'I didn't feel that way': Sussan Ley on the Coalition alienating migrants at the last election
The new Liberal leader sat down with the Feed to discuss how the party got it so wrong. Source: SBS Sussan Ley didn't feel the Liberal Party alienated migrants in the last federal election, but accepts that some voters felt that way. "I want to know why they felt that way," she told The Feed. "Because I certainly, as the deputy leader in the last parliament, never, ever felt that way." In an interview with The Feed, Ley spoke about a range of criticism directed at the party, conceding that it was rejected by a number of voting groups. Ley's predecessor, Peter Dutton linked record levels of migration — which peaked at 536,000 in 2022-23, but which Treasury estimates will return to 260,000 next year — with exacerbating demand on housing supply and pushing up prices.
Simon Welsh, director of a social and political research firm with connections to the Liberal Party, Labor Party, and The Greens, said that in diverse communities, this rhetoric turned voters away from the Coalition. Ley said it made her "sad" to hear this feedback from voters, adding that "I accept that maybe was the case for a variety of reasons".
Ley was born in Nigeria and moved to the United Arab Emirates before she was two, following her father's work for British intelligence services. In a 2014 interview with SBS, Ley said she would often accompany him on MI6 fieldwork around the Persian Gulf — experiences, she says, that helped shape her worldview. She later moved to the UK at age 10, before moving to Australia when she was 13. "I'm a migrant to this country, but I've got the great fortune of, you know, looking white with the same language," she said, acknowledging that the experience wouldn't be the same for "someone who doesn't have that". Nonetheless, she said: "I felt very different and excluded at school. I have a sense, actually, of what that feeling is. And it's not good enough for people to feel like that. I worry about social cohesion."
Ley said she wants to understand where feelings of exclusion among multicultural voters came from as the Liberal Party reckons with its devastating defeat at the 2025 federal election. "We have two seats in urban Australia, in the cities," she said. "We have record-low votes with youth and with women. And historically, the scale of this defeat is unprecedented." "So I want to make that point because I accept it. I heard the message."
In research by emeritus professor Peter McDonald and professor Alan Gamlen of the ANU Migration Hub, they said that migration was "being weaponised during this election campaign to elicit panic and sway voters". They outlined several reasons for the record migration levels during 2022-23, including an influx of students, backpackers and temporary workers who unable to travel during the pandemic, as well as several visa extensions under the Morrison and Albanese governments. They added that, in the recent budget, Treasury estimated the number will fall and, by 2027, migration levels in Australia could plummet to historic lows.
Simon Welsh from RedBridge said: "The Liberal Party cannot form government in this country again until it figures out how to talk to young Australians and diverse Australians." And while they've been doing the rounds post-election, he's not sure he's seen anything radically promising just yet. "The only way that the Liberals and the Coalition can reach out to young people is by slaying some of their sacred cows," he said. "While the Coalition is running around talking about opposing net zero and walking away from the Paris Climate Accord, they are never going to win back large numbers of young people across this country, because climate is more than just an environmental issue." "For young people, when they look at climate, they see an economic issue. So they see economic impacts of it on cost of food, cost of living." "Until the Coalition are willing to catch up with young people on that issue. They will never win them over in large numbers, and that's just one issue."
Asked why young Australians turned away from the party, Ley said she wasn't sure they "found us relevant at all". "Did we sort of send a message to them in the right way? Maybe. Maybe not. Did we have policy offerings that … resonated with them? Probably not." "Did they look at us and see reflected back the agenda that they wanted? Probably not. So, yeah, I think it was a fail on many levels."
Sussan Ley's historic elevation as the first woman to lead the Liberals comes at a moment of reckoning for the party, particularly regarding the issue of women voters abandoning it, Ley said. The disconnect with female voters became especially clear to Ley at polling booths during the final weeks of the campaign. "Often there was a queue, so you had a chance to talk to people in that queue. And it was quite interesting. A lot of the couples, the man was taking the Liberal Party, 'How to vote' card, but the woman was sort of just basically ignoring us," she said. After a while, she said she asked them for their honest feedback. "If you ask someone for their honest feedback, particularly a woman, usually you get it. That's a good thing," she said. "And, you know, they would say, well, yeah, 'No, we're not really, you know, we're not interested in the Liberal Party.'"
The Liberal Party has long been plagued by what's often referred to as a 'women problem' — a label given for the ongoing criticism about the number of female MPs (fewer than their male counterparts) and broader concerns over how the party treats women. Prominent figures from within its own ranks, including former deputy leader Julie Bishop and former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, have publicly called out the culture of misogyny they say exists within the party. "There have been times in that building where women have not been treated well. Women have not been treated appropriately. And women have been let down," she said. Ley said she had, at times, felt dismissed by male colleagues. "I don't say that it was something that was egregious or crossed a line," she said. "It was simply perhaps that feeling that you weren't being taken seriously in a room full of men or that feeling that, if you said something, nobody really paid attention. But then when a man said it, suddenly everybody listened."
However, Ley maintained the party's culture had improved and that "misogyny" went far beyond the party to extend more broadly to parliament and other workplaces she'd been in. While her leadership is a historic first for the party and there is some "novelty" in being the first, she hoped the focus would soon shift. "I know I'm the first female leader. I don't sort of think of myself like that, other than to know that it sends a positive signal to women," she said. "I don't mind, in one sense, if the novelty wears off and people would just get on with the job."
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