Photo by Vek Labs on Unsplash
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Political commentators are quick to say politicians stand for nothing if they choose career advancement above conscience or the national interest.
Labor's cowardice against gambling advertisers comes to mind here - a dishonourable surrender to big money and powerful media.
But these same commentators - this one included - are equally critical when political leaders hold fast to policies that are out of sync with the electorate.
Astonishingly, Sussan Ley has managed to adopt the two approaches simultaneously - standing for something and then standing for nothing, simply to retain her party's leadership.
Perhaps this is a reminder that in politics, principles invariably run into other forces, such as bone-headed dogma and insurmountable numbers.
In any event, the incoherent formula to which the Liberals' first female leader is now wedded is hardly a winning one. It is barely explainable.
Consider it. The Libs are now dead against net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, but they remain aligned to the Paris agreement which provides the international benchmarking mechanism for the 2050 target?
Also, net-zero by 2050 - the goal Liberals took to the last two elections - is now a handbrake on the country, they insist, whereas, achieving it anyway, would be "welcomed". Confused?
Puzzled onlookers ask basic questions about modelling and costing and timelines. "Can you explain how living standards will be better with a hotter planet and the economic uncertainty of these policies and these culture wars?" asked Shaun Carter on Twitter.
"Can you explain how power prices will be cheaper under your policies when coal and gas are more expensive than renewables and nuclear is 20-30 years away?"
Good questions, right? Especially as the July 2025 CSIRO GenCost report found renewables remain the lowest-cost new-build electricity generation. It also concluded that nuclear small modular reactors (SMRs) are currently the most costly.
It all seems crazy-brave against the inconvenient trifecta of (a) planetary physics, (b) private investment shifting from fossil fuels towards renewables, and (c) community opinion.
But hey, this is conservative politics, a world where Ley's capitulation to the forces of politicised nostalgia follows its own bespoke rationale.
To the rest of us, abandoning Scott Morrison's pragmatic accommodation simply guarantees that Ley will never be prime minister. This, while doing nothing to vouchsafe her leadership beyond, say, February.
That is when her colleagues will schlepp back into Canberra for 2026, confronting afresh the stark reality of several more years in the doldrums.
They can hardly complain, though. The Coalition is not being led by the leader it selected six months ago, but by the right-wing colleagues she defeated.
The phalanx of smiling hardliners filmed marching into the party room to pull her into line was a visual demonstration of this silent coup.
Unwilling to risk losing the leadership on principle, Ley surrendered it anyway, merely retaining the title.
You might ask what is their golden strategy, having successfully seen off her stated plan to take the party back to the middle?
Staggeringly, it amounts to little more than dusting off Tony Abbott's colourful "wrecking ball" and "python squeeze" rhetoric while reducing the whole climate change/emissions reduction debate down to the new-old pressure on the hip pocket. Visionary stuff.
Abbott, you will recall, believed climate change was "crap" and committed himself to "axe the (carbon) tax" to save households.
It worked because Labor collapsed in on itself, and energy costs soared. Perhaps the economy will tank this time too, and such messages will again be cogent? It is possible.
But a lot of water has flowed under the bridge - and over it - since 2010-2013. Back then, there were no "teal" MPs sitting in the most affluent Liberal seats in the land - the former sinecures of PMs like Robert Menzies, Malcolm Turnbull and Abbott and Coalition treasurers such as Josh Frydenberg and Joe Hockey.
Plus, a lot of new voters have flooded the electoral base since then, bringing vast numbers of Gen Y and Zers into the electoral calculus. For them, climate change is not debatable.
Liberals used to proudly represent such people - educated professionals on better-than-average incomes.
Now it seems to push them and their education away in favour of a shouty belligerent fringe who watch Sky after dark and think the biggest problem facing the world is wokeism.
Things weren't always so anti-intellectual. Adelaide Cuneo is vice-president of the NSW Liberal Women's Council. In a powerful opinion piece midweek, she reminded her party it could only succeed if it "chooses to lead, not shrink".
"John Howard introduced Australia's first renewable energy target, heritage-listed the Great Barrier Reef, and went to the 2007 election promising a carbon-trading scheme," she wrote in the Nine papers.
"We were part of the global solution, not a barrier to it. Today, that legacy feels distant."
It sure does. Labor can't quite believe it's happening.
"This year saw the Coalition's worst defeat since 1943. So what did it do? It retained its hated nuclear policy, it rejected quotas to support more female MPs. It abandoned climate targets," wrote the veteran strategist Bruce Hawker.
If there is a path forward for Ley, it does not involve defiantly doubling down on failure.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.