Is Sussan Ley facing a glass cliff?

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Ending the climate wars and moving the party back to the sensible centre.

That's the promise that the new Liberal leader Susan Lee has made.

But the challenge ahead for her is immense.

In fact, it's unthinkable how big her job is, as the party room remains deeply divided over the way forward and there are lots of grumbles about the future of the Liberal Party.

So as the party room mulls over its policies and tries to reconnect with voters, where does nuclear fit into all of that?

Welcome to Politics Now.

Hi, I'm Patricia Carvellis.

And I'm David Spears.

And David Susan Lee is now in the hot seat and it is a very hot seat, a very difficult seat.

You wonder if it's a poison chalice for whoever would take it.

She takes the role on as the Liberal leader after the party's historic election loss.

The party has been reduced to just 28 seats in the lower house and looks likely to spend quite a few years in the political wilderness unless they can pull off a miracle and, you know, there's an outside chance, but it's pretty small.

Susan Lee's promised to bring the party back to the sensible centre.

But I want to ask you this.

Does everyone want it to go back to the sensible centre?

No, they don't.

And nor within the nationals.

Yes, they'd love to win more votes and win government, but there are some, clearly, who believe that the way to do that is by maintaining Conservative policy positions and even lurching further to the right.

What the party has done here, we can come to the difficulties, and they are enormous, that Susan Lee will face, but they have opted for the female candidate, the candidate who does represent that declared effort to reflect a modern Australia, as she said, and get back to the sensible centre, as she says, where she wants to target.

that is a significant decision for the Liberal Party as a whole yes it was a tight result but the numbers are the numbers and the party has opted for that rather than the man who represented the more conservative wing of the party so that's significant this is also historic the Liberal Party what is it 80 plus year history they've never had a female leader choosing a woman is a big moment for the party, does present a first step towards winning back women who've been deserting the party over recent elections.

The policies will matter more, I would suggest.

Always.

But it's a first step and that is important.

However, you're right to say this is enormously difficult.

Not only does Susan Lee face a Labor government now in a far more commanding position than it was in its first term.

The numbers, again, tell the story there.

This is a huge majority that Anthony Albanese has.

Not only does Susan Lee face that difficulty, but also it is a deeply divided party.

The vote was very tight.

Three of those senators, two of them who we understand voted for Susan Lee, will go when the Senate changes over in July.

So those numbers could get even tighter.

And you've got the Nats who are also feeling pretty aggrieved with the Liberal Party at the moment after the defection of Jacinta Dumperjiba Price.

Some of them blame the Libs for wooing her.

They're of a mind now to kick up more dust on things like net zero, on other issues as well.

This is going to be a more difficult relationship, right, between the Libs and the Nats.

So Susan Lee's got to deal with all of that.

This is going to be tough.

Hugely tough.

So let's go to some of those policy issues.

Nuclear.

Nuclear was obviously a big policy they took to the election.

They lost the election in a pretty astonishing way.

And so everything's on the table, Susan Lee and also Ted O'Brien, her deputy, have said.

Okay, that's reasonable.

That makes sense.

You do have to review all policies.

So everyone gets that.

But I was surprised that they even said the getting to net zero by 2050 is on the table too.

Now as you mentioned the Nats want that re-looked at but really

I just I just wonder is reviewing getting to net zero by 2050 going to win you back the cities that they say they've lost?

There's a few, there's a bit of double speak going on.

You look at the seats they've lost now at successive elections, or you can go back to Tony Abbott's old seat at Warringah, Wentworth, Kuyong.

I mean the list goes on, McKellar, even Bradfield now.

I know it's tight there.

But all of these seats, do you think abandoning the net zero target by 2050 is going to help win back these urban centres where the Liberal Party's just been booted out,

is going to help win back Middle Australia, these voters in the sensible centre, as Susan Lee says.

It is very hard to see how abandoning that target is going to do that.

Now they haven't abandoned it per se, but as you say, it's part of all things now being under review.

