AARON PATRICK: The infamous lectern slap that spelled doom for Sussan Ley
She meant the gesture to convey the deep hurt felt by Jewish Australians. It came off as contrived and artificial.
Sussan Ley’s short, difficult and awkward leadership of the Liberal Party might be explained by two public performances.
On August 27 in the Great Hall of Parliament last year, Ms Ley gave a perfectly timed and genuinely funny comedic after-dinner speech to politicians, lobbyists, journalists and advisers who constitute the Canberra bubble. Ms Ley poked fun at herself. Anthony Albanese tried, but his heart wasn’t in it.
Four months later, on December 22, Ms Ley slapped the lectern at a press conference in Sydney as she castigated the foreign minister for skipping funerals of the Bondi massacre victims. “I haven’t seen Penny Wong shed a single tear,” she said, her voice full of righteous outrage.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.Conducted over 49 emotional seconds, Ms Ley’s verbal assault on Ms Wong appeared not as she intended: an expression of deep and powerful anger on behalf of Jewish Australians. Instead, a word that came to be associated with the display was “performative”.
Blame game
All public politics is an act. It is impossible to know if a man would have been judged the same way. Fairly or unfairly, Australians decided they were unconvinced by Ms Ley, rating her one of the least-popular political leaders in modern Australian history.
Voters didn’t so much turn against the Liberals’ first woman leader, as lose interest. The more she spoke, the more her authority ebbed away.
In the dying days of her leadership Ms Ley complained of sexism, including from me. Was there evidence beyond a satirical headline or a meeting of her opponents? Was Sussan Ley a victim of institutional rejection by the Liberal Party? Is the patriarchy to blame?
There is no question the Liberal Party has a women problem. From activists on campus protesting the war in Gaza to the professionals driving the teal wave to middle-class suburban mothers demanding greater health and childcare, women have become the driving force of modern Australian politics.
They’re more left wing than men of the same age, surveys show, and determined to reshape Australia. They are a big reason the Labor Party enjoys a huge majority, and why there are 12 women and 11 men in the Cabinet.
Rolemodels
The new gender dynamic is why Ms Ley’s tenure was such a disaster for the Liberal Party. It needed her to succeed, or fail with flair, to demonstrate to women it understands the game has changed. Ms Ley’s job was to win back the female vote without sending men to One Nation. She did neither.
Strangely, she shunned two women who could have helped her. Victorians Sarah Henderson and Jane Hume were banished to the backbench for reasons never explained but presumably due to internal politics.
As an advocate for what might be called the traditional curriculum in schools, Ms Henderson could have shored up Ms Ley’s right. Ms Hume, as the embodiment of inner-city Liberal values, could have been a weapon against the teals. Both found themselves marginalised when they had so much to contribute, perhaps the universal female story.
The depth of Ms Ley’s failure is amplified by the success of her contemporaries elsewhere.
Last weekend, after just three months as prime minister of Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party’s Sanae Takaichi won the greatest parliamentary majority since democracy was introduced after World War II. In a country in which women do 80 per cent or more of the domestic labour and represent fewer than 10 per cent of the CEOs, her victory looks like a defining moment for sexual equality in Asia.
In Britain, the Nigerian-raised Kemi Badenoch is leading a Conservative assault on Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer so effective that a majority of Britons think he should resign.
Elsewhere in Europe, the first female Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni leads the third longest-lasting government on one of the Continent’s least-stable political systems. Donald Trump is a fan, which helps Italy navigate his unpredictable leadership.
Which points to the real reason voters turned on Ms Ley: they did not see a prime minister in her. They did not feel she could credibly articulate the views of Australians, male or female.
When is a reminder that if you slam you fist on the table, you better make it convincing. Because if you don’t, you’ve just made yourself look like a pretender.
