The Stakes of a Ley Victory – What a Coalition Government Would Mean for Australia

Part 4:

Sussan Ley’s Opposition isn’t just fighting to win – it’s fighting to reshape Australia. From climate backsliding to a new era of culture wars, a Ley-led government would roll back progress on every front. Here’s what’s at stake in 2026 – and why Labor’s defeat in the next election, 20 May 2028 at the latest, would be a disaster for the country.

Sussan Ley’s Opposition isn’t just fighting to beat Labor; it’s fighting to reshape Australia while doing a little DIY open-heart surgery on itself during the odd lull in culture-warring. From climate backsliding to the revival of culture wars, a Ley government would roll back everything we might kid ourselves we have gained, to gloss over the price-gouging, wage thieving and years shovelling ever bigger buckets of money from the poor up to the wealthy that we fondly call social and political progress.

Because it isn’t overt slavery. Or it only happens to people who are here on working holidays.

The stakes at the 2025 election could not be clearer: a choice between a future that confronts crisis and one that retreats into the misty-eyed myths of a Ming Dynasty past where, in retirement, “Pig-Iron Bob”, Robert Menzies would have his driver, Peter Pearson, chauffeur the great man in his Bentley, wrapped in a blanket, right up the special-built ramp to a platform, that gave him a view of the whole ground at Princes Park, so that he could toot Carlton goals on the horn of his Bentley. That’s what you call a Liberal.

Only blokes, of course, in those halcyon days. Ladies, please bring a plate.

On climate, the danger is beyond crisis-level. A Ley government would ditch even the absurdly inadequate targets of today and return the state to its official worship of mineral extraction, repackaging the “gas-led recovery” as economic necessity and cursing “climate activism” as woke, cultural elitism.

The re-emergence of coal and gas as patriotic totems would leave Australia once again a pariah at international forums and prey to trade sanctions from markets sold on decarbonisation. Ley would not merely slow the transition; she would mock it, rewarding the polluters whose influence over her party has never waned. Her performance during the so-called “war on utes” is the clearest signal that under a Ley government, climate policy would again be reduced to culture-war theatre.

Housing offers less hope. The Coalition under Ley would dress its inertia in the familiar language of “cutting red tape” and “restoring market confidence,” while dismantling Labor’s limited investment programs in favour of tax concessions for rack-renting investors, spivs and developers. Migrants and planning laws? Always handy scapegoats, but the underlying crisis, rocketing rents, increasingly insecure work and stagnant wages; would be left to the invisible fist of market forces.

Lest we forget, under the previous Coalition government, homelessness grew by a fifth and rental stress reached record highs, while one in three low-income households spent over half their dosh on rent. Ley would not build homes; she would simply re-open the old blame file.

The picture darkens further should do-gooders come to snivel about welfare. The Coalition has long treated those who need social support not as citizens but as con-artists and work-shy bludgers. Orwellian phrases, “social reciprocity”, “mutual interdependence” and “resilience-building” are being kept warm in departmental hard drives, as we speak, all cued up to torment the poor.

That Indue cashless debit card, which does have true-blue Liberal Party fiscal network affiliations, will be such a boon to pensioners and all others’ helplessly improvident, bone idle and thriftless.

Naturally, Robodebt would be reborn, this time as “enhanced, integrity protection” Cuts to JobSeeker would motivate the work-shy, new compliance regimes as “mutual obligation.” What Ley calls discipline is, of course, sadistic cruelty, a Work House era legacy, that conflates poverty with moral failure. Scott Morrison is its biggest convert. That Ley has revived the old language of “welfare dependency” confirms how little her party has learned from one of the darkest chapters in recent administrative history.

Morrison who may be available to consult as his packed AUKUS boondoggle or Bunnings Influencer schedule permits, will advise the administration of Robodebt 2.0, given his special insights gained in security and random very early morning roundups of illegals as “tough cop on the beat” at Border Force.​

Integrity in government would become even more oxymoronic. And more visible. Ley owes her political survival to a party that perfected the dark arts of donor influence, colour-coded spreadsheets and insider privilege. Gun clubs, sports rorts and car parks would all be in the money again.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission would not long survive intact under a Ley regime; funding cuts, procedural interference, and bureaucratic attrition, (ABC or CSIRO-style) would achieve where open hostility, sabotage and ineptitude fail. The revolving door between ministerial office and lucrative lobbying would spin unchecked. Ley’s own probity on ministerial travel remains the gold standard; a standing reminder of her party’s contempt for accountability.​

If politics is downstream from culture, then culture is where Ley’s project would find its true momentum. Her party thrives on division, moral panic and phobia. Expect renewed assaults on the rights of trans people, a revival of the “parents’ rights” agenda designed to police classrooms and teachers, and endless dog-whistling about migration and “values.” The rhetoric would be packaged as common sense and ordinary decency, but the purpose is the same: to divide the country and to distract from the absence of credible economic reform and all-pervasive corruption.​

Susan Ley’s debut will be doubly difficult. She is stepping into a leadership that is already half-written (or half-erased) by others, and none of them particularly interested in the future she claims to offer. The Coalition agreement, she inherits, is less a partnership than an armed truce, with the Nationals under David Littleproud openly dictating the terms of climate and energy policy.

