Australia’s main opposition party ousts leader Sussan Ley as polls drop

SYDNEY – Australia’s main opposition party voted to appoint former defence spokesman Angus Taylor as its new leader, dumping Ms Sussan Ley just nine months after the Liberal party’s electoral rout and following further sharp declines in opinion polls.

Liberal Party lawmakers in Canberra elected Mr Taylor as their new leader on Feb 13 by a vote of 34-17, according to Mr Aaron Violi, the chief whip.

The Liberal Party is the senior partner in the centre-right coalition, making its leader the head of the opposition.

The other member is the rural-based National party.

Since the ruling

Labor party’s sweeping re-election victory last May

, the centre-right opposition has been dogged by internal dissent, with the coalition collapsing and reforming twice and its support falling below that of the insurgent, hard-right One Nation Party. 

“We are sitting at a crossroads, and we can’t sit idly by while we see our support erode,” Senator Jane Hume, who was elected deputy leader of the Liberals, said ahead of the ballot. “This government is not doing a good job. Its support isn’t increasing.” 

She said Australians are feeling “rightly aggrieved, but they’re not seeing an alternative from a Liberal opposition”. “We need to be able to hold the government to account, but we also need to be able to provide a credible alternative to voters at the next election.”

Ms Hume was elected deputy leader after she defeated Mr Ted O’Brien, who served as Ms Ley’s No. 2.

Mr Taylor, 59, is a former consultant at McKinsey & Company and a Rhodes scholar with degrees in economics and law – although economics was his preferred pursuit.

He is generally viewed as supporting conventional centre-right economic policies of smaller government and lower taxes.

Still, he has also been subject to ridicule in the past.

In 2019, Mr Taylor was the talk of social media after he replied to his own Facebook post about his efforts to increase carparks at a train station in his electorate.

“Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus,” he wrote from his MP Facebook account on his own post.

“Well done Angus” subsequently went viral in Australia. BLOOMBERG