Photo by Juan Rojas on Unsplash
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
With this week's Newspoll recording the Coalition's lowest ever primary support at just 24 per cent, and Sussan Ley's net approval at minus 33 per cent, political drama is in the air.
Canberra's "killing season" approaches. That time when opposition MPs slouch dejectedly through the final parliamentary days of the year and conspire in corridors and over restaurant tables about what to do.
Over the years, this closing window for a spill has overwhelmed leaders on both sides - Kim Beazley in 2006, as Labor MPs fretted about a potential fifth straight loss to John Howard, and Malcolm Turnbull in 2009, defenestrated by a climate-sceptical Tony Abbott.
A common theme is a leader trying to connect with the middle mass of Australian voters, only to be replaced by a muscular foe promising to sharpen the contest and take the fight up to the PM. Sound familiar?
Ley was never going to be in a strong position because opposition leaders rarely are. But after an epic thrashing like the one meted out in May, her triple challenge of managing a reactionary Coalition, healing her own bruised party and also forcing it to confront its crisis in the cities, is probably not possible.
It didn't help that she secured the leadership by just four party room votes against the right faction's Angus Taylor.
Nor that her colleagues are increasingly beguiled by unapologetic populists like Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, and Nigel Farage.
Nor even that Ley is already an aberration anyway - the first woman to lead a party that has shown itself to be doctrinally hostile to addressing any gender disparity.
To survive, she must overcome these deficits and out-point alpha males such as Taylor and Andrew Hastie who see her as a placeholder and their own elevation as a birthright.
Let's be blunt: Australia's political class - media included - struggles to accept that the two descriptors, "woman" and "leader", can peacefully co-exist. This is a function born of both conscious and unconscious bias. Like an overactive immune system, the political machine attacks women who lead with greater zeal. Examples stretch right back to Joan Kirner in Victoria, through to Julia Gillard, and now to Ley.
Invariably this pressure brings overreaches such as calling for Kevin Rudd's removal from Washington, and attacking the PM's choice of T-shirt.
Just as invariably, such errors prompt beard-stroking vindication from critics of "her" judgement.
This whole sclerotic process relieves the wise men from the mental flexibility required to absorb Ley's central assessment - facts like that there are more Labor women in the House of Reps than there are Coalition MPs. That the Coalition has lost 33 seats over the last two elections and eight senators. And that the Liberal Party holds just two of 43 inner metro seats and just seven of 45 suburban seats.
One need only to look at the polls, recall the election result, examine where the Liberal Party's metropolitan base has gone, to see the Liberal Party is at a crossroads.
While federal Liberals have failed to imbibe the precarity of their position, salivating Nationals have not hesitated, seizing on the moment to become functionally the senior partner. Thus, the Liberals' eventual opposition to the Voice referendum was effectively decided by the Nationals. Ditto Liberal support for unpopular nuclear energy, and now the party's looming backflip on net-zero by 2050.
Labor has long despised the Greens, complaining that the minor party could construct policies which did not need to balance other interests across the economy and society.
Liberals are slow to twig that the Nats are doing the same to them, forcing them into positions that threaten no regional seats but cause electoral carnage in the cities.
Abandoning net-zero by 2050 would be another Barnaby-shaped thumb in the eye of middle-Australia.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.