Apart from a slight uptick of hope when Malcolm Turnbull gained the leadership of the Liberal Party in September 2015, promising to bring “emotional intelligence” to the role, I have never wished the LNP anything but defeat and oblivion.

But Sussan Ley’s leadership win (and the welcome defeat of the twin Taylor/Price ticket) adds texture to this story, if not yet hope.

Gender justice — the recognition of structural disadvantaging and inequality — is one of several pivotal issues that Liberals have tried to manipulate, insult, trivialise or ignore. (The most egregious example surely is Bully Boy Abbott – the man who elected himself as minister for women in 2013, after hysterically insulting Australia’s first and only female prime minister, Julia Gillard, over the preceding three years.)

Having lived in Britain long before and through Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power, then witnessing her rapid crushing of every social initiative that benefitted ordinary people and sustained communities, it has long frustrated me that even intelligent commentators kept insisting that Liberal fortunes would be turned around if only they had more women.

‘More women’, though, is not even half a solution

It was self-evidently pathetic to continue the farce favoured by conservatives that the far greater number of men in their ranks equalled far greater merit. Because while far more women were. and are. needed in all spheres of power and decision-making, what also matters — fiercely — are every candidate’s lived values: the quality and depth of their social and political analysis, their integrity, empathy, and character. Plus, a modicum at least of willingness to look around as they rise to see who is being left out. And why.

As a “1968” feminist, I was young and naive enough to assume that greater female opportunity and visibility would advance the progress we were seeking. But, as long ago as that, it was abundantly clear to all serious thinkers that changes in gender politics could, on their own, never be enough.

A decade later, in 1978, as the founding publisher and first managing director of the London-based feminist publishing house, The Women’s Press, I saw that while each of our distinguished writers had her own emphasis, to a woman each understood that race and social class above all, as well as sexuality, cultural conditioning, education and access to ideas plus the essential right to have ideas and express them, would inevitably be crucial to any understanding of gender. Conversely, that race and class cannot be fruitfully discussed without understanding their impact on individual and collective experiences of sexuality and gender.

In this global movement for change — inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and fiercely resisted by conservatives — there was significant impatience and intolerance for women who wished only to smash glass ceilings in a public world otherwise largely untransformed. The “pie” to be shared with (White) men under this paradigm was strictly capitalist. Even hyper-capitalist. And stridently, defensively, individualistic.

In that subdued, but increasingly popular version of feminism, White women have benefitted in stark disproportion to Black women, most especially those Black women who brought to the discussion their invaluable awareness of the ruthless structural disadvantaging that continues to play out in each drama about the gaining and sharing of power. Most of all, I’d suggest, when it comes to race, imperialism, colonialism, and the stubborn, unforgivable refusals of those who have gained most to see what it costs to those who have least.

How is any of this relevant to Ley’s victory in achieving the leadership of a deservedly shrunken parliamentary Liberal party? She is being hailed for the fact that she is a woman (hello, it’s 2025), but surely there’s more to it than that.

Ley comes to the role with a mixed history. She was deputy to a leader (Peter Dutton) who will rival Scott Morrison for the ignominious title of worst Liberal leader… although there’s Abbott, in whose cabinet she also served, so “worst” may be a crowded designation. As deputy to Dutton, Ley vigorously defended appalling policies. She also adopted the same negative tone on social progress as The Leader, and was reliably supportive of him.

Yes, she did have choices. But in this contest her rival was not only Angus Taylor, but also his running mate, Jacinta Nampijnpa Price, the First Nations woman who leapt in a single bound from the Nationals (where she has been promoted and feted) to the Liberals. There she self-evidently hoped for even more power, but as a voice — irony intended — for what are indisputably White-advantaging politics.

Clearly, we cannot hope for inclusively humane politics from all women, LGTBQI+, or people who come from economic disadvantage, or are Black

To do so would be an affront to a person’s right to tell and live their story in their own way. However, those of us who do wish to view politics through an intersectional lens — at the very least acknowledging the trinity of race, class, gender structural disadvantage — are equally entitled to question the motivation of someone, in this case Price, who identifies so openly with economic and environmental interests not shared by the vast majority of First Nations people.

Price has made no secret of her affiliations, nor the facts that she has been, or is, conspicuously supported by Gina Rinehart who attended her Senate “debut” and is one of the tiny few non-Indigenous people who may have possibly suffered a relative setback in her fortunes from a vigorous and effective Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, the silencing of which was the peak “success “of Dutton’s shabby career, perhaps also of Price’s.

That leaves out key player Taylor who clearly thought that the Dutton-Price Voice “success” could be replicated with only a single name change. Perhaps not quite as bright as we might expect a former shadow treasurer to be, Taylor also has a string of watery, even sodden financial mysteries yet to be explained. Plus — and it is a mighty big plus — Taylor also carries in his very person that unabashed sense of entitlement (class, gender, race) that has buoyed every conservative leader in Australia. Up to now.

“Why should a wrecker be given a leadership position?” said someone close to Price’s work against the Voice on the day her bid for deputy Liberal leader was defeated. Which leaves the question of Ley, and her significance in breaking an exhausted mould.

Ley was health minister in Turnbull’s government and had also been in Abbott’s. When my paediatrician husband was getting the AMA’s President’s Medal for the second time, we were seated at the same table. Readers, Sussan was quick-witted and fun. Not a qualification for leadership, but 1000 times since, when I have witnessed her appalling politics and have publicly criticised them, I have remembered that evening and the woman I then met.

Perhaps we will soon discover that Ley has done nothing greater than defeating Taylor and Price and the nakedly self-interested politics each of them stands for. Perhaps Nigerian-born, former pilot, tough survivor Ley is not capable of moving Liberal politics away from the ugly, divisive negativity towards some of that “emotional intelligence” evoked by Turnbull a decade ago. Or, perhaps that party, like Thatcher so long ago, “…is not for moving”. But can we find out?

I could wish that the LNP will be in shrunken opposition for infinity. That’s not good, though, for our democracy. And while the continuing Opposition Leader in the Senate, Michaelia Cash, is already calling for the Coalition to focus on its “values and beliefs… based in freedoms”, we can continue to ask for evidence of what those freedoms are. And who, precisely, they are intended to benefit. Sussan: will you show us?