No, Sussan Ley is Not a Moderate

Just because the Libs have put someone who can convincingly pull off a human-looking smile at the head of their party, doesn’t mean they’ve changed at all.

You might’ve heard that Sussan Ley has taken over as leader of the Liberal Party. If you know who Sussan is (which is not a given), you might even think “ah, the Libs have learned their lesson from their shellacking on election night and have finally had a ‘come to Jesus moment’ and chosen the path of sanity.” You might think that because… well, that’s what everyone’s been saying. She’s a moderate female, lady! Man, this is a new Coalition for the 20th century, maybe even ready for second-wave feminism!

Addressing the country as Liberal leader for the first time, Ms Ley said she planned to "do things differently" and shepherd in a "fresh approach" after the Coalition's ruinous election loss earlier this month.

Of course, as all the focus seems to be on the ‘history-making’ aspect of her ascent to the leadership, there appears to be little discussion on the fact that, on substance, there’s less daylight between Sussan Ley and Peter Dutton than two teenagers slow dancing at the Bluelight Disco. Remember those? Simpler times.

So, let's do what all the actual journalists should be doing and dig into the voting record to see how much difference there is between the supposedly "moderate" Ley and the hyper-conservative Dark Lord Dutton we just defenestrated (Spoiler alert: almost none).

Voting Record

Let’s get this out of the way - regarding her voting record, Sussan Ley has voted in lock step with Peter Dutton 99.5% of the time. There are quite literally only 13 instances out of the 2,660 times they have voted where they weren’t in perfect sync - you can literally count on three hands how many times it’s ever happened (borrow a friend’s hand if you don’t have three).

Ley took slightly different, less batshit conservative positions on particular bills on abortion drug access, civil unions, stem cell research and reproductive bodily autonomy - that’s it.

With that last one about reproductive bodily autonomy, it’s not like she’s a pro-abortion revolutionary, protesting the Capitol, it’s only that she ‘generally’ voted against it whilst Dutton ‘consistently’ voted against it. Which means there was one instance where they disagreed - here’s the bill, it was in 2006:

So think about every other dogshit Liberal bill that you’ve ever heard of (voting against the Paris Climate Accord, for decreasing welfare payments, for increasing indexation on HELP debts, against net zero emissions by 2050, for privatising government services, for reducing the corporate tax rate, against reducing tax on the lowest income bracket, against marriage equality etc, etc, etc). You can be sure that Sussan Ley, a totally real moderate, voted against the public interest with Peter Dutton on it: Every. Single. Time.

Adani

Let's not forget - as environment minister, she’s also the one who approved the infamous Adani mine, the locus of a multi-year national protest and ecological shitstorm, not to mention the carbon dioxide it releases is the equivalent of the annual emissions of several countries. She did that; nobody made her do it. Scott Morrison wasn’t hiding in a bush, secretly pulling the strings from his covert super ministry. She saw the popular movement against it, the lack of private sector investment (due to the project being politically toxic), and the corruption of the Adani family, and she chose to do it anyway.

Conscience Votes

The Liberal Party allows its members to undertake ‘conscience votes’ on matters of ethical concern. There are not the kind of Fatima Paymen-esque consequences for speaking or voting out of step with the party, as there are with Labor. So, we have to deduce from this that Ley has chosen to vote this way her entire career, not because she’s being forced to by the Liberal Party Whip, but simply because she wants to; it’s what she genuinely believes.

Plausible Deniability? (No)

If we were to try to embody the pinnacle of Christlike generosity, one could make the argument that Ley, as a frontbencher, was ‘just following orders’ in the past, and now that she’s the head of the party, perhaps her priorities will be different. Perhaps because of her gender (for some reason) and her softer language, we’ll see a wholesale reshaping of the Liberal Party from soup to nuts. But I mean, man, you’re going out of your way there to sell the dream. It’s almost as delusional as James McGrath urging us to increasingly desperately wait for the pre-polls to come in and save the day on election night. Legend has it he’s still waiting for those pre-polls.

For my money, if you had to find a person who was going to continue the exact same trajectory that the Liberal Party has been on since the Howard years, but do so with a slightly less creepy smile, then you couldn't do better than Sussan Ley. Just because she doesn't say things like she'd refuse to stand in front of an Indigenous Flag or that she kinda ‘gets’ Welcome to Country Acknowledgements, doesn’t mean she’s the Hero of the Soviet Union that people seem to be making her out to be.

So the next time you hear someone call her a moderate, send them this link.