Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Each leadership meltdown is unique, but they all heave with the same hypocrisies, deceits and roiling ambition.
Insurgents feign reluctance, motivated, they insist, by principle, honour, and selflessness.
In a cruel game where decency and logic are inverted, the wrecker preens as the builder.
The besieged leader to whom loyalty was owed right up until it evaporated en masse, transitions, lickety-split, from flawless to fatally flawed - from being the answer to being the problem.
Angus Taylor's challenge exhibits these attributes but seems even emptier than most.
His risibly drawn-out siege of the first woman in the role, has had to be slow because it always lacked evidence. Manufacturing dysfunction around Sussan Ley's authority was both its method and its justification. Speculation set the necessary pre-conditions for legitimising her removal. The slow-burn eroded the party's standing and suited Taylor's supine disposition.
Crucially, there is no egregious error of fact or judgement that Ley has committed.
Yes, she went in hard after Bondi, shamelessly politicising a national emergency, but the hardliners barracked along, delighting in the errors and overreaches it drew from the Prime Minister.
Beyond that, impatient conservatives consistently secured what they wanted.
She conceded to right-wing demands to abandon Scott Morrison's net-zero by 2050 pledge, and to retaining the right's fringe obsession on nuclear energy.
She accepted the madness of not seeking Labor-style quotas for installing female candidates in winnable seats despite the Liberal Party's dismal holding of just six female MPs in the current Parliament.
In short, conservatives forced Ley into compromises and then claimed her leadership was to blame for the unpopularity of a party dogmatically addicted to "values" that metropolitan voters had bluntly rejected in 2025.
And for what in the end? In an ethereal resignation press conference on Wednesday evening, Taylor rolled out boilerplate bromides about falling living standards, Liberal values, and the loss of the Australian way of life under Labor.
Reporters were left to conclude that Ley had betrayed these or pursued other tangents. Except that she hadn't.
Nobody pressed Taylor for instances of her wrong turns as measured against his assertions.
A key lament - that the Liberal Party is at its lowest ebb since its creation in 1944 - is concerning. But it may be more attributable to the party's feckless surrender to the Nationals, its anti-immigration signalling in the last election, and its under-representation of women. If so, dumping Ley for the Liberal bloke from central casting is serious error.
As NSW Liberal Party Administrative Committee member and barrister, Jane Buncle, wrote in the Nine papers last year, "a new leader won't fix a party that has forgotten what it stands for. The problem is the horse, not the jockey."
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.