As parliament returns, Albanese is buoyed by Newspoll as Ley confronts depth of Coalition's defeat

Australia Broadcast Center

20-07-2025

When the federal parliament finally sits this week for the first time since the election, the full depth of the Liberal Party's electoral humiliation will be on visual display in the House of Representatives.
Just six Liberal women will be in the lower house.
Six.
And because women usually wear more colour than their male colleagues, the scarce numbers will be hard to miss. There will be no ambiguity about the problem.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, on the other hand, is likely to be feeling confident as parliament returns with Newspoll delivering strong results for Labor and a second honeymoon narrative for the party.
The Liberals will hope that the optics of having their first woman leader sitting opposite the prime minister at the dispatch box will neutralise just how shocking a number this is in 2025 — but one leader, reluctantly backed and still being quietly undermined by some of her colleagues, does not disappear an issue so deeply rooted.
Ahead of the return to parliament, Sussan Ley has let television program 60 Minutes into her life to introduce herself to the nation.
It says a lot about the country's engagement in politics that a woman who has been in the parliament since 2001 and has served in many frontbench roles from as far back as the Howard government era still has to introduce herself.
Previous Liberal leader Peter Dutton also appeared on 60 Minutes, but his task was less about an introduction — his name was more well-known around the country — and more about softening his image, something it's fair to say he failed spectacularly to achieve.
Ley doesn't need to soften her image. She needs to establish an image and identity of her own.
Ley showed the 60 Minutes audience her impressive skills, including flying planes, and her beautiful grandchildren. It is a way of using what is a good personal story of female empowerment to signal that the Liberal Party under her leadership has changed.
But it will take more than some soft media pieces to shift the deep perception of a party out of touch.
All eyes this week will be on the first Question Time. Politics is as much a mind game as it is an ideas and strategy game between leaders. Ley and Albanese will be working out how to tackle each other across the dispatch box.
They share one indisputable trait. Both have been underestimated their entire careers, and both talk about this as one of the elements of their success.
The PM has consistently outperformed when his critics have suggested he isn't capable. Ley is much the same. She is using that doubt to power herself through.
One of the most stinging and damaging criticisms of the Liberals under Peter Dutton was a penchant for saying no to Labor ideas.
In fact, the Liberals became so addicted to saying no that they even said no to policies that fit squarely into their historical world view, including personal income tax cuts before the last election.
This week will be the party's first parliamentary chance to show that they are done with that hyper-oppositional behaviour.
On the two key pieces of legislation Labor will introduce this week — reducing HECS debts and tougher regulation of childcare in the wake of the abuse scandals — the Liberals have now indicated they are a yes.
They have even walked away from the policy of slashing 80,000 international students from higher education institutions, with the opposition's education spokesperson yesterday promising a more "sensitive" approach.
Dutton had claimed that cutting foreign student numbers would free up more housing and rental opportunities. He said students were "taking up accommodation that should be occupied by Australian citizens".
The opposition's new education spokesperson, Jonathon Duniam, conceded the policy under Dutton wasn't "as constructive as it could have otherwise been".
"Obviously, those numbers were part of a discussion that occurred before an election we lost," the new education spokesperson told Insiders.
"I don't think that any university should, as some have, use international students as a cash cow. That's not appropriate because it's not a good business model, but we need to recognise that a large part of the funding, for especially regional universities, comes from international students.
A more sensitive conversation needs to be had, Duniam said, and added the Liberal Party "will work with the sector and the government about that."
Before the last election, Labor also vowed to crack down on this, saying it would reduce international student numbers to a maximum of 270,000 in 2025.
The shadow education minister also said the Coalition had softened its position on other education policies, including past opposition to the Albanese government's plan to wipe 20 per cent off student HECS debts.
Newly elected Labor members and senators will also begin delivering their first speeches to the House of Representatives and the Senate this week.
First speeches in the House will be led by the member for Dickson, Ali France, and the member for Melbourne, Sarah Witty.
It's not a mistake that they have been chosen to lead the many, many speeches that will be delivered.
These two new MPs vanquished the political leader of the right, Dutton, and the left, Greens leader Adam Bandt.
Their speeches will make the point that their communities voted for Labor because they wanted a government that wanted to get things done.
And Labor will seek to highlight that its new caucus is composed of 56 per cent women. They will sing it from the rooftops all week, but the truth is they don't need to.
It will be on full display in the chamber as the MPs take their positions on the green leather seats.
The ABC has projected that the Liberals will win the most seats in the new Tasmanian state parliament, with the Labor Party seeing its worst vote in Tasmania ever.
This is the fourth election the state has held in seven years, after a no-confidence vote tabled by Opposition Leader Dean Winter during his budget reply speech.
I am a big fan of democracy, but I can see why Tasmanians may be fatigued by the never-ending elections they are forced to engage in.
It's kind of staggering, really, and tells you everything you need to know about the volatility of politics that nearly 40 per cent of Tasmanians voted Liberal at the state election over the weekend.
In the May federal election, the Liberal vote in Tasmania sat just below 25 per cent. It's a monumental difference. The Liberals see it as a sign that their brand is not entirely damaged, and perhaps that is part of the story. But it's not all of it.
It's worth looking at how wild the swings were towards the Liberals and how that has changed the fortunes of Bridget Archer, who lost her federal seat during the obliteration of the party in Tasmania at the federal election.
Archer contested the seat of Bass in this weekend's Tasmanian state election and has now managed to not only win, but she got 1.53 quotas on Saturday night.
Archer may be a minister in the Tasmanian government. This was something that wasn't possible for her in the federal Liberals.
The predicted Labor loss would be one of the great tactical miscalculations of recent Australian political history. There does remain an outside chance that Tasmania's Labor leader, Dean Winter, can form government with a large and mostly progressive crossbench.
It is understood that Winter believed Premier Jeremy Rockcliff would step down after the no-confidence motion rather than call another election.
Labor was again left unprepared at the state level to fight.
But the swing to the Liberals does show that perhaps the anti-incumbents mood appears to be in decline off the back of elections in WA, the federal election, and now the Tasmanian election. All three have given the two major parties some hope that they may have arrested the decline.
Patricia Karvelas is the host of ABC News Afternoon Briefing at 4pm weekdays on ABC News Channel, co-host of the weekly Party Room podcast with Fran Kelly, and host of politics and news podcast Politics Now.