Nine months. That’s how long Australia’s first female Liberal leader lasted before the boys’ club sharpened their knives. Sussan Ley never stood a chance and that was always the point.

The Liberal Party, Australia’s rapidly shrinking bastion of private-school privilege, big-business boosterism and IPA-scripted economic mischief, has spent decades perfecting the art of alienating women.

It hasn’t been easy. But for over 30 years, through policies and practices that roll back progress on gender equity, shrug off workplace harassment scandals, scorn quotas as if they were socialist poison, and cultivate a culture where “merit” somehow always favoured a bloke in a blue tie, they’ve driven away virtually every woman under 60 who isn’t already on the payroll, joined by wedlock into the old boys’ network or a paid-up member of the crumb maiden sisterhood.

When their catastrophic wipeout in the May 2025 federal election saw women desert them in droves, it left the Liberal party room looking like a sad reunion of 1980s boarding-school prefects. So huge was the carnage that the fix was obvious: install a woman. Mind the house. Keep the lights on.

Sadly, this was no road-to-Damascus epiphany on equality, justice, decency or even policy, but because the optics demanded it. Enter Sussan Ley, elevated on 13 May 2025 as the first female leader in the party’s 81-year history.

Perfect. A woman to clean up the boys’ mess.

Not just any mess, mind you; the worst electoral shellacking since federation. Spud Dutton is still spitting chips over losing Dickson to Ali France. And losing to a woman? He’s quit politics completely, after under-performing in every post he’s been given. As will Angus Taylor when he’s rolled, because being a silver-spooner with Tony Abbott’s backing and a Cayman Islands account or two won’t save you from Newspoll.

Dutt’s crew were too gutless to tell him how badly he was failing on the hustings, insiders claim. Now there’s too few left to help hapless Angus use a calculator. The Liberal parliamentary party in the House of Representatives is now a fading blue rinse of eighteen — eighteen! — boosted by ten LNP Fine Cotton ring-ins from Queensland who are not Liberals at all.

Despite its claims to legitimacy and its brown paper bag heritage, the LNP is a hastily arranged marriage of convenience that’s only eighteen years old — just old enough to buy grog but too young to be trusted to party by itself.

Who can forget the shell-shocked, we’ve-been-rumbled-and-done-over-all-at-once look the Liberals bore last May as they crawled back, whimpering and licking their wounds?

Dragged kicking and screaming into their own black hole of entropy. Wracked with survivor guilt. Self-conscious in their conspicuous smallness. Traumatised by a near-death experience.

And then there was their new pilot, Sussan Ley. Twenty-odd years of parliamentary experience, albeit with the odd fly-now-pay-later taxpayer-funded jaunt and the even odder claim-travel-allowance-to-buy-a-Gold-Coast-apartment embarrassment. A background that screams autonomy, authenticity and achievement — commercial pilot, farmer, shearers’ cook, former punk rocker, bush-doof woman — persuaded to accept the poisoned chalice of leader.

Textbooks call it a “glass cliff.” But we all know a stitch-up when we see one. Blind Freddy could have warned Ms Ley.

Professor Michelle Ryan, who coined the term, is diplomatic. “The timing definitely suggests that it’s somewhat of a glass cliff,” she tells our hand-shy ABC, the national lapdog the Liberals starved and bullied into cringing servitude.

Ryan points to Ley’s ascension after “an unprecedented loss at an election” and being the “first time a woman is leading” as probably “not unconnected.” In brief: the blokes who might have fancied the job when there was a chance of actually winning — your “Handy Andy” Hasties, your Deadpan Dan Tehans — took one look at the trainwreck dumpster fire and suddenly had pressing barber-shop commitments elsewhere.

But Ley? She could clean up the mess. That’s what women do, isn’t it? Mop up after the lads have trashed the joint?

From day one, Sussan Ley was white-anted by the die-hard right that dominates the party’s branches and holds the numbers in the parliamentary party. Even Press Gallery doyenne, the indefatigable Michelle Grattan, is on to it:

“Many of the conservatives never accepted this outcome. Ley was quickly taken hostage.”

