When Sussan Ley stepped into the Liberal Party leadership after Peter Dutton’s crushing May 2025 defeat, it briefly felt like the Coalition might chart a new course. As the first woman to ever lead the federal Liberal Party, her appointment carried enormous symbolic weight. It was never going to be an easy task, particularly with the smallest of mandates to be leader in the first place, but there was still hope that Ley just might be the figure willing to break from the party’s increasingly narrow, combative politics and give it a chance at renewal.
But six months on, and that hope has evaporated. What once looked like a moment for reinvention has instead hardened into something gratingly familiar. The glass cliff that hung over Ley from day one is now fully visible and she’s buckling under the pressure of factional forces at the expense of Liberal voters.
Instead of using the opportunity as leader to drag the Liberals into alignment with what modern Australia wants, ie: meaningful climate action, social progress, a commitment to integrity, she’s retreated. She’s blatantly ignored the urgent warnings of moderates, commentators, and even her own internal polling and offered zilch in the way of fresh thinking or coherent policy.
And now, under pressure from the hard right of the Coalition, she is presiding over a baffling abandonment of the party’s net-zero commitment, despite the last election clearly showing that decisive climate action was a top-tier voter priority.
In fact, according to a recent Essential poll, 48 per cent of Australians believe the Liberal Party should take more progressive positions, while just 24 per cent think it should lean more conservative. Among coalition supporters specifically, 49 per cent want more progressive policies, underscoring that even the party base is not unified behind a retrograde strategy.
Meanwhile, young Australians are drifting so quickly away that the Coalition may never be able to appeal again. ABC reporting on post-election data showed millennials (born 1981–1996) gave the Coalition just 21 per cent primary support, while Gen Z gave it 27 per cent. Importantly,70 per cent of Gen Z voters and 66 per cent of millennials ranked climate change as a “very” or “fairly” serious threat.
The intel is clear, and the Liberal Party has known it for years now. The hard evidence demonstrated by Teal independents, younger voters, professional women, and its own former supporters prove, decisively, that climate action is not niche and not optional. Yet Sussan Ley is backing in a position that is not only environmentally reckless, but electorally suicidal.
When leaked internal polling warns that ditching climate targets will cost the Coalition swathes of previously blue seats, it should be a moment for the leader to draw a line. Instead, Ley has allowed herself to be boxed in by the same ultraconservative figures who have long attempted to remake the Liberal Party into an Australian Trump-lite replica.
If all of this feels eerily familiar, it’s because we’ve seen it before. Malcolm Turnbull, perhaps the last leader who arrived with genuine moderate credentials and a public appetite for change, quickly wilted under the pressure of the party’s right flank. He failed to confront the internal bullies who sought to drag the Coalition away from the mainstream. Despite his own well-documented passion for stronger climate reform, he failed to make true headway. His treasured National Energy Guarantee (NEG) was abandoned due to internal party opposition, and he later stated that failing to pass climate policy was his greatest regret as leader.
Ley seems to be running the same trajectory, only faster. The outward possibility that she could be the leader to modernise a deeply out-of-touch Liberal Party, has simply not translated.
And the cost will not just be hers. If the Coalition abandons climate responsibility, clings to outdated social conservatism, and fails to centre the needs of women, families, younger voters and professionals, it will accelerate its own decline. This latest retreat from net zero doesn’t just undermine the party’s credibility; it threatens its viability.
Six months in and Sussan Ley is well and truly on the ropes, and those in the alt-right of her Coalition couldn’t be happier. She’s a dead woman walking unless she finds the bravery to lead rather than placate. Because the Liberal Party won’t just lose the next election, it will lose its relevance entirely.