Grattan on Friday: Sussan Ley hasn’t solved her Jacinta Price problem – it may just become bigger

It says everything about the Liberals that the fracas over Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s comments about Indian immigrants became a proxy for the longer-term, debilitating battle over the party’s leadership and identity.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley mishandled the affair initially by not personally dealing with Price at once. But it quickly became clear Price was using the situation to play the victim and defy her leader.

After a week of damage to the Liberals, when Price on Wednesday refused to endorse her leadership, Ley sacked her recalcitrant colleague from the shadow ministry (as she had to).

In doing so, Ley upheld her authority. But she must know she also undermined that authority.

Price has signalled she’ll use her backbench freedom to talk on whatever she likes, including divisive issues such as net zero.

From Price’s point of view, it might be a setback, but it has advantages. She no longer has to master those knotty details about procurement policy she was supposed to get across in the defence industry portfolio she held.

She doesn’t have to work so hard. She can swan around feted by the Coalition’s conservative base, enjoying regular spots on Sky News, and creating headlines when she says something provocative.

From a distance, Price can watch Ley grapple with what seems an impossible job and, if and when it all blows up, she can reckon on getting some of the spoils from whoever leads the new order.

Price’s misstep – saying the government encouraged Indian immigrants because they voted Labor – would have been quickly fixed if the Liberal Party was functional and collegiate.

But it is a seething mass of frustrated ambition, resentment, tribalism and deep ideological division.

Ley’s factional protector, Alex Hawke (who previously was Scott Morrison’s numbers man), was in the firing line after he tried unsuccessfully to strong-arm Price into an apology. Factional warriors prefer to work in a dim light; Price, effectively accusing Hawke of bullying, shone a spotlight on a figure who already has plenty of enemies.

Two Liberal women, Sarah Henderson and Jane Hume, whom Ley demoted to the backbench, waded into the Price affair. They come at Ley from opposite ends of the spectrum: Henderson is a conservative, Hume is usually with the moderates. Anger can make for strange bedfellows. They are unlikely to give up.

Ley’s leadership is safe for the moment. Her opponents are aware she has to be given time. While the pro- and anti-Ley numbers in the party room are close, wannabes Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie know that trying to take down the first Liberal female leader would be a messy business.

Taylor has been careful with his words, but the behaviour of Hastie, a member of the shadow cabinet, is extraordinary. He trails his leadership coat while saying now isn’t the time (young family and all that). He repeatedly preempts the party’s net-zero review.

On Thursday he said, “People know I have a desire to lead but there isn’t a move”. He said he’d speak out on issues such as energy (despite being spokesman on home affairs, not energy): “I oppose net zero”.

Looking at what is ahead of Ley, you have to ask: if one rebellious senator brought a crisis, how can she and her party hope to get on top of everything else besetting them?

The most obvious issue is the future of the commitment to net zero. The Nationals will almost certainly dump it, and it’s becoming anyone’s guess what the Liberals will do. If they stick with net zero, do the parties split the Coalition?

The Liberal Party is now two parties. One is made up of the conservatives, obsessed with anti-“wokism”, who want to go further to the right, having given up on the urban seats now held by teals. The other is centred on the moderate wing plus some pragmatists, who seek policies that can win urban electorates, but lack fresh ideas about the shape they should take.

Ley is hardworking, and many centrist voters would probably like to see her succeed. But she is not an innovative policy thinker.

Later this year, the Liberals will release the report on their election performance, by former federal minister Nick Minchin and former state minister Pru Goward. They’ve been undertaking many interviews, but they hardly need them to identify what went wrong.

Policy that was ill-prepared and left too late; an unpopular and often tone-deaf leader; failure to reach key constituencies, especially women and young people; and multiple inadequacies with the party’s ground game.

Minchin and Goward will stress the Liberals must step up their efforts with the young, female voters and ethnic communities. But is Ley likely to have a snowball’s chance in hell of doing this?

The infighting over climate will alienate young voters, already turned off the main parties. If the Liberals were rash enough to ditch net zero, nothing they could do would drag younger voters back.

The party is fractured over quotas for female candidates, with Ley sitting awkwardly on the barbed-wire fence while saying there must be more women, however it’s achieved. Moreover, the Albanese government has made delivering for women one of its priorities – the Liberals could never outdo it here.

Meanwhile, senior party figures can’t even be civil about their own women. Victorian state director Stuart Smith had to resign on Thursday after belittling women in WhatsApp messages, including apparently joking that a female state Liberal MP had dementia.

The disaster that is the Victorian Liberal Party matters for Ley. If the Victorian Liberals do badly against what should be a highly vulnerable Allan government at next year’s election, there will be a knock-on impact for Ley, assuming she is still leader.

As for the migrant communities, alienating the Chinese diaspora has cost the party votes in the past and now it has added the Indians.

On Thursday Ley apologised, on behalf of the opposition, to the Indian community. As in her handling of the affair generally, the action came way too late.