Sussan Ley’s decline has hit terminal velocity in the latest Redbridge poll. Almost immediately, the left gleefully painted a picture of conservative disarray that’s as stark as it is unsurprising.

The Coalition’s primary vote has cratered to a dismal 24 per cent, while One Nation has surged to 18 per cent.

That’s right. A minor party, once dismissed as a fringe protest vote, is now nipping at the heels of what was supposed to be the natural party of government.

And Sussan Ley?

Her preferred Prime Minister rating sits at a record low of just 10 per cent, trailing Anthony Albanese’s 40 per cent by a chasm that no amount of spin can bridge. But ten points for trying. Not only has Ley announced the Coalition will dump Net Zero, but now she will focus on cutting immigration.

Nothing like a good poll to remind you of your raison d’être.

Australia is going down the gurgler fast. Our economy is buggered, Woke stupidity has ruined our democratic institutions, and our political class wants us to be subjects of a United Nations now influenced by third-world countries, the majority of which are dictatorships. We allow too many people to enter our country and share in her bounty without adding anything. Too many are bringing their medieval hatreds to our shores. Even our national security head honcho is getting worried.

Ley is back on track. The trouble is … nobody believes her.

Not the punters in the outer suburbs, not the farmers staring down the barrel of another energy crisis, and certainly not the growing chorus of conservative voters who’ve had enough of half-measures and virtue-signalling.

This isn’t just a bad poll, it’s a referendum on a leadership that’s allergic to conviction.

Ley has become like a sapling in the wind to the point where at the time of writing, reports were emerging of Coalition moderates abandoning Ley for Andrew Hastie. Ley was copying Hastie’s policies anyway, so why not go with the real leader?

In the meantime, One Nation’s performance in the polls has surged.

This brings me back to a point I made earlier this year in these pages. The Coalition’s path to victory isn’t some mystical two-party preferred threshold – it’s an historical reality that provides a pretty clear guide for the Coalition. Since 1975, the conservatives typically have formed government when they’ve beaten Labor on first preferences and cleared north of 41 per cent of the primary vote. It’s a consequence of our preferential system – splinter the right, and you gift the keys to The Lodge to the left. The lesson? Unify the conservative vote, or watch it evaporate.

Now, do the math on this Redbridge poll. The Coalition at 24 per cent, One Nation at 18 per cent. Add them up, and you’ve got 42 per cent which is a whisker over that magic 41 per cent. Suddenly, the doomsayers look a tad premature.

There’s a case here for a rejuvenated conservative coalition. Not the anaemic, poll-chasing version under Ley, but one forged with true conviction. Imagine a leader who doesn’t just mouth platitudes about reducing immigration to ‘win votes’ in the marginals, but who champions it as a bulwark to protect Australia’s way of life. Our housing stock, our infrastructure, our very social fabric.

The latest poll underscores this appetite. One Nation is seen as the party best placed to handle immigration.

The Liberals’ inertia is no cultural problem. It is a consequence of poor leadership.

But One Nation’s rise, like Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the UK, is not just a problem for the Coalition, it is fast becoming a problem for Labor, just as it is for Keir Starmer’s UK Labour. It’s only a matter of time for Anthony Albanese.

Labor, for all its smug complacency, is in real trouble. Albanese’s government is already creaking under the weight of its own migration explosion and Net Zero zealotry. Its policies have juiced inflation and alienated the aspirational class. Labor’s economic policies have no theoretical grounding other than socialism, and the historical record of socialism is that it never works.

Yet the leftist pundits and self-proclaimed psephologists will scoff, ‘The Coalition’s unelectable!’

They’d do well to remember that John Howard, Australia’s second longest serving Prime Minister, was once written off as ‘Mr 18 per cent’. He wasn’t low in the polls for dithering, but the leftists then, as now, thought his vision for Australia was old-fashioned and couldn’t win votes. Until it did.

As the saying goes, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’

But polls aren’t prophecies, they’re prompts. The real story here isn’t Labor’s lead, it’s the fracturing of the conservative vote that’s been hijacked by moderates within the Liberals who have vested interests, and none of those in the national interest.

Sussan Ley might be the current custodian, but she’s no conviction politician. The base knows it, the numbers confirm it, and One Nation’s rise is proof.

Not just the Coalition, but conservatives more generally must rediscover their spine. They need to embrace the 42 per cent, slash immigration for Australia’s sake, bury Net Zero and tell Paris and the UN to get stuffed without apology. Do that, and the next election won’t be a pollster’s fever dream, it’ll be a conservative rout.

Ley’s political epitaph will read, ‘Nobody believed her’.

In the meantime, the 42 per cent of Australians who care deeply about this country are waiting impatiently for leadership that is more than just a position and a show for the chattering classes who are more interested in their intersectionality than their grandchildren’s futures.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.