Today, Sussan Ley faces a pivotal moment as she convenes a meeting with her party members to deliberate on the Liberal Party’s stance regarding net-zero emissions.

Her approach is to remain largely silent, allowing MPs and Senators to voice their opinions. Following this discussion, she intends to reconvene with her shadow cabinet to craft a policy that could extend her tenure as opposition leader.

“It’s not a strategy, it’s just weak,” a Liberal MP candidly expressed to Daily Mail Australia.

Supporters of Ley, primarily her political aides, argue that she maintains an open mind on the issue.

This openness is likely a tactic to avoid making any statements that could jeopardize her position, reflecting the precariousness of her situation.

The topic has sparked a fierce debate within the party, with conservatives and moderates holding starkly different views on the way forward.

Conservatives want the target scrapped altogether. Moderates say without it the Liberal Party is trading away its electoral viability, especially in the cities, which is where the overwhelming majority of voters live.

The vast majority of Liberal MPs aren’t ideological on this issue. Like Ley as leader, they just want to survive in their seats and will go where the wind blows.

Today, Sussan Ley puts her leadership on the line, calling a party room meeting for this afternoon to nut out the Liberal Party’s position on net zero.

It’s blowing hard within Liberal ranks, including amongst the ageing, dwindling party membership, in favour of dumping net zero.

The party research that federal director Andrew Hirst will present as part of the meeting of MPs and Senators will be important.

It will show that younger voters and women are strongly in favour of climate action and equate that with supporting net zero. But it will also highlight that the majority of voters are more concerned with energy prices than climate action – unsurprising given the cost-of-living crisis being made worse by rising energy prices.

Expect opponents of the net zero target to latch onto this fact as good reason to dump the target and focus on Labor’s approach as the cause of price woes. It’s not that simple, but simple messages cut through with simple people, and the Liberal party room is by and large nothing if not simple.

In truth, Ley’s leadership is already dead in the water, but following what the majority of her colleagues want on this issue will avoid a party room coup – a stay of execution, if you will.

So, in a sense, Ley will survive as leader this afternoon by not showing leadership. Or branded another way, she’ll lead by following. It’s an approach torn from the script of the British satirical series Yes Prime Minister, where Jim Hacker once said: I am their leader, I must follow them.

The only problem is that the majority of the electorate want to keep net zero, and the full Hacker quote actually reads: ‘it’s the will of the people, I am their leader I must follow them’.

If Ley wants to be PM, she can’t dump net zero. But that’s a longer-term problem. Six months into being opposition leader, she has more immediate problems, and sacrificing the net zero target buys her time.

Ley’s leadership is already dead in the water, but following what the majority of her colleagues want on this issue will avoid a party room coup – a stay of execution, if you will

Senior moderate frontbencher Tim Wilson told Sky News this week that he wants to see leadership shown by Ley this afternoon. 

He’ll be sorely disappointed, unless silence is enough.

Wilson and other frontbench moderates (Anne Ruston, Andrew Bragg and Maria Kovacic) are apparently considering resigning from the shadow ministry if net zero gets dumped. Conservatives are planning to do the same if it’s not, joining former frontbenchers Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Price on the backbench.

Simply put, it’s a mess, and that’s before you even consider what comes next for the Coalition. The Nationals have already held their party room meeting and dumped net zero. If the Liberals don’t do the same, it’s hard to see how the Coalition can remain intact.

Which brings us to a key criticism the non-aligned within the party have when it comes to Ley and her lack of leadership. 

‘This was always going to be a pressure point after the election’, one of the most senior figures in the Liberal Party says. 

‘Sussan needed to stay ahead of it. She needed to stake out a clear position so that the Nationals didn’t do it for her.’

Coalition divisions over how to address climate change have been ever-present, going right back to when John Howard refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol ahead of the 2007 election, but did commit to introducing an emissions trading scheme.

Divisions over the particulars of an ETS defined the Malcolm Turnbull/Tony Abbott showdown in 2009, before Abbott won out and used his opposition to Julia Gillard’s carbon tax at the 2013 election as a pathway to power.

The vast majority of Liberal MPs aren’t ideological on this issue. Like Ley as leader, they just want to survive in their seats and will go where the wind blows

Since that time, the internal Coalition fights over climate change went largely underground, managed behind the scenes, but they never went away. That’s what can happen when Liberals and Nationals form government.

But after Scott Morrison’s 2022 election defeat, they resurfaced, only managed by the authority Peter Dutton has as opposition leader. His sizeable loss earlier this year has brought all the tensions and disagreements back to the fore.

Whatever happens later today and in the coming weeks and months as a new policy over how to manage emissions cuts gets hatched out, divisions will remain. The differences of opinion between the protagonists are so great that a middle ground is hard to identify.

Whatever that middle ground looks like, it will only hold if the Coalition can become more competitive in the polls. Such success has a way of moving people on to focus on the possibility of winning.

Ley appears far too damaged already to lead the opposition into that space, and any new leader would only get the shortest of honeymoons to try before the cracks again widen and the disagreements flare back up.

In the meantime, the competitiveness of the opposition may well fall even further away if voters think that it has lost touch with their sentiments, which brings us back to younger voters, women and most Australians who live in the inner cities, all of whom feel strongest about climate change action.

Realistically, the only way the opposition can become competitive again is off the back of a full-blown economic crisis, which pushes emissions cuts off the agenda or wraps it up with higher energy bills in a way that turns the public against Labor on this issue.

That’s not impossible, but the Coalition would need to look like a credible alternative government capable of solving such issues. 

The danger for Liberals is that even if that economic armageddon scenario plays out, voters remain reluctant to entrust the rabble on the opposition benches with fixing things – instead giving Labor more time to solve the crisis.