Sussan Ley gets personal at the press club, government side-steps specifics on Iran

Australia Broadcast Center

26-06-2025

Welcome back to your weekly federal politics update, where Brett Worthington gets you up to speed on the happenings from Parliament House.
Sussan Ley is an unlikely Liberal leader.
A grandmother and a former aerial musterer from country Australia, she's hardly the kind of figure her party has turned to before.
Given the state the party finds itself in — repudiated by voters at successive elections, having recorded a record low primary vote and been rejected by voters in the major cities — the fact she's not like those who came before her is an asset.
But let's not suggest for a single second that she's not versed in handling old boys' clubs.
"I was not taken seriously in pilot training. I was nearly always the only woman in the group," she told the National Press Club this week, speaking about her formative years after finishing school.
"The privileged boys, whose parents bankrolled their lessons, attracted more street cred than me."
Ley is no stranger to the Liberal Party or federal parliament, of which she's a two decade veteran. But she now faces the task of introducing herself to the broader public.
Ley spoke of growing up the daughter of a British spy, of later living in a bedsit under a bridge and then later working as an air traffic controller before taking flight mustering livestock in small planes.
"I was told I couldn't get a crop-dusting rating because the chemicals would damage my unborn children. I was yelled at, hit on, and then ignored," she said.
As a mother raising a family, she started university at 30, obtained a masters and later worked for the Australian Tax Office. She spoke of understanding the pain that comes with coercion and control.
"Because I have felt that pain too," she told the press club. "I understand what it is like when you blame yourself for the actions of others. Because I have blamed myself too."
The whole point of sharing her story is to make plain the extent to which change has come to the Liberal Party. She argues her story is Australia's story.
Ley discussed the former prime ministers that she'd spoken with since becoming leader. But she never mentioned Peter Dutton's name, instead only referring to him as "my predecessor". She offered a stark assessment of the party's failures in recent elections, having lost more than 40 seats across the parliament since 2019.
Liberals now only hold two of 43 inner city seats and seven of 45 outer metro seats.
"We didn't just lose. We got smashed. Totally smashed," she said of May's federal election. "What we as the Liberal Party presented to the Australian people was comprehensively rejected."
When the parliament returns next month, the contrast will be stark.
In the House of Representatives, just six of the 28 MPs in the Liberal ranks will be women.
Insisting she was "agnostic" about the mechanism to boost female representation, she vowed she would be a "zealot" in seeking the outcome.
"I'm the first woman in my position and I don't believe anyone in my position has had the resolve that I have right here, right now," she said.
"Watch this space."
The week started with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese facing criticism for his government's response to US strikes on Iran at the weekend.
News broke around 10am on Sunday. Just shy of three hours later, the prime minister's office issued a statement from a government spokesperson, which did little more than note the events that had happened.
By Monday morning, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong was blitzing breakfast TV and radio to offer a ringing endorsement of President Donald Trump's actions.
Wong later appeared with Albanese after a meeting of the cabinet's National Security Committee (NSC), where the two faced questions about what Australia knew before the US dropped bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities.
If you'd been taking a swig of something hard every time Albanese said it was a "unilateral action by the United States", well, you wouldn't be standing for very long.
An at-times testy Albanese appeared frustrated when asked about intelligence that had been shared with his government, or what had been discussed at the NSC meeting.
The press conference also highlighted the sensitivities around the perception of the prime minister's relationship with Trump.
In the UK, a senior government minister confirmed his country was notified about the US strikes on Iran before they played out. Clearly, that wasn't extended to Australia — not that the prime minister was willing to admit that.
It's worth noting, not even the Coalition was criticising Albanese for not knowing about the strike in advance, yet the PM seemed unwilling to concede his lack of awareness.
The Coalition was quick to offer a ringing endorsement of the strikes at the weekend, and later welcomed the government offering its support.
Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie also urged for greater transparency about US military operations on Australian shores.
That came into focus after the government consistently brushed off questions over whether the highly sensitive military facilities at Pine Gap or North West Cape provided intelligence to the US for its bombing raids.
Hastie argued that greater transparency would offer the public a better understanding of the US alliance.
It's also the kind of comments parties like to make in opposition, only to completely disregard when in government.
Albanese could have raised such matters directly with Trump had he decided to go to the NATO summit in The Hague.
As Australia is not a NATO member, the government's plan had always been to send Defence Minister Richard Marles to the meeting. Albanese toyed with going after his planned meeting with Trump in Canada failed to eventuate. But the PM ultimately decided against it, with Marles going as originally planned.
It was a classic damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
In not going, Albanese faced Coalition criticism that he was letting Australia down by not meeting with Trump. Yet if he'd gone, the words Airbus Albo would have been quick to slip off the lips of those who argue the prime minister spends too much time abroad.
As for when he will meet Trump, the PM says that's still being worked out.
Advocates of the AUKUS partnership want Albanese to get in a room with Trump to lock down his support of the military pact.
It wasn't that long ago the Coalition was railing against what it dubbed a bloated bureaucracy.
"You don't have to have a bigger team to have a better team," then-shadow treasurer Angus Taylor would often say.
Having been delivered a electoral landslide, Albanese has found himself offering the Coalition a taste of its own medicine.
Convention has dictated that an opposition has around 21 per cent of the staff that the government has. That meant Labor had around 500 staff in the last parliament and the opposition had around 100.
But not anymore, with Albanese this week telling Ley he planned to cut back opposition staffing allocations, much like he did to the crossbench after the 2022 election.
The Coalition says it was told it would be cut another 20 per cent (20 positions), with the PM also cutting 10 positions from his own side of politics.
The opposition says it's a blatant attempt to limit accountability. You'll be shocked to hear there's been no mention about not needing bigger teams to have better teams.