Australian women turned their backs on Ley. But they won’t forgive Taylor for this assassination

February 18, 2026 — 2:00am

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So this is how the Liberal Party’s first foray into female leadership ends. Not with a bang, but with an underwhelming sense of inevitability.

Sussan Ley is out after nine months, and the architects of her downfall are wasting no time in telling anybody who’ll listen that there was no choice, they had to do it.

“We must change, or we will not continue to exist,” Senator James Paterson said last week.

It’s not as if people were betting their life savings on the good ship SS Ley making it to the next federal election. But in appointing Angus Taylor as leader and Jane Hume as deputy, the Liberals have once again shown that their version of generational change bears a striking resemblance to the past. And watching a group of men wheel and deal in the shadows until they got their way doesn’t feel like an evolution so much as a return to regular programming.

The truth is, though, even without the industrious efforts of her colleagues to undermine her, Ley was never going to be the solution to the Liberal Party’s women problem because serious women never took her seriously.

For decades, the Liberal Party has not had to look hard to understand why it has been losing once blue-ribbon heartland seats. Voters in these electorates, particularly women, have been clear about their........

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