Sussan Ley, not Angus Taylor, Dan Tehan, must lead Liberal Party

Who’d be the Liberal leader now? Such was the magnitude of Peter Dutton’s disaster, the party begins its second term in opposition in even worse shape than its first, effectively having to begin opposition all over again against a government that has just won in a landslide.

The Liberals have been kicked out of urban and suburban Australia, leaving them almost entirely a party of outer suburban and regional and rural electorates. Affluent metropolitan voters, once the loyal base of the Liberals, have fled A lot.

And Liberal ranks will now include even fewer women, with the number of female MPs reduced to single digits — perhaps half a dozen. And despite the LNP losing several seats in Queensland, losses in other states mean the LNP will exercise an even more disproportionate influence — a key element in the Liberals’ abandonment of their traditional values over the past three years.

Worst of all, the Nationals maintained their representation in net terms, meaning they will be able to demand more frontbench spots and more control over Coalition policy in the coming term.

Notwithstanding that the Nationals were the source of some of the better policies of the Dutton era — divestment powers in big retailing, more aviation competition, road user charges for electric vehicles — the inability of the party to move into the late 20th century and accept climate science is going to continue to hobble the Liberals.

Leading while the Liberal Party thinks through whether it returns to traditional Liberal values or strikes out further in other directions, and works out how to appeal to the majority of Australians who live in urban and suburban electorates, is a tall order. And remember the Liberals, traditionally, don’t handle being in opposition well. Peter Dutton was blessed with unity, partly because there were no alternatives to him. Now the partyroom is rather more crowded with alternatives.

One contender manifestly unsuited to the job is Angus Taylor. Taylor has now played a significant role in two losses for his party. As energy minister under Scott Morrison, he was an advocate for keeping unviable coal-fired power stations going, screaming in fury each time energy companies — which had given up discussing their plans with him — announced it was no longer worth it to spend millions maintaining outdated technology. His policy legacy in that role was Coalkeeper, a plan to levy a tax of hundreds of dollars a year on every Australian household to keep coal-fired clunkers going. Imagine the fun Labor, which was able to pin Dutton’s time as health minister on him, will have with that if Taylor is leader.

Having ascended to the role of shadow treasurer in a sort of combination of the Peter Principle and the Steven Bradbury Effect, Taylor went one better: not merely did he fail to exploit the impact of inflation and interest rates, he failed to prepare any economic strategy for the Liberals at all. When his costings finally emerged, after more than a quarter of Australians had already voted, they trashed the party’s reputation for fiscal discipline: the Liberals went to the election for the first time in the party’s history promising both higher taxes and higher deficits.

For a party that desperately needs to reflect on its values and what it can offer Australians economically, Taylor is literally the last MP capable of doing that successfully.

That leaves Sussan Ley and Dan Tehan. The Liberals urgently need to turn things around in Victoria, where even the most incompetent state government in the country wasn’t enough to stop Labor picking up seats. And Tehan managed to easily hold off an independent challenge in Wannon. But he’s virtually unknown. There’s been some commentary that Dutton was still too unknown to voters by the time the election campaign arrived, when it’s more likely that voters actually had a very good idea of who Dutton was, and just didn’t like it. But Tehan is genuinely unknown, partly because he spent the past three years as shadow immigration minister periodically issuing media releases condemning “Labor’s stealth plan for a big Australia” and not much else. “Dan who?” will be the immediate response from most voters.

Ley, on the other hand, is a known commodity, for better and for worse. All the negative stuff about her is out in the open — she did the customary spell in the sin bin after being convicted of offences against political travel expenses (Indy 500, speeding tickets, etc). She was a loyal and aggressive deputy for Dutton, and stepped up to face the media when Dutton did one of his frequent disappearing acts. She’s a parliamentary veteran who’ll be much better placed to hold the government to account — something the country absolutely needs — and having been frozen out of the election campaign leadership team, she bears little responsibility for the election debacle.

Lefties love to mock Ley’s name — something that, if it was being directed at a Labor woman, would have them clutching their pearls. But God help us that a politician might have actually lived an interesting life before politics. The migrant, one-time punk and ATO manager who still flies herself round her electorate ain’t the Liberal from central casting. Given the weekend debacle, what’s wrong with that?

And forgotten now is that Ley knows how to beat the Nats. That’s how she entered politics: the retirement of Tim Fischer opened up Farrer to a three-way contest, and Ley narrowly defeated the Nationals to add the seat to the Liberal column. She’s held it against all comers — pseudo-Nat independents and Labor alike — ever since. And while it’s a Band-Aid on a gaping wound of female participation in the Liberal Party, she might be the sort of example that can start bringing female voters — who’ve deserted the Liberals in their millions over the last two elections — and candidates back to the conservative side.

Is the smoking ruin of the federal Liberal Party smart enough to see the logic? Or will it doom itself to more resentful, incompetent blokes doing the same stuff over and over?

Is Sussan Ley the right person to lead the Liberals? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au to be published in Crikey. Please include your full name. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.