Costed energy policy, real cost of living relief: What Sussan Ley must offer voters to haul the Coalition back from pitiful 40-year polling low
Compounding that, data released this week, revealed support for the Coalition has sunk to a 40-year low, although Labor has failed to capitalise on the exodus.
Despite the uphill battle the Liberal Party now face, there is no assurance that Labor will secure a next-term win, and in fact, it is now anyone's game.
The biggest lesson that can be taken from the Federal Election is that when any party strays from its core values, they will be punished at the polls.
The 2025 primary vote for Labor was 34.6 per cent while the LNP primary vote was 31.8 per cent.
Contrast that to the 2019 Morrison versus Shorten election, with Labor's primary at 33 per cent while the Morrison-led coalition achieved a primary of 41 per cent.
The 2019 LNP result looks like a dream compared to the nightmare they just endured.
The Liberals in particular, have been dealt the worst hand, with previous supporters voting for minor parties and independents, and the preferences heavily in favour of Labor.
The Greens are another party who are paying the price for jumping into issues without a clear agenda.
The group remain a force in the Senate but lost three out of four of their Lower House seats, including that of Greens leader, Adam Bandt.
On the other hand, One Nation has doubled their numbers in the Senate, increasing to four Senators.
People know what they are voting for and the renewed numbers for One Nation is the outcome delivered from disgruntled voters who look towards alternate parties who show their cards and stick to the values that voters align with.
Parties are also defined by their action or inaction in opposition.
In 2007, Kevin Rudd easily took down a stale Howard-Costello government who had been in power for a decade and had begun messing with Industrial Relations laws to the detriment of the average Aussie battler.
Mr Rudd was a clean slate, and announced he would abolish Howard's 'unfair dismissal' laws, which affected everyone employed by small and medium businesses with under 100, employees, and on the flipside, promised climate change action, laptops in classrooms and a faster internet.
Then, when Tony Abbott became opposition leader, he was so effective and aggressive in his relentless attacks on a chaotic and dysfunctional Rudd-led Labor Party, that he was credited for the internal toppling of Rudd, who was replace by Julia Gillard.
Mr Abbott outlined everything that was different between the Liberal's path compared to the disastrous paths Mr Rudd had led Australia down.
Mr Abbott pledged to "stop the boats", and get rid of the carbon and mining taxes.
It should have been an easy task for Peter Dutton, as opposition leader, to show the public the contrast between the Liberal outlook compared to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's failures as Labor leader.
But with policy on the fly, such as the not-so-well-thought-out nuclear power stations (without costings), the appeal of the Liberals remained flat in the recent election with a lower primary vote even to Labor's.
The Liberals have the most to lose – and the most to gain over the next three years as they navigate a new path forward.
They will need to prove to a skeptical voting public that they have the better policies to help make Australia's economy stronger, cost of living cheaper, and its social values uncompromised.
New Liberal opposition leader Sussan Ley and her deputy Ted O'Brien are off to a shaky start with a messy split between the Liberals and Nationals after a breakdown in talks between Ms Ley and Nationals leader David Littleproud, before the parties made amends.
Then, during her first major address as opposition leader at the National Press Club, Ms Ley touted the possibility of quotas for higher female participation within the party as her first big idea.
It was the only take away from that all-important first address.
Ms Ley looks like a leader without a clear direction.
She does have some grace of a new leader of a party facing a massive slump in numbers, which have been halved to their potential size.
But that window will close by the end of the year and those who look to the Liberals as a plausible alternative to Labor will judge whether they are on track in finding their true north.
The Liberals will need to have a coherent energy policy and renewables agenda while putting forward their ideas to provide baseload power to support manufacturing while bringing down power prices, rather than a nuclear policy without any costings.
They will need to explain exactly how they will drive down inflation and cost of living expenses, stabilise housing and rental prices, and show that they have been better at bulk billing and Medicare than Labor.
Slogans will no longer do, and strong policy direction will need to be coupled with reliable costings before the next election – so the work starts now.
