Craven, ill-advised and now repeatedly wedged, it’s too late for Ley

The Coalition is done. It is only a matter of when. It’s a self-saucing pudding of grievance, personal ambition and right-wing identity politics that is concerned only with consuming itself.

This is not all Ley’s fault, but her leadership is the inevitable end point of the Liberal Party’s past 30 years, where the road to success was paved by crushing your enemies, both internally and ideologically, and the electorate’s needs and desires be damned.

Ley has never held onto a principle that could not be bent if it meant her own personal ambitions could be realised. It’s shocking that someone who still insists a brief flirtation with punk in her teen years is all you need for a personality, who leans heavily on a version of herself that has not existed for decades (she was once a pilot! She has shorn sheep!) has not been able to pull together a party that treated her as an after-thought even when it had an actual leader.

Ley wanted an end to live exports until she was deputy leader. She was a friend of Palestine, until she was not. She wanted environmental protections until her party had a tantrum. Those are the issues she had time to think about.

Her base kneejerk political instinct is even more craven – like when she immediately vowed to repeal Labor’s stage-three tax cut changes without thought and then pretended it never happened.

We saw that on display again this week when she had no response to Anthony Albanese’s diplomatic triumph with Donald Trump. Whether or not the substance of the meeting was actually in Australia’s interests (more on that later) aside, the response from Trump was better than perhaps Albanese even hoped for.

Ley was unprepared and ill-advised. Instead of taking the “backing Australia” route, she grasped at an off-handed and inconsequential comment Trump delivered against Kevin Rudd, as if that was the most important issue at hand. On even that she was forced to retreat.

Is it any wonder that Ley has now found herself stuck between a rock and a hard place on the environmental laws, a position she has landed herself in by carefully cultivating political principles with all the heft of baking paper.

The environmental laws offered up by Labor are mostly designed to ensure the mining industry doesn’t have too many pesky regulations to deal with when it wants to open up new projects or expand existing ones. As a rule of thumb, if the mining industry is on-board with your environmental laws, then those laws aren’t exactly a winner for the environment.

Now, because national security trumps absolutely everything in the hierarchy of political needs, Resources Minister Madeleine King, who is maybe an even better friend to the sector than the cos-playing coal miner Matt Canavan, has linked the passage of the laws to the critical minerals deal Australia has just signed with the United States.

That means that Labor is running with “Daddy Trump wants the laws, so we have to do the laws, but the Coalition won’t come and do the laws with us, which means we might have to do the laws with the Greens and that would be better for the environment, and not as great for industry, and we don’t want to do the laws that way”.

You will notice that voters don’t really play into this. They rarely do when it comes to the environment.

The wedge Ley has created for herself in all of this though is this; industry wants the Liberals to negotiate with Labor on the laws because that will be better for it.

Barnaby Joyce and other braggadocios within the LNP will gleefully tear the Coalition apart if Ley gives the OK to the environmental laws’ passage. Labor has increased the pressure on Ley by claiming the laws’ passage is a matter of the nation’s security. So does Ley bend to industry and Labor? Or the gascons in her joint party room?

It doesn’t really matter of course. The Coalition is done no matter what she does, it’s just a matter of whether she wants her name linked as the final nail in the coffin or not by expediting it.

And if the Coalition don’t come back to the table, or the Greens won’t budge on things Labor doesn’t want to include, Labor will pull the laws, just as it did before. Either way, Ley isn’t facing a test to her leadership as much as a trial. You have to wonder what the point of it all is.

The focus should be firmly on Labor and what it is doing – and not doing – on the environment, in the name of “future proofing” Australia.

As Noa Wynn reported in Overland Journal this week, 80 per cent of Australia’s critical mineral projects sit on Indigenous lands. Australia has just entered into a multibillion-dollar deal with the United States for those minerals, and is attempting to rush through environmental “protection” laws that will create “go zones” for mining projects, with little recourse for anyone impacted, let alone the environment itself.

This is a massive issue. The Coalition, and Ley, are sideshows. One the government is, once again, using to its own advantage.