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Australia’s Liberal party has elected its first female leader after suffering a crushing defeat in nationwide elections this month that returned Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to power and wiped out the country’s opposition.
Sussan Ley, who was deputy leader of Australia’s 80-year-old centre-right party, won a slim majority in a closed-door MPs’ vote in Canberra on Tuesday.
She defeated Angus Taylor, the party’s shadow Treasurer and a former McKinsey consultant long tipped as a potential leader from its rightwing flank.
The vote came as Labor’s new cabinet was sworn in on Tuesday, following a sweeping victory that rocked Australia’s political landscape and handed Albanese the first back-to-back win for a prime minister in more than 20 years.
It also set off a fractious battle between the moderate and rightwing factions of the Liberal party, which had been led into the polls by Peter Dutton, a hardline conservative and former Queensland policeman.
But Dutton’s “anti-woke” stance — as well as his policies aimed at cutting the public sector workforce — drew damaging comparisons with US President Donald Trump, resulting in the Liberals’ worst-ever loss.
Labor won 94 of the 150 lower house seats, while Dutton lost in his own electorate and the Liberal party was all but erased from Australia’s cities.
“We have to meet modern Australia where they are,” Ley said on Tuesday, acknowledging the party’s “poor result” in the election. She said the Liberal party would review its energy policies and seek to attract more female voters and candidates.
Aaron Violi, MP for the seat of Casey, outside Melbourne, said unity was paramount for the Liberals to return to the electoral fold. “It’s the only way we can survive,” he said.
One Liberal MP, who preferred to remain unnamed, said Ley would need to “spill some blood”, calling for an overhaul of the party’s structure, brand and candidate selection and a review of its relationship with its coalition partner, the rural National party.
“The size of the loss is a bit of an opportunity. We need to be ruthless,” the person said.
Ley, 63, was born in Nigeria and raised in the Middle East due to her father’s work for British intelligence before the family moved to Australia.
She was first elected in 2001 for the rural New South Wales seat of Farrer, which covers more than 126,000 sq km. Previously, she had worked as a sheepshearing station cook, stock-mustering pilot and air traffic controller.
She held senior ministerial positions under former Liberal prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, but stepped down as health minister in 2017 over an expenses scandal.
This year, she was criticised by Albanese over a speech on Australia Day in which she praised billionaire Elon Musk’s plans to colonise Mars by likening it to the white settlement of Australia — a contentious episode in the country’s history.
Alexander Downer, a former Liberal leader, said that it was a “big ask” for Ley to revive the party, given her closeness to the 2025 campaign as deputy leader. But he noted that she still had a fairly limited public profile.
“I don’t think the public knows who she is yet, [though] she’s been deputy leader of the party for three years,” he said.