A hostage who had to publicly capitulate on net zero, a policy she’d previously supported, making her look weak before she’d even had a chance to walk back anything like her “Parliamentary Friends of Palestine” membership, 2001–11. A hostage who faced “relentless undermining” from critics within the party, Sky News hacks, and catastrophic polling.

Most tellingly, a hostage whose would-be executioners didn’t even bother to whisper. Taylor and Hastie holding meetings over “coffee and pastries” on the day of a Bondi memorial service, with conservative factional heavyweights in tow, plotting her removal while she was still warm in the job.

“The plotting has been extraordinarily open,” Grattan writes. “Those seeking to bring her down haven’t even felt the need to whisper behind their hands.”

Open or brazen? See the cruelly demeaning disrespect reserved for women who dare to think they can lead the Liberal Party? In case we miss it, Grattan notes that Ley “has been treated with more disrespect than a man would have been.”

Enter the Incredible Sulks

But the real knife went in from outside the party room altogether. The moment Ley became leader, One Nation’s vote in opinion polls began climbing off its May election low of six percent toward double digits. Within a month, according to Bernard Keane’s analysis, those “resentful older men in the outer suburbs and regional areas” had made their verdict clear: a woman leading the Liberals? Not on your Nelly.

These are Hanson’s people. The angry, the aggrieved, the bitter — blokes who’ve watched their privilege “by nature of their skin colour and having a penis” shrinking and decided it must be someone else’s fault. Women. Migrants. Elites. The woke mob. Anyone, really, except the economic system that’s left them behind or the political party that facilitated it.

And Pauline? She knows her market. As Keane notes, she’s “the queen of the Australian men’s rights movement” — someone who’s made a career of attacking feminism as “anti-male,” dismissing family violence as “frivolous,” promising to roll back abortion protections, and vowing to replace the Family Court with “everyday Aussies.” She means blokes who reckon they got a raw deal in the divorce settlement.

The data tells a different story, of course. Only three percent of Family Court cases result in fathers being denied contact with their children. The Australian Institute of Family Studies found the system, if anything, tilted the other way.

But why let facts get in the way of a good grievance? These blokes feel hard done by, and Hanson validates that feeling. She tells them they’re victims. She tells them women lie. She tells them the system is rigged against them.

And when Christian Porter, then Attorney-General under Morrison, came along with legislation to effectively abolish the specialist Family Court by merging it with the lower Federal Circuit Court, guess who backed him?

Pauline Hanson — who recently boasted at a men’s rights rally about being “given” the Family Law Inquiry by Prime Minister Morrison — and independent crossbencher Rex Patrick, who was promised extra judges for South Australia in exchange for his vote. The deal was done late one February night in 2021, over the objections of Labor, the Greens, Jacqui Lambie, and 155 legal stakeholders including women’s legal services, family violence experts, and the Law Council of Australia.

Porter dismissed the critics, claiming they had “a vested interest in delays.” Women’s Legal Services warned that domestic violence victims were increasingly having to represent themselves, “facing off against their perpetrator” in what was “a very unsafe situation.”

Jacqui Lambie was blunter: “If you think the heartache and the suicides going on out there are bad enough… wait until you see what’s coming because it is a train wreck in action. What is wrong with you people? You are playing with people’s lives.”

But Porter pressed on, delivering what Jess Hill called “a huge win for Hanson.” The Family Court, established by Whitlam in 1975 specifically to protect women and children during what was often the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship, was gutted. The men’s rights lobby had won.

The Full Circle of Misogyny

And here’s where it all comes together. The Liberal Party that campaigned on being the adults in the room, the party of sensible economic management and family values, has spent the past decade courting exactly the demographic that made Sussan Ley’s leadership impossible: resentful men who don’t think women should be in charge of anything more significant than the weekly shop.

Morrison’s government didn’t just tolerate this worldview; it legislated for it. Porter’s Family Court changes were a deliberate sop to the same grievance politics that feeds One Nation. The same despicably dishonest politics that says women lie about domestic violence. The same politics that treats equal rights as discrimination against men. The same politics that sees any woman in a position of authority as an affront to the natural order.

