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Much like the seminal early-aughts Britney Spears film, Sussan Ley found herself at a crossroads this week.
Fresh off what should've been a good week in parliament, the opposition leader had to launch operation damage control and loaded up the car with her team and headed on the road to meet with the Indian Australian community following Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's remarks on migration.
The NT senator's claim the government had politicised Australia's migration program and was favouring Indian migrants because they voted for Labor reverberated. So did her refusal to apologise.
A range of Coalition frontbenchers called for Nampijinpa Price to nip the story in the bud and say sorry. She wouldn't. It was just clumsy wording, she'd argued. Ley also didn't apologise on the senator's behalf, not wanting to put words in her mouth.
The so-called "henchman" Alex Hawke was dispatched to encourage Nampijimpa Price to make amends. In his view, she didn't mean what she said but even if she wasn't being racist, that's how it came across.
Even Nampijinpa Price's old friends in the Nationals were clear: they didn't want to be tarred with the same brush. Meanwhile, the man she initially replaced in Dutton's ministry, Julian Leeser,
took it upon himself to apologise to the community on her behalf.
This was a sacking
Nampijinpa Price rose from a first-term backbencher to a high-profile shadow minister in less than a year. Her prominent role in opposition to the Voice to Parliament made her a household name. Ambitious for more, the conservative movement darling defected from the Nationals after the election to launch a failed run for the deputy leadership.
Standing outside in the dark and cold in Hobart, you could almost see Ley's mind ticking over in the snap press conference she called to take place smack bang in the middle of the east coast's nightly news bulletins. The comments, she said, had caused "significant hurt" to the Indian Australian community.
Undoubtedly it was Nampijinpa Price's refusal to endorse Ley's leadership that signed her ticket to the backbench just 105 days after Ley originally demoted the senator to the shadow outer ministry.
It was a point the leader's office wanted us to know too. This was a sacking, not someone standing aside.
Come Thursday, Ley was finally ready to apologise to Indian Australians who were "hurt and distressed" by the remarks.
The opposition leader, who was on a visit to a housing development in Tasmania, looked around at the foundations of the in-progress dwellings as she emphasised that migrants, too, are struggling with the housing crisis and anxious for the government to deliver.
She also wanted voters to know the opposition is fighting … for Australians, that is. And that her leadership was "absolutely not" under threat.
A damaging distraction
The saga has been a damaging distraction for an opposition already desperate to rebuild its trust and reputation with Australia's multicultural communities after a series of missteps.
Ley has already held a number of roundtables with Chinese community leaders in a bid to repair damage caused by senator Jane Hume's off-hand "Chinese spies" remark (Hume was also demoted post-election).
The whole saga is a chink in Ley's armour and at the very least handed Labor a helluva lot of material for their 2028 election campaign.
However, in making the move to dump someone the minute they expressed dissatisfaction in her leadership, Ley issued a challenge to others who might consider a move against her: back her in now, or step out into the light and be associated with Nampijinpa Price's remarks.
She didn't have much choice, even if it's a gamble.
Especially as the news cycle turns towards the government's climate targets, which will no doubt pour even more fuel on the fire of the internal fighting over the Coalition's own climate ambitions.
Pacifically yours
Speaking of climate, the clock is officially ticking for the government to set its 2035 climate target. As David Speers wrote this week, the timing of the announcement is delicate.
Anthony Albanese has spent the week at the Pacific Island Forum in Solomon Islands and in Vanuatu, where the prime minister repeated his argument that climate change action is the "entry fee" for credibility in the Pacific.
But some Pacific leaders aren't happy about Australia's plans to approve the extension of Woodside's North West Shelf gas project. A stopover in Vanuatu also didn't end the way the prime minister would have hoped, after the Pacific island nation declined to sign
a $500 million security and development deal as had previously been planned.
Albanese was also the victim of a fashion faux pas, arriving to a meeting of Pacific Island Forum leaders in a bright pink shirt that screamed "look at me" instead of the uniform dark blue leaders shirts.
After sending what this column can only assume was several strongly worded text messages to staffers on the ground to locate the outfit he should've been wearing, the prime minister excused himself from the table, only to return a short time later in the right attire.
Never one to pass up a playful shot at Albanese, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon joked: "You've got to reiterate quite a lot to the Australians what they need to be doing and the rules sometimes." |
