Opposition Leader Sussan Ley wants to talk about anything but the security of her own job. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
It was the ABC’s brilliant 2015 documentary on the Rudd-Gillard years that helped to entrench a snide insider political phrase as part of the wider Australian lexicon – the term “the killing season”.
The compelling three-part television series of that same name analysed Labor’s turbulent years leading the country between 2007 and 2013 while struggling with gargantuan levels of internal party division.
In the series, political players revealed the term that refers to a specific time in the parliamentary calendar, one that can apply to both sides of politics.
As the Federal Parliament draws closer to either the mid-year or the Christmas recesses, political antics and clandestine manoeuvrings often ramp up.
There is one more full sitting week left for parliament this year – it’s next week.
The killing season is upon us.
Leaders don’t always get toppled in the lead-up to Christmas, but talk of challenges and coups invariably fire up at this time of year, especially when polling numbers aren’t being too favourable for a particular party.
It’s Liberal leader Sussan Ley who now finds herself the focus of much of that talk, trying to cling onto her job in the face of rising factional unrest, runaway egos, and a bolstered conservative push in her party.
And it’s really all the media wants to talk to her about right now.
The Opposition Leader is doing the rounds spruiking the Coalition’s new (old) energy policy and trying to explain why it can no longer support the net zero carbon emissions by 2050 target the party’s former leader, Scott Morrison, committed the country to while he was Prime Minister in 2021.
She is also dangling the party’s incoming migration policy that promises to be as hardline an approach as the Coalition’s take on the environment.
Everything has to do with affordability – that’s the Opposition Leader’s key message.
But the main topic her interviewers want to discuss right now is the security of her leadership.
Take Monday (17 November) night’s 7.30 program for example, in which Sarah Ferguson (coincidentally the same interviewer from the ABC’s Killing Season documentary) kept bringing Ms Ley back to the question of her leadership.
“Are you prepared to admit the obvious, which is that Andrew Hastie is making a move on the leadership?” Ferguson asks Ley.
“The question is, is it a short-term move or a long-term move?”
The Opposition Leader tries to dismiss the talk as “speculation about the commentary and various opinions” while trying to drag the conversation back to, you guessed it, “affordability”.
But the interviewer is having none of it.
“I will come to that in a moment,” Ferguson interrupts.
“… can you guarantee to voters that the party will keep its first female leader until the next election?”
Ley answers: “Absolutely. I am the leader and was elected six months ago. We’ve been working on policy ever since.
“I’ve talked about several critical areas, including managing the budget responsibly, delivering personal income tax cuts, fixing up industrial relations, which is a huge drag on productivity in this country, keeping communities safe …”
The interviewer interrupts again: “Let me just come back to this. I asked you about what’s going on inside the party. We want to understand what it is that Andrew Hastie is doing,” she says.
“We want to understand the pictures that we saw of that large group of people opposed to you walking out of the party room previously.
“Do you really believe that voters don’t have a right to know what’s going on inside the party about the political rancour inside the Liberal Party that led to this radical change of policy?”
And so it went – the interviewer wanting to know about the threat to the Liberal Party leadership, and the interviewee trying desperately to talk about anything but.
It wasn’t just one media appearance where this was the case. It’s pretty much the only topic the media cares about right now.
Here’s another exchange from Monday, this one with Natarsha Belling on The Briefing podcast.
Interviewer: “How hard, though, is it to lead the Liberal Party right now? There is a lot of speculation, I’m going to be brutally honest here, that you’re being knifed in your own back from within your own party.
“We know this happened with the Labor Government. How does that feel? How can you possibly unite a divided party or put a fight up to the current government when you’re being knifed by your own colleagues?”
Later in the same interview: “Do you feel like you’re going to get pushed off a glass cliff?”
These are the questions Ms Ley can expect to be confronted with right up until parliament rises for the year or she is challenged for the leadership (whichever comes first).
It is evident that she is moving the Coalition further to the right than she might really want to, in order to appease the more conservative elements within the party.
That tactic didn’t work for Malcolm Turnbull. The right got rid of him anyway.
Yes, the killing season is here. Pass the popcorn.
