The prime minister has borrowed from a sharp-tongued predecessor to launch his first attack on the new opposition leader, Angus Taylor, asking: “Can a soufflé rise once?”
Albanese played on an infamous insult from former prime minister Paul Keating, who asked whether a soufflé rises twice when Liberal Andrew Peacock mounted a challenge to regain the party leadership in 1989.
“Angus Taylor presents us with a new question: can a soufflé rise once?” Albanese said during a speech to the NSW Labor Country conference in Orange on Saturday.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
It was the prime minister’s first public comment on Taylor’s toppling of Sussan Ley in a long-anticipated Liberal leadership spill. Taylor’s 34-votes-to-17 win on Friday brought down the Liberals’ first female leader just nine months after she took the top job.
Albanese said Taylor and his new deputy, Senator Jane Hume, had both damaged their party with their various opposition to tax cuts, cost-of-living relief and renewable energy.
“It is extraordinary that they have had eight months of plotting in order to deliver the two people to the leadership positions who, more than anyone else on their entire show, were responsible for alienating the Liberals from the Australian voters,” he said.
“But that is what they have done. Every single challenge that is before us, they have failed on.”
Within minutes of the change of leadership, the federal government rolled out online attack ads criticising Taylor’s record as a minister and shadow treasurer.
Murray Watt, a federal minister, said the spill would do little for the Coalition.
“The Liberal party has completely lost touch with the vast majority of Australians and what they care about,” Watt told reporters in Sydney on Friday. “There is no evidence to date that Angus Taylor has any solutions for those challenges.”
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said Taylor’s record was shambolic.
“Angus has zero credibility on the economy and neither does the bin fire that is the Coalition,” he said.
Just days after reforming the Coalition with Ley at the helm, the Nationals leader, David Littleproud, said Taylor would be the right person to lead the opposition back into government.
“Angus is the leader Australia needs to take up the fight against Labor’s reckless spending and ideology,” he said. “Angus can offer hope to aspirant Australians and those who are struggling to enter the housing market.”
Ley announced she would resign from parliament in the coming weeks after losing the leadership, triggering a byelection in her NSW seat of Farrer.
One Nation’s leader, Pauline Hanson, said her party would field a candidate in the upcoming byelection.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
