Thu Oct 9

How to be a successful opposition

Written by Jill Sheppard, Senior Lecturer, School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University

Sussan Ley’s challenge as opposition leader is to keep her party united and ready to govern in the event that the government loses public favour. That is, they need to be a ready alternative government.

Voters evaluate governments on the basis of what they’ve done ^[1], but also what they promise to do next ^[2]. Opposition parties start on the back foot, as governments have greater public visibility and can use public money to ingratiate themselves with voters. Ley is particularly up against it, with only 51 members in her party room and little public confidence the party has any chance of winning the next federal election.

Inevitably though, the money runs dry or the government’s mistakes start to pile up. That’s when an opposition needs to be in a credible position to persuade swinging voters that they are a better option than the government. This broadly involves three stages: establishing competence, offering an alternative vision of government, and surviving the campaign.

Competence in opposition

The first stage – establishing competence – is where Ley and the Liberals now find themselves. Ley comes to the job with some question marks, having resigned ^[3] as health minister in 2017 amid accusations of misusing publicly-funded travel.

On the plus side, her early moves ^[4] to reinstitute formal policy development processes inside the party (including on “net zero” and nuclear energy) signal competence.

Former opposition leader Peter Dutton was competent in his own way ^[5], leading a defeated and fractious party room through a full parliamentary term with little public dissent and no serious challenges to his authority. However, this came at the expense ^[6] of any real policy agenda, and that contributed to their defeat at the 2025 election.

The more difficult task is to combine competence and vision, and this is where we introduce Andrew Hastie.

Hastie, as a recent member of the shadow cabinet and now backbencher, is less concerned with establishing competence than with offering his own vision ^[7] of a Liberal government. He attributed ^[8] his decision to resign as shadow minister for home affairs to a lack of autonomy over the party’s immigration policy. He appears to have no patience for deliberative policy development processes. It has also been reported ^[9] that Dutton accused Hastie of being “on strike” in the lead-up to the election.

Hastie’s position has been compared ^[10] to that of Tony Abbott, but as opposition leader, Abbott was actually quite conciliatory.

Before the 2013 election, he committed to support the NDIS, Labor-led education reforms and the National Broadband Network. He offered ^[11] stability and competence, particularly in contrast to six years of Labor in-fighting under Rudd and Gillard. His more conservative excesses (and awkward idiosyncrasies) came post-election.

Balancing competence and vision

Kevin Rudd – whom Abbott defeated in 2013 – offers the best recent example of an opposition leader successfully balancing competence with vision. It might be argued that Rudd’s “John Howard-lite” vision at the 2007 election was less ambitious ^[12] than electorally strategic. Still, his political style differentiated him from Howard, whose government was 11 years old, fractious, and had little energy for new policy.

Before Rudd came Howard himself, who won government from Paul Keating and Labor in 1996 with a mix of competence and conservative vision. The Liberal Party had been in opposition for 13 years, lost an “unloseable ^[13]” election in 1993, and rotated through a series of unpopular and gaffe-prone ^[14] leaders.

Howard was awkward in front of a camera but respected by his colleagues. He successfully sold the electorate on his vision ^[15] of nationalism, economic prudence, and blue-collar ambition.

Hastie seems in lockstep on the second part of Howard’s approach. His Instagram posts, public statements, and pre-parliamentary career in the military all point to ^[16] a traditionally conservative vision.

John Howard and Kevin Rudd combined competence with vision as opposition leader - and then won government. Alan Porritt/AAP

Winning the campaign

Hastie’s criticism of Ley seems to boil down to her insistence on competence at the expense of vision. However, Ley’s deliberative processes might yet produce a platform that concords with Hastie’s personal vision. If so, she will have ticked “competence” and “vision” on the opposition leader checklist, and Hastie may have limited his career unnecessarily.

An alternative outcome is that Ley’s Liberal Party deliberates over the next year or so and agrees on a platform that is more moderate ^[17] than Hastie (and fellow conservatives Jane Hume, Angus Taylor and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price) wants.

Hastie is wrong if he thinks winning from a centrist position is impossible, although it tends to require an incompetent government. Rudd defeated a moribund government whose two most senior figures openly despised ^[18] each other. Abbott toppled Rudd in his second stint ^[19] as prime minister after Rudd was deposed by and then deposed Julia Gillard. In the absence of a similar breakdown in Anthony Albanese’s Labor government, Hastie might be onto something.

In political science we call this valence politics ^[20]. There are many issues on which all voters generally agree: everyone wants fewer wars, good quality education, affordable healthcare, for instance. Parties can differentiate themselves on their ability to tackle these valence issues, or they can propose an alternative vision.

By tacking to the centre, the Liberals will need to demonstrate that they are more competent than Albanese’s government. Choosing vision over competence – Hastie’s apparent preference – is not for the faint-hearted.