I think they're going to have to reach a position on this relatively quickly.

The proper campaign review will probably take some time, but I think they're going to need to settle fairly quickly where they stand on net zero.

Nuclear might take a little bit longer.

I doubt they'll stick with their position of seven government-funded, taxpayer-funded nuclear power plants sprinkled around the country.

You know, most liberals I've spoken to say, no, we can't do that again.

But plenty of them still want to keep with nuclear as an option.

So they want to take the moratorium, which we have off, get rid of the ban and then let the market decide.

Here's the policy difficulty, pk how do you get to net zero right without all those nuclear power plants and just saying we'll remove the ban and someone in the private sector might build some maybe there'll be small modular reactors in 30 years time doesn't get you to net zero by 2050.

what's the other path it's the renewables path that the government's on back

storage and gas and so on but this is the path they've spent years bagging 82% renewables all these transmission lines and this is a big problem you know it's impossible to get there on that path so it's really difficult difficult for them to find a pathway that's not nuclear, but not the government's path as well to get to net zero.

There aren't too many trails that lead you to

no, that's absolutely right, which is why I suppose they are revisiting it, because without that, how do you actually even get there?

But being able to recast it is going to be, I think, incredibly difficult for them.

Now, if you look at the issue of climate change at the last election, it wasn't, I think, at the same intensity as it was at the election that Scott Morrison lost.

But it is absolutely a defining issue of our generation.

And with young voters, who they say they want to capture back, yes, you need to appeal to their economic interests.

Yes, Generation Z owns very little.

It doesn't look like they will unless you change the policy settings.

And they clearly want to do more work around that, recapturing young people.

They talk about women.

But this issue...

is kind of linked to that story.

It is.

And look, you know this, PK.

These climate wars have been fought in Australia since John Howard was here.

Susan Lee declared yesterday that the climate wars are over.

They're not.

When we're still having debates about whether to stick with net zero and still having debates about whether we get there via nuclear or renewables, it just feels like we're heading back into, for the coalition at least,

another tumultuous debate over what to do on climate and energy.

The government's big majority though, and the fact that it can do what it likes with the Greens in the Senate, as long as the Greens are on board, it can pass what it likes through the Senate.

I think we are on the path the government's laid out for the foreseeable future, certainly for the next three years.

After that, and the likelihood is they win another term again, so another six years, it gets increasingly difficult to stack up any alternative pathway.

Nuclear, push the

timeframe out further.

It just gets harder and harder to make this

a reliable pathway to get to net zero.

The job for Susan Lee, I mean, hats off to her that she even wanted the job because in all seriousness, she's been in the parliament for a long time since the Howard government.

She is, I mean, can I use the term?

I'm going to, people know that I just say what I really think.

I mean, it's a shit sandwich.

That's what she's been handed.

This is such a difficult pathway to navigate.

Although the spin of people who have supported her worth sharing is that, in fact, Angus Taylor would have had a harder time even though he's a capital C Conservative but you know he really had annoyed the gnats with this move around just into Napajimpa Price and and you know the the recruitment and then clearly that backfired it clearly backfired and I've spoken to people who say yeah it was actually instrumental in in flipping a couple of votes away from him so I'm sure there are some regrets there well I'm not sure but you'd think that there would be perhaps

I think they both would have faced a difficult task because they both have to carry part of the blame.

One was the deputy leader, one was the shadow treasurer.

After Peter Dutton, these are the two most senior people in the show.

Yet we haven't yet heard from either Susan Lee or Angus Taylor where they think they failed.

Susan Lee was asked a few times at the press conference yesterday and she spoke about messaging,

but I don't think we've heard yet her identify policy problems that the coalition had at the election.

And clearly there were policy problems.

I mean, no doubt she agrees the work from home thing was a debacle,

but she wants to wait for the proper campaign review to go through that process.

Again, I think it's going to be important to hear fairly soon from Susan Lee where they went wrong because you've got to acknowledge where you went wrong to then start rebuilding and repairing and reconnecting.

