Sussan Ley elected first female Liberal leader, narrowly defeating Angus Taylor in ballot
Sussan Ley has become Australia's first female opposition leader, beating Angus Taylor in the race for the Liberal leadership.
Smashed in the 3 May federal election, Liberal MPs met to elect a new leadership team at Parliament House on Tuesday morning, without Peter Dutton, the former leader who lost his seat in the historic drubbing.
Ley, a former environment and health minister, was the Liberal party's deputy leader under Dutton and has been a member of parliament since 2001.
Now the most senior woman in the party's 80-year history, Ley was elected 29 votes to 25 votes over the former shadow treasurer. She is the first regionally based opposition leader since the 1990s.
The 63-year-old is one of the longest-serving female MPs in Canberra.
Liberal party acting chief opposition whip Melissa Price announced the result just after 10:15am.
Born in Kano, Nigeria, Ley represents the regional New South Wales seat of Farrer and is a former wool and beef farmer and tax office executive.
A trained pilot, she joined the Liberal party in 1994 and has held the industry and small business portfolios since 2022.
A mother and grandmother, Ley's father was a British intelligence officer who brought his family to Australia in the 1970s. She has previously revealed she enjoyed a 'brief punk rock period' in the 1980s and added an extra 's' to her first name in her 20s, guided by numerology.
Serving as a minister under Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, Ley resigned from cabinet in 2017 over an expenses scandal involving official travel and the purchase of an investment property on the Gold Coast.
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