‘No Liberal leader can survive a fire on the right’, but arsonists surround Ley

The May election generally was acknowledged to have been disastrous for the Coalition. But the disaster continues to unfold. On its current trajectory, it will extinguish itself as a party of government in the current term.

Not because of the genius of the government. Labor’s polling numbers are essentially unchanged since election day. The onrushing disaster is self-inflicted. There’s an angry, self-destructive impulse coursing through the Coalition itself.

It’s true that Labor successfully entrenched itself squarely in the centre of the electorate, taking seats from the left and the right to amass its commanding majority.

The rational response to this is obvious. Challenge the government for the centre ground. This is where governments are formed in a system of compulsory voting. And it’s what Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has been attempting. But much of her party is refusing.

And the chief victim is Ley herself. She took the job of leader with low public recognition. A vox pop by The Daily Telegraph, showing a photo of her to 100 random adults in central Sydney in July, found no one able to name her. But as voters began to discover her, they reacted positively.

“Sussan Ley started on a high of net likeability at positive 11 points, which made her the most likeable politician of the 20 or so we tested,” says Jim Reed of Resolve Strategic, pollster for this masthead. By this month, it had fallen to positive 1, about on par with Anthony Albanese.

“The relative change was even more stark on her performance rating,” says Reed. “It went from a pretty healthy positive 9 to negative 5, again on par with Albanese.” That’s a brutal fall of 14 points in a single month.

What happened in that month? Ley sacked Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from the shadow ministry for refusing to endorse her leadership, and Andrew Hastie resigned his frontbench seat when Ley ruled that he would not be involved in writing the party’s immigration policy.

A member of the Liberal leadership group remarks that “the loss of Jacinta and Andrew was especially damaging because they are rock stars with our branch members”. Both are members of the party’s conservative arm or, more specifically, the New Right faction, as explained in the useful factional analysis by my colleague James Massola earlier this month. Ley is a moderate.

And that polling crunch occurred before the Barnaby Joyce breakout last week. Even though he’s not a Liberal – for now, at least, he’s a Nationals MP, on the way to joining One Nation – it reinforces the public impression of disarray and despair in the Coalition.

Reed joins the dots: “It’s a truism of politics that disunity may not be the leader’s fault but it tends to hurt them most, and that’s what’s happening to Sussan Ley. Just when the voters were giving her a chance.”

While Ley has performed well in difficult circumstances, she hasn’t been entirely blameless. But it’s devilishly tricky for a leader when the party is in a mutinous mood. A retired Liberal MP says the Coalition is pulling every lever it sees, and most of them turn out to be trapdoors. This week’s Kevin Rudd moment is an example.

It’s been a rule of Australian politics for a dozen years now that Rudd is failsafe target for ad hominem attack by anyone looking for a target. This was a Labor Party achievement. Once Labor decided to systematically demonise him and render him friendless in order to protect Julia Gillard, Rudd has been fair game for all. True, Albanese and Penny Wong are staunch defenders, but he’s still good for a low-cost laugh across the political spectrum.

Or that’s what Ley thought when she decided to pull the Rudd lever. Little did she know that it was actually a trapdoor that her colleagues were waiting to spring. No sooner had she demanded his sacking as ambassador to the US than two of her colleagues, Jane Hume and Hastie, went public to praise him. Tony Abbott joined this surprise new caucus, Liberal Friends of Kevin, saying he’d done a good job in Washington.

It didn’t matter that it was a misplaced criticism for Ley to make. The point is that she said it. The party should support the leader or, at least, stay shtum. A low-risk manoeuvre for Ley turned into a damaging one. She backed off, wounded.

The much bigger issues for the party are still unsettled. Liberal policy on net zero and immigration are convulsing the party internally. A committed and growing core of Liberals – and Nationals – is prepared to fight to the death to kill the existing Coalition commitment to net zero.

And to make drastic cuts to the immigration intake. But the death they fight to could well be their own. The ructions so far are minor compared with the disasters that await if these are mismanaged. And the parties, and the Coalition as a whole, are in no mood to be managed.

One Liberal MP says Ley’s Acknowledgement of Country at the National Press Club so enraged his branch members that he’s still getting angry emails five months later.

Liberal senator and all-purpose wise man James Paterson said a couple of weeks ago that the party was going through “a mass public therapy session”. Another conservative Liberal MP says it was normal and natural to go through a public grieving process after such a shocking electoral loss. But if it were therapy or grief, that would be easier; they are passing phases.

“We are going well beyond grief,” says the conservative Liberal, someone who did not vote for Ley in the party leadership ballot but who sees the importance of making her leadership viable. “What we’re doing to ourselves now is indulgent and destructive, and it’s not strategic. It serves no good purpose. Public esteem for the party is testing new depths. There is no goodwill in the Coalition party rooms. We will go out of existence if we keep this up.”

The centrifugal force in both Coalition parties is their base – their branch members, the Murdoch media and especially Sky After Dark. These represent a small minority of the electorate but they are a key component of the Coalition’s structural support. And they’re demanding that the Coalition move not to the election-winning centre but to the angry right of politics.

Ley’s efforts to appeal to the political centre are some of the very irritants that most antagonise the Coalition’s base. For example, Reed says Ley has given Acknowledgment of Country remarks and talked about net zero. One Liberal MP says Ley’s Acknowledgment of Country at the National Press Club so enraged his branch members that he’s still getting angry emails about it five months later.

And as for net zero, it is the issue most likely to destroy Ley’s leadership. “Sky After Dark is whipping our branch members into a frenzy over net zero, and that’s pushing our MPs to harden their positions,” says a Liberal. “No Liberal leader can survive a fire on the right.”

Ley gave a sane speech this week about tax policy, designed to establish principles of competent fiscal policy and small government. Did anyone notice that she’d just promised to cut income tax if elected? No. With all the agitation in the Coalition, she can’t take a trick.

One of the ominous signs for Ley’s leadership is that poll support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has doubled. It won 6.4 per cent on election day but the latest Resolve poll puts it at 12. Other polls have found the same trend. These are Coalition voters moving to One Nation in frustration with Ley and the Nationals leader, David Littleproud. Barnaby Joyce’s pending move to One Nation is not occurring in a vacuum.

What to do? If Ley cannot placate the right fringe, she cannot survive to the next election. If she cannot move the party to the centre, she cannot win the next election.

To reconcile the two, she has to manage her party more actively, quickly forge a workable compromise on an emissions policy, and offer the Coalition base some psychic satisfaction on touchstone issues of immigration, identity and sovereignty, while continuing to work towards election-winning policy on other issues.

For the Liberals, the worst possible outcome would be to dump Ley. To tear down their first female leader after just half a term would confirm to most of the country the suspicion that the Coalition is an incorrigible bastion of antediluvian chauvinism.

And for the Liberals to take refuge in the destructive and racist impulses of One Nation would be like the gingerbread man in the old folk tale. To cross the dangerous river, he trusts the offer from the crafty fox to carry him safely, only to be devoured midstream. Making common cause with Hansonism would not save the Libs, it would consume them.

In the meantime, the teals and the Climate 200 crowd are conspicuous by their electoral inactivity. As one leading figure in the movement says, why interrupt your enemy when it’s in the middle of making a mistake?

And Labor can continue its policy lethargy over productivity, economic growth, energy costs, immigration, defence and housing without paying a political price. Labor simply cannot believe its luck.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.