Now, this comes all at the same time as, of course, we must just reflect on, you know, this term and it's been going absolutely viral out there among actually the generations they need to win, which is the glass cliff,

which is the cousin of the glass ceiling and the idea that, you know, once a woman can only, you know, is given any role or wins any role or gets a job in, you know, it's not just in the political sphere, of course, when the troubles are there.

And there are heaps of precedents in business as well, all over the shop.

You know, I have a funny view on that.

Like, I think, yes, it's clearly a factor, but equally, you know, men would have wanted this job right now too.

Like, there is obviously a hunger for this job.

I can understand the take, though.

I mean, well, I do too.

The Liberal Party is at its lowest ebb ever, isn't it?

Yeah, and if you look at just the, if you're going to be just numeric about this, their most popular politician in Julie Bishop was overlooked.

They overlooked Julie Bishop, who was popular, and there are all sorts of reasons why they did that.

But at this point, They're at their lowest ebb.

You know, there's talk about this being an existential moment for the Liberal Party.

There's some talking about whether they split from the Nats, all of these things.

And at this very moment, they've opted for their first female leader.

So I don't think you can split the two apart.

Now, I can see why people are saying this is, you know, to use that term, it's certainly become more popular this week, the glass cliff moment.

Now, you know, Susan Lee is, I think, leaning into the fact that she is the first female leader as a first step.

She acknowledges this is significant.

But,

you know, being a Liberal, she doesn't want this to be seen as tokenistic at all and understands there's going to be far more required to win back the women who've left the party.

So that's still a wait and see.

It is.

I want to move to the government because they're in charge and they have so many numbers.

It's obscene.

It's obscene how many seats they have.

I'm being funny, just I don't think it's obscene.

They have every right to win seats.

But like in so many, over 90 seats, right?

The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister have gone off on a whirlwind trip to Jakarta.

As he promised, his first bilateral meeting would be with the Indonesian President, Praboo.

It was his first trip after he became Prime Minister originally too.

But David, it seems that the Prime Minister is now embarking on a bit of a path of fixing some unfinished business.

Yeah, I've just been putting together a column on this for the ABC side.

And I do think it's interesting.

I mean, obviously, there's been a lot of focus on the celebrations in Labor, but also some of the factional messiness that we've seen around the dumping of Ed Husick and Mark Dreyfus.

But with all of that going on, look at what Anthony Albanese has been quietly doing.

Huge victory, huge authority, he's more powerful now than ever before, king of the world across the parliament and the party.

But he's also keeping an eye on his political vulnerabilities in a way that I think shows he is more attuned to those potential weaknesses than he was three years ago when he first came in and prioritised the voice referendum, for example.

This time, I've noticed that, I mean, the trip to Jakarta is a good example.

First put a call.

What did we see during the campaign?

Criticism that he'd taken his eye off the ball with Indonesia when reports emerged of Russia wanting to base military aircraft there, you know, contested reports and so on.

But the point was Albanese wasn't paying enough attention to Indonesia, so off he goes to meet with President Probo.

He's also, with the ministerial changes this week, moved the AFP, the Federal Police, and ASIO back into home affairs.

And that follows a problem that he faced earlier in the year about this hoax caravan bomb plot where he was accused of being kept out of the loop, kept in the dark.

Now, it was a hoax plot, but again, he's moved to shift these agencies back into home affairs because of what happened with that caravan bomb plot.

Again, fixing a potential vulnerability for the government.

Even his ministerial changes, Murray Watt, a Queenslander, in to fix this problem with the environmental laws they couldn't land in the first term.

Annika Wells into communications and sport.

presumably to do something on gambling ads.

It's interesting that she's straddling both of those sporting bodies, but also the gambling issues in communication.

So I just think it's worth noting that he is trying to fix some of these problems and potential problems in a way that perhaps he wasn't three years ago.

