LATIKA M BOURKE: Endorsing a female leader is simply not enough for the ailing Liberal Party

Sussan Ley has one task, and simply being the Liberal Party’s first woman leader is not it.

She needs to drastically reform the party, redirect its policy focus and deliver representatives that reflect the country.

Being competitive by the next election is not just a sound byte to deliver up with a tone of confected gravitas.

It is a herculean task. And Sussan Ley’s first outing as Liberal Party leader gave no indication that she is up to the job.

After prevailing over Angus Taylor, an equally mediocre option, by a vote of 29-25, she fronted the media.

She promised to consult and listen about how to chart the way forward for the shattered party.

But she came with little detail other than to introduce herself to the public.

“I want to talk a little bit about me,” Ms Ley said. “It’s a story about a mum and a family, and it is a modern Australian story.

“When I came to this country as a young girl from a cold English boarding school in my teenage years, I stepped out of the aeroplane at Brisbane Airport and I looked at this brilliant blue sky and I knew that I’d come to the best country on Earth.

“I knew that Australia was a place where I could dream my biggest dreams — and I have.”

She said one of those dreams achieved was becoming a pilot. She then reminisced about the wisdom she found in the shearing sheds of Western Queensland, noting their occupants were not always amongst the best educated.

“I learnt the value of a hard day’s work in the hot sun,” she said.

“I learnt the real value of — and the dignity of manual labour.

“And I always said there was no better wisdom than the wisdom of the shearers in their singlets sitting at the huts at the end of a hard, hard day.”

She later professed to not having a political idol but drawing inspiration from the “invisible Australians” who walk into electorate offices seeking help.

It was as tone deaf as it was troubling. This is not the time for self-indulgent backstories. This is the time for revolution, for an acknowledgement that there are no forgotten, invisible, quiet Australians, but those who looked and listened and did not vote Liberal.

If Labor’s landslide displays anything about these mythical Australians, it is that they are ignored — ignored by a Liberal party that has prioritised and indulged personal political ambition and ideology over the centre.

Ms Ley’s promises were mostly to the partyroom, no captain’s calls, a guarantee to consult and appear at press conferences in Canberra.

These were sledges at former leader Peter Dutton and his command and control style as well as his refusal to submit himself to scrutiny from the press gallery.

But they exposed the central problem with the Liberals in their moribund leadership fight — they are still choosing for and thinking about themselves.

And they have chosen a leader who struggles to stand by many of her previously held positions. Not a moderate, nor a conservative, it has been difficult to pinpoint her values.

The one-time supporter of banning live exports no longer thinks the animal cruelty concerns she once highlighted in the industry warrant its banning.

She could not commit to nuclear energy, or at the very least the lifting the moratorium on its development in Australia.

In 2008 she said she supported Palestinian statehood: “In part out of knowledge that the victors in World War II, including Australia, wrote a ‘homeland’ cheque to cover the sins of the holocaust and centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe, but it was the Palestinians who had to cash it.”

But on Tuesday she retreated from that position citing a trip to Israel with her Jewish colleague Julian Leeser and “the changed geopolitical circumstances of the Abraham Accords with Israel reaching out for peace to Saudi, to Morocco.”

The Trump-negotiated Abraham Accords were between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and later Morocco.

As someone who wanted to be foreign affairs minister and Mr Dutton’s spokeswoman for the portfolio, she would have been aware that the very prospect of Saudi normalising ties with Israel was speculated to be partly behind Hamas’ October 7 attack on the Jewish state, and whatever progress was being made remains on ice.

To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the lady is for turning!

While it will be badged as “pragmatic,” this conviction-less approach from the new leader doesn’t bode well for the enormity of what’s required to make the Liberals truly viable within one, or more likely, two terms.

The party needs a leader who can transform it. That figure must bring clout, authority and drive change with dogged determination in the way David Cameron completely remade the Tories in the UK from the “Nasty Party” into a movement that delivered Britain its second and third woman prime minister, first Hindu prime minister and woman black leader.

And they must have an agenda aimed at achieving those results, now.

It was telling that the first note that went to journalists after Sussan Ley’s victory, was to clarify that Sussan Ley’s last name is pronounced “Lee”, as opposed to “lay.”

That so little is known about the former deputy leader, who has been in Federal politics for a quarter of a century, should be of concern, particularly given that if she survives to fight the 2028 election, she will be older than John Howard was at the time of his last win in 2004.

Understandably, the focus is on the fact that the Liberals have elected their first woman leader.

But for the sisterhood, this might feel a pyrrhic victory. The time to send a signal by smashing the party’s self-constructed glass ceiling was a decade ago.

Today, it feels like Sussan Ley is not so much obliterating a glass ceiling but taking a giant leap off the glass cliff and one that is fuelled by personal ambition rather than any hunger to revive the centre-Right.

It is welcome that what remains of the Liberal Party finally found it within themselves to endorse a woman. But this is no longer enough or even the start of its problems.

The party must represent Australia’s modern face — it will die otherwise.

But it must first and foremost revolutionise how the party operates to deliver policies and candidates that propose solutions to today’s problems. It doesn’t take a woman to do that, it takes a reformer. Just look at David Cameron.

And unless Sussan Ley shows she is capable of this undertaking, she will be remembered as a placeholder rather than the woman who saved the party.