Sussan Ley must say ‘sorry’ – and not just about T-shirtgate

Now would be a good time for Sussan Ley to admit that she’s wrong. After a churlish comment about our US ambassador in a moment of national good fortune, followed by a week of increasingly unhinged faux outrage over the prime minister’s tatty old Joy Division T-shirt, practising the art of admitting to mistakes is crucial to her political survival.

It wouldn’t be the first time a politician made the wrong call. Sometimes they get terrible advice on political point-scoring from an immature partisan hack in their office. Sometimes they’re egged on by shock jocks and lose sight of what normal people think. And sometimes opponents whip up an issue to make a rival seem out of touch, silly and downright spillable.

Whichever it is, Ley bears the ultimate blame for stumbling from Rudd Derangement Syndrome to Godwin’s Law of band T-shirts within a very poorly judged few days.

And she should own it. Because this is not the last time the opposition leader is going to have to admit error if she’s to fulfil the big agenda she is developing. In fact, she’s going to need to steel herself for some pretty uncomfortable introspection into the past choices of the party she leads.

It’s widely agreed that the 2025 election was more than just a defeat for the Coalition. It finally revealed that the Liberal Party has been held together by philosophical Clag, gaffer tape, and poorly set papier-mache hastily applied by successive Coalition governments seeking to repair the liberal-conservative alliance while flying the plane of government. Now the Coalition has finally crashed to earth, it would be folly to pretend that these were the ideal components parts of a credible engine to drive Australia.

Ley – who, as a trained pilot, should have some notion of engines – has grasped this. She has been sketching out a vision in a series of speeches delivered around the country. The sequencing of the speeches is rather elegant and well-considered. If she weren’t busy creating new trivia questions for Politics in the Pub, we might even detect a new order for alternative government.

Buried in the speeches are plenty of clues to the nostra culpas the first Liberal lady leader is going to have to get used to giving on her party’s behalf.

Ley delivered the first address in the series at the National Press Club in June. Launching herself as opposition leader, she told her personal story and described the values of aspiration, hard work, persistence and reward which shaped her. She observed that “the best governments don’t try to run every person’s life, rather they focus on getting the fundamentals right so that every person can achieve their best”.

Her first admission on behalf of the Liberal Party will have to be that it has not always adequately focused on those fundamentals. Often it has shaped, proposed, or agreed to policies which interfere in how Australians choose to live their lives.

Compulsory superannuation has been one of these sacred cows, with Coalition governments abetting ever-increasing contributions out of workers’ take-home pay. Now Treasurer Jim Chalmers is demonstrating that he regards those savings as a fund for his political projects. He says he wants to divert Australians’ nest eggs into “areas of need”. Politically, that would be the Labor government’s need. A system that requires implicit trust that politicians won’t change the rules to meet political goals is uniquely vulnerable to being abused.

The next speech in the series was hosted by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia in September. Here, Ley argued that government should stop carelessly spending money that young people today will have to pay back with interest. If Australia wants, she said, to keep the social safety net strong, we have to ensure it is financially sustainable and targeted to genuine need.

To be credible, the Liberal Party will have to admit its share of the political spendathon through industry subsidies, shovelling taxpayer cash into a childcare model which rises in cost while it fails our smallest, and the metastasising National Disability Insurance Scheme. Every poorly targeted dollar and political bribe handed out or matched in the hope Australians won’t realise their pockets are being picked is a handbrake on Ley’s reset if she can’t bring herself to admit that governments of which she was a part got these things wrong too.

The third speech in Ley’s arc was delivered at the Centre for Independent Studies, where she focused on increasing productivity and making it easier for Australians to pursue their dreams. Fine words, which need to be weighed against the many exceptions the Coalition has granted itself in the past.

In the fourth, this week (drowned out by the post-punk T-shirt furore) Ley emphasised the importance of small business to the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. But try being a small business competing with the regulatory advantages successive governments, Liberals included, have conferred on the top end of town.

The chapters to-date will be followed by speeches on defence, national security and foreign affairs. All areas in which the Liberal Party has past missteps to acknowledge – too many to list in a single column, though no doubt readers can think of a few.

If the Coalition is to effectively critique the Labor government and offer a new vision for Australia, it will have to stop treating its own past actions as irreproachable. Ley’s speeches are soaring. But defending ill-advised, ineffective or wasteful past policies will quickly crash the Coalition’s hopes of getting off the ground again. If she can’t admit to having been wrong, she’ll never get it right.

A good place to start, even if it’s in the privacy of her party room, would be to acknowledge that T-shirtgate was unnecessary self-harm. And to set a new standard for politics. Only those who can admit when they were wrong can learn from their mistakes.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is an independent insights and advocacy strategist.

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