And if he's smart, and there's all evidence that he's shown a lot of smarts recently, he looked just at his result, he will try and nail down some of these things.

quickly in the first six months of this second term when the opposition is at sixes and sevens and is not really much of a threat to them.

When, you know, business and anyone else who might get cranky, yeah, they can try what they want, but they know the truth.

They've got to work with these guys.

They've got a thumping majority.

You've got to nail stuff when you've got the political capital.

That's exactly right.

Particularly environment laws.

There's always going to be issues on both sides,

whatever you come up with here.

So you don't want to delay it too long.

I think use that political capital.

Find something that's going to work and get it through the parliament

because, yeah, I don't think the opposition are going to have much luck laying too many gloves on him in the foreseeable future.

No, I'd be surprised if they do.

You know, we could be wrong, but like, yeah, this is going to be a tough time for the opposition just to get their show together.

And I don't envy that role.

Can I say, you know, the government's getting some good news in some areas too.

Today, wages picked up a little stronger than expected, which is really great for their narrative.

and also for Australians, delivering cost of living relief.

Yeah, I think it was a 3.4% annual growth in wages up from 3.2.

So, yeah, you're right.

That goes to the labor narrative.

First order of business in that first cabinet meeting or first ministerial meeting yesterday was a submission on above inflation wage growth for the minimum wage.

And I suspect we get some interest rate cuts soon too.

So this will all help the economic narrative, the cost of living story that dominates so much of the first term.

So

much stuff going on.

What a time to be alive.

David, who have you got on Saturday?

Still working on that one.

Fair enough.

Things are moving so fast.

They are.

It's been a huge.

I think it was Annabel Crabb noted that the election itself, of course, was extraordinary, but the fallout has had more kick than a shirty mule.

She's so good.

But it's so true.

It's been such a wild couple of weeks.

It has.

A few people have said, oh, aren't you going to take time off?

Because obviously it's been, we both caned it, like we've been working for such a long period of time as politicians, anyone who does the sort of work we do.

But I'm like, this is the interesting bit, right?

This is like now we know the result.

I remember you said to me in a previous, obviously, podcast, I'm excited because all the questions are about to get answers.

And this is,

we've, all the questions we had are now answered.

So poring over those details, seeing how people behave.

The Greens have got their leadership ballot.

This is happening Thursday afternoon.

And that's still a little unclear.

It is.

I don't.

I'm not close enough to it.

Haven't made enough calls to make a call, but it seems.

They're a pretty tight shop when it comes to...

So why bother making calls?

No, you should always make calls.

But yeah, there's a lot moving and a lot more will move.

But yeah, you can see the Prime Minister.

I will say this.

You know, how he was called Airbus Elbow.

He's not worried about that right now.

No, he's gladly accepted the invitation to go to the Pope's inaugural mass.

So from Jakarta, it's off to Rome.

Look, he'll tack on, no doubt, some meetings with other leaders who are going to be there.

He mentioned the Canadian PM Mark Carney, who's similarly just had a recent win.

And maybe he meets Ursula von der Leyen from the European Union as well.

I don't know.

We'll see what other meetings he secures there, talk about EU trade and so on.

But clearly, he's also going to be personally enjoying the moment of, you know, he noted his mum brought him up Catholic and Anthony Albanese's apparently re-engaged with his Catholic faith more in recent years.

Being there at this new Pope's inaugural Mass would be a personal high point for him too, I'm sure.

Yeah, and these are the sorts of things you can do when you're not staring down campaigns saying, you're going overseas, you've got your, like, there's such a different dynamic.

Yeah.

And I find that really interesting.

All right.

David, you'll be back on Saturday with Insiders on Background with a mystery guest.

Stay tuned.

Yes, tomorrow the party room will be Mel Clark and Fran Kelly

working on a secret scroll story.

So I'll be back, of course, because I am every day with this podcast.

But send them a question to the party room at abc.net.au and they'll answer it.

See you, David.

See you, Pico.