Good morning and welcome to our rolling coverage of the Liberal Party leadership spill against Opposition Leader Sussan Ley. My name is Emily Kaine, and I’ll be taking you through the events of the day.
The Liberal caucus will meet for a special party room meeting at Parliament House in Canberra at 9am (AEDT) today. A spill motion is expected to be held, and Angus Taylor is expected to seek to unseat Ley, the party’s first female leader.
Follow along as we bring you rolling updates here on our dedicated live blog.
Liberal senator Alex Antic has backed in leadership challenger Angus Taylor and claimed the attempt to oust Sussan Ley has nothing to do with gender.
Speaking to Sky News late last night, Antic dismissed claims that ousting the party’s first female leader would launch the party into disrepute, saying it was not an issue of gender, rather a matter of urgency to get the party back on track before losing more popular support.
“We are haemorrhaging votes … We simply don’t have much time left. My concern is, if we were to leave it any longer, there may not be a Liberal Party left to salvage,” he said on air.
“I’ll certainly be supporting Angus.”
Antic also dismissed rumours that he was planning to defect to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, but praised the party for its “common sense” approach, saying it was cutting through to everyday Australians at a time when the Coalition was failing to do so.
Liberal Party leadership challenger Angus Taylor is a conventional Liberal at a time when unconventional ideas are taking root in centre-right parties around the world.
Taylor resigned from Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s frontbench at 7.30pm on Wednesday, setting up a spill of the party’s leadership.
The 59-year-old has an extensive pre-politics resumé: the son of a fourth-generation NSW sheep farmer, he was a boarder at Sydney’s elite The King’s School who parlayed law and economics degrees from Sydney University into a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.
He had a successful consulting career at McKinsey and Co and Port Jackson Partners before he was elected to parliament as the member for Hume in Tony Abbott’s 2013 landslide election win.
On paper, Taylor looks like the Liberal leader from central casting, the complete package. But some in his party room question whether he is ready to lead, and his record for developing and landing policies is not dazzling. He may also be too cautious for the toughest job in parliament – leader of the opposition.
Read the full story from chief political commentator James Massola.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has been in the top job for exactly nine months today, but has struggled to find clear air to litigate her vision for the party.
Since taking the vacant role following Peter Dutton’s loss at last May’s election, Ley has overseen plummeting personal and party polls, two splits with the National Party, a series of high-profile defections from her frontbench, and a handful of attacks on the government that have fallen flat.
Everything came to a head last week shortly after the Coalition reunited, when The Australian’s Newspoll showed the Coalition on a primary vote of just 18 per cent. After much speculation defence spokesperson Angus Taylor resigned from the frontbench on Wednesday, and on Thursday made clear he was challenging for the leadership.
Taylor was followed off the frontbench by high-profile conservatives James Paterson and Jonno Duniam, as others tendered their resignations and publicly offered their support to Taylor.
It is rare for an opposition leader to be given so little time to turn party direction around, and backers of Ley have argued she has done well and deserves more time.
Good morning and welcome to our rolling coverage of the Liberal Party leadership spill against Opposition Leader Sussan Ley. My name is Emily Kaine, and I’ll be taking you through the events of the day.
The Liberal caucus will meet for a special party room meeting at Parliament House in Canberra at 9am (AEDT) today. A spill motion is expected to be held, and Angus Taylor is expected to seek to unseat Ley, the party’s first female leader.
Follow along as we bring you rolling updates here on our dedicated live blog.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