No wonder these blokes fled to Hanson the moment Ley took the Liberal leadership. Why settle for a pale imitation when you can have the real thing? Hanson tells them what they want to hear: that it’s not their fault, that they’re victims, that women have too much power and men need their rights “restored.” Ley, by virtue of being a woman in the top job, represented everything they despise about modernity: women with agency, women with authority, women who don’t know their place.

Ley could have adopted Hanson’s entire men’s rights playbook and it wouldn’t have mattered. These blokes don’t want a woman leader who validates their grievances. They want Pauline, who validates their grievances while remaining acceptable because she knows her place as their champion, not their peer.

The Boys’ Club Strikes Back

Inside the party, the dynamics were just as poisonous, if subtly different. The conservative faction never wanted Sussan Ley. She was a moderate from the small centre-right grouping who’d won with the support of other moderates — an accident of numbers in a decimated parliamentary party. The conservatives, who “overwhelm the branches and have a clear edge among the parliamentarians,” bided their time.

They didn’t need to wait long. Nine months, as it turned out. Just long enough to be able to claim they’d given her a go. Just long enough for the polling to become catastrophic. Just long enough for the Young Liberals — the Young Liberals! — to publicly call for her resignation.

And when Angus Taylor finally moved against her, it was with the full backing of the conservative machine. Taylor, who’d been runner-up in the original ballot. Taylor, who’d run the economic portfolio into the ground during the 2025 election with a platform Labor gleefully branded as “higher taxes.” Taylor, who as Michelle Grattan notes faced “extraordinarily open” plotting alongside Hastie, yet suffered none of the disrespect Ley endured.

On Friday morning, 13 February 2026, it was over. Taylor 34, Ley 17. A margin so emphatic it doubled the four-vote defeat he’d suffered nine months earlier. Jane Hume, elected deputy, was the sole concession to the party’s five — five — remaining women in the House of Representatives.

Ley’s parting words were a masterclass in dignified fury: “When I came to the leadership of the Liberal Party nine months ago, my mother had just died.” She announced she would resign from parliament entirely. The seat of Farrer, which she’d held for 25 years, now faces a by-election that Pauline Hanson is already eyeing.

Translation: You bastards never gave me a chance. You white-anted me from day one. You plotted openly while I was still burying my mother. You held meetings to discuss my removal on the morning of a memorial service and didn’t even pretend it was a secret.

The Reckoning That Won’t Come

The tragedy — or the black comedy — is that nothing will change. The Liberal Party has known about its “woman problem” for over a decade. Back in 2014, the confidential “Room for Movement” report documented “a deeply regressive male chauvinist culture” — a “boys’ club that actively silenced, intimidated and bullied its women members.” The report warned of an “existential challenge” if the party didn’t achieve gender balance.

That was twelve years ago. Today the party remains, as Keane puts it, “a party of middle-aged white men somehow representing the entire Australian community.” They’ve learned nothing. Changed nothing. The same blokey culture that drove women voters away in their hundreds of thousands remains entrenched. The same conservatives who sabotaged Ley are now celebrating Taylor’s victory.

And out in the suburbs and regions, the angry old men who fled to One Nation the moment a woman took charge are feeling vindicated. They’ve got their bloke back. Order is restored. The threat of female leadership has been neutralised.

Meanwhile, Hanson continues her crusade, telling anyone who’ll listen that women lie, that the courts are rigged against men, that fathers are the real victims. Porter’s Family Court changes remain in place, making it harder for women fleeing violence to protect themselves and their children. And the Liberal Party congratulates itself on having given a woman a go — see? We tried! — before returning to business as usual.

Nine months. That’s all it took. Sussan Ley was set up to fail. She was undermined from within, abandoned by the voter base her party cultivated, and ultimately knifed by blokes who never accepted her legitimacy in the first place.

She walked into Friday’s party room wearing white — the colour of a bride left at the altar by her own party. She walked out with her dignity intact, which is more than can be said for the men who put her there and the men who brought her down.

Angus Taylor, meanwhile, has his bloke’s bloke leadership at last. Let’s see how long it lasts when Newspoll comes calling with the bill.