Sussan Ley: From Nigeria Roots to Leading the Liberal Party as Its First Female Leader in Canberra

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Sussan Ley has made history by being chosen as the first female leader of the Liberal Party.

On Tuesday, Ley climbed to the highest female position in the party’s 80-year history, narrowly defeating Opposition Treasury spokesperson Angus Taylor in the party room vote, 29 to 25.

With a background as the mother of three, Ley is well-versed in prominent roles, having previously served in positions related to environment and health, as well as holding the deputy leadership in the Liberal Party.

The 63-year-old, reflecting on her international upbringing, described her journey in her inaugural speech as leader, calling it a “migrant story”.

So what do we know about Sussan Ley and what can we expect from her leadership?

Who is Sussan Ley?

Nigerian-born Ley was raised primarily in the Middle East, moving to the United Arab Emirates with her English family before she was two.

In a 2014 profile, Ley told SBS how she accompanied her father during fieldwork for British intelligence agency MI6. It was during these trips that she first embraced a passion for diversity.

She previously described her time at a boarding school in Sussex, England from the age of 10 as “tough” but “a defining period of time” that nurtured her interest in politics.

By the age of 13, her family had moved to Australia. After briefly dabbling in cattle farming in Queensland, they moved to Canberra.

It was here she embraced punk culture, opting for spiked purple hair, black lipstick and multiple piercings.

“It was a way of expressing yourself exclusively based on your own identity without adopting anyone else’s perspectives. I appreciated that,” she mentioned to SBS News.

“People sometimes assume that by being a punk, you weren’t a conservative, but quite clearly you could be and I was then.”

After leaving school, she added another ‘s’ to her first name because of a numerological belief it would change her personality.

“I worked out that if you added an ‘s’ I would have an incredibly exciting, interesting life and nothing would ever be boring,” she told The Australian newspaper in 2015.

Ley has worked many jobs, including air traffic controller, shearer, cook and wool and beef farmer as well as public servant. She also got her commercial pilot’s licence.

As a grandmother to six, she also pursued higher education as a mature student, achieving a bachelor’s degree in economics alongside masters in tax and accounting.

Life in politics: from same-sex marriage flips to class actions

Ley’s more than two decades in parliament (she was elected as the member for Farrer in south-west NSW in 2001) have not been without controversy.

She has openly admitted when she’s changed her mind on issues throughout her time in office, including eventually supporting same-sex marriage after initially opposing it.

In 2011, she was the co-chair of the parliament’s Friends of Palestine group and spent 10 days in the occupied West Bank.

Upon her return, she gave a speech to parliament in which she said: “I support the Palestinian bid for statehood in part because it will give heart to the ordinary people of the West Bank and Gaza.”

On Tuesday, as the Opposition’s party leader, she says she views the issue differently, highlighting she has since been on a trip to Israel.

“Right now, what we’re seeing is not a party interested peace with Israel, not a party interested in a secure Israel behind secure borders and not a party interested in a just and lasting peace,” she said.

In 2017 she was forced to step down as health minister in the Turnbull government following revelations she made taxpayer-funded chartered flights to the Gold Coast, during which she bought a property.

More recently, as environment minister in 2022 she appealed a class action by eight children, arguing she did not have a duty of care to protect young people from climate change.

On Australia Day this year, she compared the arrival of the First Fleet to Elon Musk’s SpaceX Mars mission, calling British settlement a “daring experiment”.

“And just like astronauts arriving on Mars, those first settlers would be confronted with a different and strange world, full of danger, adventure and potential,” she said.

Australia Day became a public holiday in 1994 and marks the day the First Fleet landed in Sydney Cove in 1788. But many Australians, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, now refer to it as Invasion Day or Survival Day.

What can we expect from her leadership?

Ahead of the leadership decision, experts told SBS News that Ley could take a more moderate approach to leadership than her predecessor Peter Dutton.

Amy Remeikis, the chief political analyst for policy think tank The Australia Institute, said Ley can be a mixed bag in her views.

“While she is more moderate than Dutton and Taylor, she straddles this weird section in between being a moderate and a conservative,” she said.

“She’s a regional Liberal and while she has had some more moderate views, particularly when it comes to women, for a while there she was against live export.”

When it comes to economic policy, Ley appears to be in line with traditional Liberal values of small government and reduced taxes, Remeikis said.

Dr Mark Rolfe, a lecturer in the school of social sciences at the University of NSW, said Ley’s leadership could deal with a perceived “gender problem” within the Liberal Party.

“When we see the number of teal representatives, and the lack of female Liberals, its clear that professional women voters have departed from the Liberal Party,” he said.

“The issue of gender voting has confounded the Liberals.”

Following her ascent to leader, Ley admitted the Coalition had “let women down” at the federal election.

“There is no doubt about that, and that is true, the number of women that are supporting us is declining, and I want to rule the line under that,” she told reporters on Tuesday.

Rolfe said Ley would have a challenging path as leader of a party that is mostly made up of conservative MPs.

John Mickel, former Labor MP and adjunct associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology, said appearing moderate could be the key to winning back voters, particularly professional women.

“The Liberal Party no longer knows has the support of particularly younger people and professional women. So the attractiveness of Sussan Ley would be that she would be seen as somebody who could attract or entice back the female vote.”