Robert Weir is a freelance journalist whose work has also been published in The Spectator Australia. He enjoys writing political, lifestyle, and environmental stories as well as film reviews
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ABC News
4 hours ago
- ABC News
As Tasmania waits to find out who will form the next state government, here are the priorities of the new parliament's independents
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"We need to see a respectful mature parliament that's respectful of everyone's voices." She has confirmed she would not want a ministry in a power-sharing government. Peter George is best known as an anti-salmon campaigner, having been the spokesperson for Neighbours of Fishfarming for years. While he leant into his anti-salmon reputation during the campaign, it certainly wasn't the only thing he spoke about. He was vocal in his opposition to the proposed Macquarie Point AFL stadium, and rolled out a variety of policies addressing concerns about health, housing and education. Like most of the independents and The Greens, Mr George wants to see a strengthened Integrity Commission with public hearings. He also wants to end native forest logging, crack down on short-stay accommodation, and address the state's soaring debt. "We have 5,000 people in this very small state … waiting to get decent roofs over their heads, we have a health system that's sort of tottering and teetering under the weight of demand, and we have an education system that's turning out functional illiteracy of somewhere close to 50 per cent. "Those are important things that we need to deal with. "I want to hear about that, and I want to see a parliament of 35 people roll up their sleeves and do some serious work across political lines." Mr George said he wants to hear what the parties' plans are for "rebuilding Tasmania's future" but so far his dealings with them have not won him over. "One area of concern is that Labor and Liberal seem to have drawn lines in the sand saying we won't talk about this, we're going to insist on that," he posted on a video on Facebook. "Well, that's not how minority government works, that's certainly not how collaboration works, so slight warning there, but we'll deal with this down the track." 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ABC News
5 hours ago
- ABC News
NSW MP Gareth Ward likely to be removed from parliament after conviction for sex crimes
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The Age
8 hours ago
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A China shock 2.0 is emerging to rock America
Yet instead of pursuing the policies needed to meet this threat head-on, the MAGA agenda is heavily focused on fighting the last war – on bringing manufacturing jobs lost to China and elsewhere back to the US. The challenge, Autor and Hanson argue, is not that of attempting to resuscitate the industrial might of a bygone age, but ensuring that the US is front and centre of the new technologies and able to convincingly harness them to its own ends. This endeavour is not obviously helped by Trump's scattergun approach to tariffs, punishing friend and foe alike, his propensity to alienate rather than co-operate with allies, the stupefying attacks on scientific research and the repudiation of foreign talent – once the very lifeblood of American advancement. Nor is it helped by the administration's casual disregard for the great asset of dollar hegemony which, bizarrely, Stephen Miran, Trump's chief economic adviser, seems to regard as in some way partly responsible for America's de-industrialisation. An administration seemingly hell-bent on fiscal ruin, and on weakening the dollar for the purposes of making US goods more competitive, doesn't exactly inspire international confidence in the dollar as a reserve currency asset. Loading China, by contrast, is investing heavily in the digital yuan as a way of internationalising its own currency, of offering an alternative to the fool's gold of cryptocurrency and of usurping the dollar for cross-border payments. Already, it is making steady progress. Why any longer should Brazil use the dollar for selling soybeans to China when Trump threatens the country with punitive tariffs for the sin of prosecuting his friend, Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president? Why indeed should it employ the dollar at all when the US regularly uses its power for extraterritorial purposes? In the developing world, Western influence is waning fast; China has been quick and single-minded at moving into its place. China has many problems and challenges, from the demographic to the still-deflating credit and property bubbles. But its catch-up and overtake approach to the technologies of the future is already paying big dividends. As, too, is the aggressive expansion of China's universities sector, originally begun under Jiang Zemin's presidency in the late 1990s, and heavily focused on Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), the US-led China in 60 of 64 frontier technologies as recently as 2007, judged by share of the world's most-cited research, while China led the US in three. However, by 2023, these rankings were reversed, with China leading in 57 of 64 key technologies, and the US in seven. 'China has built the foundations to position itself as the world's leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains,' the ASPI says. All of the world's top 10 research institutions in some technologies are based in China, and are already collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). The potential threat from Chinese AI is too great to ignore. Now, globally recognised companies at the forefront of their industries – such as Huawei in telecommunications, BYD in electric vehicles and Longi in solar wafers – have come from nowhere in less than 30 years to achieve world-leading positions. Industrial policy in China has, moreover, deliberately targeted key choke points in the supply chain, such that the US was this week forced to abandon its ban on the export of H20 Nvidia chips to China in return for China lifting similar export restrictions on the rare earth minerals vital to many hi-tech industries. The Nvidia ban was completely pointless in any case, serving only to turbocharge Chinese attempts to develop alternatives. Autor and Hanson suggest that the correct response to the China 2.0 shock is for the US to act in unison with commercial allies such as the EU, Japan, Canada, the UK, Australia and South Korea. Loading Counter-intuitively, Chinese companies should also be encouraged to set up production facilities in the US and elsewhere, rather similarly to the way that China once enticed Western companies to do the same in China as a way of speeding up technology transfer. Replicating Chinese industrial policy by aggressively promoting innovation in new fields, as happened in America and Europe during the Second World War, could also help narrow China's lead. It scarcely needs saying that Trump's America is at present doing the opposite of all these things. But just because Trump has got his head buried in the sand doesn't mean other nations should do the same. The potential threat from Chinese AI is too great to ignore. If China gets there first, it will reshape the world in its own image, and 'the end of history' will look very different from the one outlined by Francis Fukuyama back in 1992, when he declared the final triumph of liberal democracy.
