump former Treasury secretary Ken Henry says has “robbed” the average full-time worker of around $500,000. It’s once again time to put policy ahead of politics, but old habits die hard.

Party founder, the late Sir Robert Menzies, famously said the future of the Liberals relies on having “something to believe in – not just something to oppose”. Were he alive, Sir Bob may struggle to recognise the party that reflexively opposed virtually every major reform proposal in recent memory.

​The NBN was called a “white elephant” and Gonski needs-based school funding resisted. The banking royal commission, that later resulted in billions of dollars being returned to customers, was a “populist whinge”, according to then-treasurer Scott Morrison. In 2019, the Liberal leadership incited fear of Labor’s proposed target for 50 per cent of new passenger vehicles to be electric by 2030. The Chinese are already closing in on 50 per cent, while Norway hit 88.9 per cent last year.

The Liberals’ opposition mindset has even seen them betray the market economics they claim to espouse.

In 2014, they dismantled a world leading, market-based carbon price in favour of grants to individual firms – the textbook definition of picking winners. Under Dutton, they eventually settled on taxpayer-funded nuclear mega projects. Countries that price carbon now account for two-thirds of global GDP, according to the World Bank.

As minister for energy and emissions reduction, Angus Taylor attacked Labor’s renewables policy as “socialist planning” and ignored expert advice to invest in cost-effective fast batteries, instead committing $600 million of public money to a gas power plant in the Hunter Valley already rejected by the market. Costs are now reported to exceed $1 billion.

Menzies led the Liberals to power for the first time in 1949 with an anti-socialist platform that attacked the Chifley Labor government’s bank nationalisation plans. Now, 75 years on, the party’s policy brain appears to have atrophied sometime between the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

When Labor introduced legislation to bring its “Future Made in Australia” industrial policy to fruition in April 2024, Ley referred to the government as “radical” while Taylor dismissed the policy as a slush fund for the PM to “pick winners”.

But industrial policy is one area where government intervention makes sense. Australia sits below Botswana at 105 out of 133 on the Economic Complexity Index, reflecting overreliance on commodities and underinvestment in innovation and manufacturing compared to other advanced economies. A policy to build sovereign manufacturing capacity and high‑skill jobs in strategically important sectors reflects a 21st-century economic consensus that markets are a means to a societal goal, not an end in themselves.

Socialist smears may resonate with rusted-on conservatives, but risk alienating voters the party desperately needs. A 2024 YouGov poll found 53 per cent of Australians aged 18-24 favour a more socialist direction, compared to 22 per cent preferring more capitalism.

According to a June Redbridge Group poll, voters aged 65+ were the only cohort in which the Coalition won more votes than Labor at the May election. A paltry 19 per cent of 18-34 year-olds voted Coalition, less than half of those who voted for Labor – a result dubbed a “youthquake” by Redbridge director and former Liberal Party official Tony Barry.

Where to now for a party that defines itself in opposition to a Labor Party that’s colonised the political centre? How does the party of “lower taxes” resonate in a social democracy where overall taxation is already well below the OECD average?

Unfortunately for Ley, she has inherited a party lacking the policy hardheads to write the necessary software update. In the wake of the election result, Institute of Public Affairs Senior Fellow John Roskam bemoaned the loss of the “serious thinkers” at the heart of the party in the 1970s and 1980s. Roskam says the party is verging on “anti-intellectual” and is lacking the personnel to think critically about how Liberal principles can be adapted to 21st-century realities.

Meanwhile, the pews of a once broad church have been gradually purged of moderates since Ian McPhee lost preselection for opposing John Howard’s hard-line rhetoric on Asian immigration in the late 1980s. Others followed, among them Julia Banks, John Hewson, Fred Chaney, and former PMs Fraser and Turnbull.

What remains is a party with an uninspiring message about small government that airbrushes over Menzies’ nation‑building legacy of universities, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, and delivering the publicly funded Snowy Mountains Scheme – the largest engineering project in our nation’s history.

Ley deserves some patience as she tries to rehabilitate the Liberals. She’s saying all the right things about “listening” and addressing issues that concern young people, but uncertain times call for a leader, not populist vessel.

We must judge her on whether she can reignite a contest of ideas anchored in sound values and serious policy work. The outcome from her working group on energy and emissions reduction will be a test she cannot afford to fail.

Ley’s championing of women’s representation is commendable but long overdue and constitutes the bare minimum for 21st-century political party. Unless the first female leader of the federal Liberals restores genuine clarity of purpose and rebuilds the party’s capacity to govern, her leadership will amount to little more than a footnote.

Gary Newman is the director and producer of How to Capture a Prime Minister. He was previously a policy advisor and journalist.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.