Sussan Ley’s efforts are in vain. The Coalition is grimly marching towards doom

Is it too soon to speculate on how long Sussan Ley will last as opposition leader?

This question isn’t a bit of traditional media sport where a troubled leader is hacked away at until there’s a showdown. And it’s not to advance the prospects of her rival, Angus Taylor, whom she defeated in a party room ballot just three months ago by a handful of votes. It’s really a commentary on where the Coalition parties are taking themselves since being handed a hiding by voters in May.

Increasingly, the Coalition is resembling the Labor Party after the split in the mid-1950s: a rump with little capacity to break out of old ways of thinking, starved of talent. A few days ago, Ley implored delegates at the Queensland Liberal National Party’s annual convention to take up her message of modernisation and getting back in touch with the wider society. They responded by voting overwhelmingly to ditch the party’s target of net zero by 2050. In that spirit, the man who would be her deputy prime minister, David Littleproud, vowed to take a nuclear energy policy to the next election.

Liberal state conferences in Western Australia and South Australia have also dumped net zero. Inevitably, on Tuesday this rearguard action found its way into the Liberal party room and then the meeting of the joint parties, with Ley being put on the spot by anti-net-zero warrior MPs. Heroically, upon becoming leader, Ley thought she could buy time on net zero and climate change more generally by giving it the rubric of “energy” and tasking Dan Tehan with the job of coming up with a policy over the next 12 to 18 months. That doesn’t look like it’s going to fly. A number of her colleagues and what’s left of the rank and file want to ditch net zero, pronto.

The wheels seem to be falling off quickly. Where does Ley go from here? She digs in or she capitulates. If she opts for the former, her already tenuous hold on the leadership becomes weaker. If she goes for the latter, there goes her stated goal of trying to broaden the Liberals’ appeal to lost constituencies, especially women and the young in cities.

You have to search hard for signs that the Coalition has a real desire to remake itself. How can it possibly hope to regain all that lost electoral ground by relitigating the climate change question, which it was fighting about in opposition 16 years ago when Malcolm Turnbull had to make way for Tony Abbott?

Even Ley’s supposed fix, trying to thread the climate change needle by ordering up a new energy policy built on household savings – essentially a retail offer – was a retread of the strategy behind the National Energy Guarantee package that brought down Turnbull as prime minister in 2018 and gave us Scott Morrison.

Paradoxically, it was Morrison who later persuaded his party and the Nationals to accept a net zero target as a bid to hold on to power. Freed from that obligation and with the May 3 landslide defeat having all but removed the Coalition parties from metropolitan Australia, the guardrails have fallen away.

Like it or not, and despite the considerable array of difficulties with the transition to a system of renewable energy, including the cost, a solid majority of the Australian public wants to keep going with it. For many younger Australians, it is a threshold issue. As the Baby Boomers die off, that is going to be a big problem for the Coalition.

The chilling thing in observing the Coalition in this second term of opposition is to see how resistant it is to the conclusions most voters reach just by watching the world around them. Just because the Coalition is the opposition, it doesn’t mean it must devote itself to opposing; its task is to present an alternative based on a clear-eyed, honest reading of our society, economy, polity and the world beyond our shores. So many of its positions and tactics reek of the past. Politically, that’s not conservatism or liberalism – it’s a slow form of suicide.

Why do Ley and her colleagues behave as though Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu haven’t fundamentally changed their countries, necessitating an adjustment in our approach to the US and Israel? In no universe did it make sense for Ley to give Michaelia Cash the foreign affairs portfolio. Cash is a legacy product from the days when the Coalition was the voters’ default choice for government, a frontbencher who can be given a ministry but is utterly useless in a shadow role. To her, subtlety is that funny word with a silent “b” in it. And she’s the opposition leader in the Senate.

On Tuesday, the Coalition tried out a scare campaign on taxes after last week’s economic reform roundtable, which Ley insists on calling a “talkfest”. Before it was held, she dismissed it as a “stitch-up”. Why then did she allow her deputy Ted O’Brien to attend?

On Wednesday, the Coalition poked around for an opening on the government’s response to the discovery that Iran has been ordering antisemitic attacks in Melbourne and Sydney. To what end? None of this creates a path to recovery; it’s a way of getting pats on the back from people in the media and the community who already support it.

This is far from the first diminished opposition to drift into self-indulgence, but it can’t go on. It’s like finding out you’ve got a spot on a lung and hitting the smokes even harder.

The Coalition’s previous model for getting into power and staying there, of tearing down its opponents through rhetoric rather than policy, and relying on relentless support from its media friends, is no longer viable, as this year’s election showed. Rather than agitating about net zero and seeking kudos from the rusted-ons, the Coalition MPs who are left in the parliament would do well to start to look for new leadership prospects who will eventually inherit the mantle from the current set of placeholders, try to understand contemporary Australian society and think of the future, not the past.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

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