When the junior partner can casually walk away from net zero and force the Liberals to follow, the fiction that Ley is in command becomes impossible to sustain. Her first months as Opposition Leader have been consumed by internal firefighting, not policy renewal, and that will only intensify as figures such as Barnaby Joyce peel off and cultural traitor, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price positions herself as the standard-bearer for a harder, angrier, meaner, whiter right.​

It is into this black hole of fragmentation that Ley is supposed to project authority and reform. We wish her good luck. A party that stank in the nostrils of voters only three years ago now expects a young, untested leader to make it palatable to the very people who have already walked out on it.

The 2022 election was not a narrow aberration; it was a structural deficit warning with bells and sirens. Affluent inner-city electorates, highly educated and politically engaged, turned their backs on the Liberal brand and either installed teal independents or shifted to Labor and the Greens. The wave was led by women, and not just as candidates.

Analyses of the vote show that tertiary-educated women in wealthier suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne abandoned the Liberals in large numbers and have shown no inclination to return. For these voters, climate denial, integrity scandals and culture-war theatrics are not regrettable excesses; they are disqualifying.​ As Frydenberg’s idol, Margaret Thatcher almost said, the women are not for turning.

And yes. He’ll be back in black. Expect Frydenberg to score a safe seat somewhere. Somewhere out there on Struggle Street lurks a baron as needy as Gerry Harvey and Josh will have billions to give away again.

Of course, Frydenberg sees himself as leader. But Ley’s problem is that she is being asked to win back an electorate her party no longer understands and, in truth, no longer much likes. The old Morrison fantasy that the Liberals could afford to lose “doctor’s wives” in the leafy suburbs because they had locked up the tradie vote in the outer rings was exposed as just that – a fantasy. The average electrician or carpenter leasing a BYD through a tax concession is not a closet Liberal waiting to be liberated by income tax cuts; he or she is still anchored in family and community voting traditions, more likely to drift toward Labor, One Nation or disillusioned abstention than to embrace a party visibly contemptuous of workers’ rights.

The Coalition has already scraped the bottom of the barrel on tax giveaways. With Labor complicit in entrenching Stage 3, the room for fresh bribery is gone and austerity looms in its place. Austerity is always a hard nag to ride to victory in any democracy, let alone one that has just lived through a pandemic and a cost-of-living squeeze.

Compounding all this is the culture of the party she leads. The Liberal Party Room remains, in essence, a boys’ club that has never reconciled itself to the idea of women as equals rather than exceptions. For decades, Liberals have resisted gender quotas with the airy claim that preselection must be “on merit,” yet the practical result of this supposed principle has been a party room heavily male, increasingly hard-right, and, by its own post-mortems, light on talent.

When your public face after the 2022 disaster is a shrinking cadre of men who demolished their own heartland and then blamed everyone but themselves, “merit” begins to sound like a club rule rather than a standard.

Ley’s elevation in that context looks less like a feminist breakthrough and more like a tactical concession: she is the nightwatchman sent to the crease after the senior batsmen have edged one too many to slip. She is tolerated so long as she tends the inheritance; any genuine attempt to change the culture that produced the teal revolt; on gender, on climate, on integrity, will likely be resisted by the very men who now claim to be her strongest supporters.

Economically, Ley’s program offers a retread of the familiar trickle-down fantasia. Tax cuts for the wealthy would be framed as productivity reform; the suppression of wages as fiscal responsibility. Public assets; from Medicare administration to the ABC; would once again be targeted for “efficiency reform.” Keep them lean and mean, and just ripe for privatisation.

Under the last Coalition government, wage growth languished even as executive pay exploded. No reason to believe that Ley’s stewardship would alter that arithmetic; the Coalition’s economic imagination begins and ends with the notion that prosperity flows downward from the top.

The hazards are not confined to the domestic front. Australia’s next Prime Minister will inherit a world edging toward confrontation. The strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific is shifting, partly under the weight of Donald Trump’s ruinous legacy; a legacy that emboldened Pentagon hawks to inflame a phony war narrative around China and to set the stage for a possible showdown over Taiwan.

In the United States itself, as historian and Financial Review columnist Professor James Curran warns, a new administration may tilt sharply toward isolationism, leaving allies like Australia to navigate without a map. In such an environment, the cost of inexperience could be catastrophic. Ley has shown no grasp of the subtleties of alliance management, preferring the optics of deference to Washington over the hard work of regional diplomacy.

Surrounded by old-guard defence hawks, she would mistake obedience for strength, reducing Australia’s foreign policy to a subset of American domestic politics. In a time of volatile superpower rivalry, such dependency is not just reckless – it is dangerous.

Put together, the picture is more than just a bit crook. On climate, inequality, democracy, and foreign policy, a Ley victory would not merely halt progress; it would unwind it. Australia would become a pariah on climate, a laggard on social equity, and a pawn in the games of larger powers. The 2025 election was not simply another contest of parties; it was a reckoning with who we are and how we mean to live in a precarious world. A Ley government would drag us backward, reviving the insecurities and divisions that once defined us. The choice now is stark: a potentially post Albo government that might yet be helped to remember it promised to fight for the future and look after the poor or one that clings to the past and the lunatic fantasies of trickle-down, immiseration of the average punter and affordable nuclear power.

The time to act is now. We have read the tea-leaves. Spread the word.

This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES

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