Not-A-Poll Reset 1 of 2026: Ley Rolled

Well at least she lasted longer than Alexander Downer.

As expected by a strong plurality of voters in my sidebar Not-A-Poll, Sussan Ley, who replaced Peter Dutton, was the next of the canvassed leaders to depart.  However for a while prior to the 2025 Tasmanian election, Jeremy Rockliff was in the lead.  Rockliff would have got a fair few more votes except that I closed off the poll while the Tasmanian election was being resolved.  This is something I do so people don't get credit for voting for a leader who was in the process of losing an election in the count on the night, but in Rockliff's case the uncertainty about whether he had survived dragged on for over a month.  In recent weeks almost all the action has been on Ley, who between 28 and 31 Jan got 37 votes in a row, but there was still the odd flash of dissent (someone voted for Chris Minns on Tuesday!)

This is Not-A-Poll's fifth successful prediction in the last six changes, improving the overall record for this series to 7/14.  

One would have thought after the drubbing that the Liberals received at the last election, the only way to go was up, but in fact the scale of the drubbing and the unexpectedness of it seems to have triggered an accelerating bleed of support to One Nation that Ley has been powerless to stop, leading to rapid rewriting of the Newspoll record books as a Coalition that had never polled below 31% primary before has crashed to now just 18%.  Ley herself polled the worst satisfaction rating for an Opposition Leader since Simon Crean in late 2003, but the 22% satisfaction rating Crean polled then was in a poll cycle during which he announced he was going to resign.  (Her netsat of -39 was still marginally better than the -43 and -44 Tony Abbott polled in February 2015, after which he lasted til September before being rolled as Prime Minister).  

Perhaps Peter Dutton's presence as a Liberal leader with some respect among One Nation voters was just holding back the well here and the Liberal Party is simply cooked by its own identity crisis in which the centre thinks it is too right wing and the alternative right thinks it is Labor-lite.  Perhaps appointing a moderate as leader at all was poking the bear, and maybe gender was a factor too (though I suspect it was a small one).  But I think the biggest problem has been that the Opposition simply lacks leadership talent.  Ley was a struggling Deputy under Dutton and continued to struggle as Leader, a couple of low points being pressuring Labor to recall Parliament post Bondi only for the Coalition to wedge itself on its response and collapse, and also copying the Sky bubble's offensive clueless claptrap about the PM's Joy Division t-shirt.  These were a continuation of Ley's poor form in contributing to the ticks and crosses beatup during the Voice referendum, which I mentioned when she became leader.  If even a moderate leader cannot stay away from such items, then what is the point of Liberal moderates anymore?

The leadership team of Ley and Ted O'Brien is now replaced by Angus Taylor and Jane Hume, both of whom have also failed upwards after playing significant roles in the 2025 catastrophe.  Can Taylor recover the party such that the polling of the last several months becomes as a bad dream, or is the Liberal Party's constituency going forwards going to be confined to rich people (and not even all of those) and a declining cohort of "my family always voted Liberal" types?  

On to the next round.  There will obviously be some support here for Taylor himself, as there is some thought that he will be gone by Christmas in favour of Andrew Hastie if he cannot make serious progress.  Jacinta Allan will face an election in November, the outcome of which is quite uncertain.  (Peter Malinauskas has one much sooner, but I don't think many voters here expect him to lose!)  Jeremy Rockliff governs in a pretty turbulent minority parliament, but has had more political lives than a cat.  Chastened by last year's result, Tasmanian Labor doesn't seem likely to force another election or attempt to take government mid-term any time soon.  In the ACT where Andrew Barr also governs in minority, there have been some interesting but not terribly serious rumblings involving the Liberals and the Greens in recent months.  There has also been talk about Anthony Albanese retiring on his own terms someday, but I would think that's more a matter for his third term than his second.  

Ley has announced her resignation from Parliament.  This will trigger a fascinating by-election with the Liberals, Nationals, One Nation and multiple independents having claims and likely a large field.  I will have more to say on that one soon.