The lost art of opposition: Is it a role beyond salvage for Sussan Ley?

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley is moving on. Having settled the Coalition’s messy fight on net zero, Ley hit the media this week in an attempt to arm wrestle the agenda to things she wants to talk about – immigration and defence spending, even raising the idea that aspiring immigrants should be tested on Australian values.

It says everything about the opposition that it cannot name (at least, not yet) what those exam-subject Australian values should be.

With the wisdom of a small amount of hindsight, the most extraordinary part of the net zero fight seems not to have been the depthlessness of the Liberals’ capacity for self-sabotage, nor their apparent appetite to have the same argument for decades. Nor was it the Coalition’s conviction that it would be able to bring around the majority of Australians (who polls show, support emissions reduction in line with the Paris Agreement) to their point of view, rather than moving themselves around to the point of view of middle Australia.

This was despite Ley’s acknowledgment after the election that her party had been “smashed”, and her pledge to lead a Liberal Party that “reflects modern Australia and represents modern Australia”.

No. The most extraordinary aspect to the messy net zero policy brawl was the fact that the argument was waged and lost (by the Liberal moderates) without us ever knowing anything about the personal position of the Liberal leader on this very divisive issue.

We never discovered what Ley believes are the pros or cons of the net zero commitment which the Morrison government, in which she served, made in Australia’s name, and which Anthony Albanese’s government has since legislated.

We never found out Ley’s personal convictions on emissions reduction in line with Australia’s obligations under the Paris Agreement, or what she thought, on balance, was the most rational and responsible energy policy.

In 2021, Ley said “no one wants to get to net zero more quickly than I do”. They were pretty cautious comments for an environment minister, as she was at the time, in a government that had committed to net zero emissions by 2050.

But now that Ley has locked in behind the party’s adopted position – to ditch net zero in favour of a vague aspiration towards emissions reduction as a “welcome outcome” – we probably will never know what she really thinks.

Ley’s mysteriousness on this point puts her in contrast to previous opposition leaders, from Robert Menzies and Gough Whitlam to John Howard and Tony Abbott. We always knew what they thought. They led from a position, and when that position changed (as Howard’s did on the GST, for example), they explained their reasons.

But Ley’s conception of her role as opposition leader is clearly very different to the men who have come before her. Her priority has been keeping the Coalition together, and as soon as the Nationals decided to ditch a sensible, economically literate energy policy, it was always going to be impossible for the Liberals to have it, while staying in the marriage.

Ley opted to keep the marriage together.

In theory, now that the opposition has united behind a common goal, it can start the business of oppositioning in earnest. It’s a huge task.

“The challenge before [Ley] is almost of the magnitude that Whitlam and Menzies faced,” says Paul Strangio, emeritus professor of politics at Monash University. “She’s facing a situation of a party in a moribund state, that requires significant renewal and recasting to think about what part of the electorate it’s going to focus on.”

In an ideal world, says Strangio, Ley would undertake the “large, creative, imaginative project” of rebuilding the policies and constituencies of the contemporary Liberal Party, just as Menzies did, and just as Whitlam and Bill Hayden did for the Labor side of politics.

But the circumstances are so far from ideal that it’s difficult to make credible comparisons with those models of opposition.

To the right, the Liberals are aggressively nibbled at by the globalised forces of populism. This tends to lead to a focus on the sorts of issues – home-grown manufacturing (a favourite of the Holden-fondling Andrew Hastie), immigration cuts, defence spending and culture war stuff – that hold little appeal, in general, for the constituencies the Liberals need desperately to win over: women and young people.

(To wit, this week South Australian Liberal senator Andrew McLachlan said his office had been contacted “by many members questioning why they should remain in the party given they are parents and the Coalition does not seem to care about the future”.)

The Liberal party room seems ambivalent, at best, about accepting the authority of its first female leader. To its right, One Nation surges at 18 per cent, according to the latest Redbridge poll, with the Liberals not so far ahead at 24 per cent, their lowest primary vote since Federation. One Nation is an increasingly credible electoral threat (although, let’s remember the right-wing party has never won, in its own right, a seat in the lower house).

But perhaps more importantly, high support for One Nation gives the right flank of the Coalition solid grounds to argue they need to cater to those voters.

All this brings us to the greatest challenge facing not just Ley, but any contemporary opposition. The electorate is increasingly fractured in its vote.

At the last election, 34 per cent of voters opted for minor parties and independents as their first-preference vote. That’s more than the 32 per cent of voters who put the Coalition as their first preference on their ballot forms.

Compare that with the 1972 election, which ushered in the great reformist Gough Whitlam, when minor parties and independents won just 4 per cent of the vote. Whitlam had been opposition leader (for the first time) from 1967 to 1972. He used that time to prepare for governing – both with policy development and building up expertise in staff. Whatever the criticisms of his government, no one can say Whitlam hadn’t prepared a full suite of policies before he was elected.

The Labor opposition under Hayden also used its time productively. A committee was formed to prepare for the transition to government, which of course, in our system, happens overnight, unlike the US system, where the change-over doesn’t take effect until several months after an election.

Howard used his time as opposition leader to make headland speeches, among other things, says Professor Frank Bongiorno of the Australian National University. “There was growing dissatisfaction with the Keating government, and Howard had well-pitched rhetoric for that context,” Bongiorno says.

Tony Abbott was a remarkably effective opposition leader who overcame low personal popularity ratings and did the intellectual and policy labour required before coming to government. His fatal flaw was that he was so good as opposition leader that he stuck with the model even after becoming prime minister, when a different set of skills was necessary.

But is the traditional model of opposition – to hold the government to account, and to do the policy work to ready yourself for government – still fit for purpose?

The world’s most famous democracy, the United States, has no formal opposition. In the Westminster system, the idea of an opposition dates back about 500 years, according to Scott Prasser, a former senior public servant-turned researcher, who last year co-edited a book titled The Art of Opposition. “By about the 17th century, you could criticise the King’s ministers and ride your horse home without being killed,” Prasser says. Things have improved, at least marginally. Now the cavalry charge is more likely to come from your own side.

But in Britain, for example, the once-great Tory party has so thoroughly trashed its own credibility that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK now polls better than the Conservatives and British Labour. Consequently, the Tories’ hold on formal “opposition” status is shaky at best.

It is Farage’s right-wing party that is pushing the Labour government’s agenda. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has just announced a suite of hardline migration policies, including deportations, a response to the pressure applied by the anti-immigration Farage.

In Australia, the Liberals have coasted for decades on their self-nominated reputation as the natural party of government. The lassitude and ineptitude of the Morrison government, in particular, formed a strong rebuttal to that claim.

Ley was right – they got smashed at the last election. The Liberals acknowledge that they deserve to be in opposition. But they seem unable to grasp how lucky they are to be in opposition.

Because as the existential challenges to the two-party system only increase, the concept of opposition as we know it might not exist forever.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and a columnist.

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