Upon hearing the news that Senator Duniam would be stepping away from politics before the federal election, I immediately wondered what this could mean for Andrew Hastie’s leadership prospects.
Remember 2025?
The end of the year served as a ‘last hurrah’ for the moderate faction.
Sussan Ley was meant to be a modern woman for a modern Liberal Party, fixing the mistakes of the Dutton disaster. Voters were offered promotional photographs of Liberal ministers in pink suits performing power walks. Serious discussions were held about quotas for branches. And there was an endless listening tour to canvas the conservative mind.
Their mission was to lure professional voters back to the blue ribbon and balance out the gender disparity present in the Liberal Party.
Women rejected the cynicism.
Having overseen two Coalition breakups, Ley finally stepped down (and out) of politics in early 2026 leaving the Liberals to suffer the unimaginable embarrassment of the Farrer by-election which One Nation won.
Speculation about Ley’s demise resulted in the moderate faction being shoved to the side and the future of the Liberals left to a micro-factional scuffle between the conservative personalities of Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie.
For Liberal Party members and voters, this turn of events was inevitable. Spectators on the other side of the political fence had a different take… Who could forget the Guardian’s rather colourful description:
…images of a cabal of right-wing Liberal men gathering for clandestine talks to overthrow the party’s first female leader.
Such commentary, in my opinion, robbed Ley of her agency as a leader. Her downfall was her own.
Regardless, this began one of the least interesting but perhaps most consequential contests for the survival of the Liberal Party.
Looking back, Hastie’s leadership noises started in late September of 2025 which I (wrongly) dismissed. Perched on a red GT 351 Ford Falcon, Hastie started giving passionate speeches to his Instagram audience presenting himself as leadership material without explicitly saying so. Technically, it was a pitch to revive Australia’s manufacturing industry which I criticised for the simple reason that young Australians aren’t likely to vote for someone who wants them to do manual labour. At the time, he was being compared to Ley and the Net Zero agenda, not to Taylor and One Nation.
Somewhere in this mix, Barnaby Joyce defected to One Nation, the Nationals had their own leadership spills, and Ley banished some of the most popular conservatives to the backbench. Then we had the will-they-won’t-they weeks where both Hastie and Taylor chickened out of a leadership spill in late January. The numbers had not materialised in the party room for a spill. Yet. Although the ABC was speculating about Tony Abbott urging Hastie and Taylor to pick a leader and unite. Abbott is now the Federal Party President.
Taylor emerged as the more conservative of the two while the initial momentum that Hastie held 12 months ago was already softening after public missteps, including during the hate speech legislation debate which led to controversial Instagram commentary with his strongest fans.
It was a weird leadership contest with a focus on bloodless rather than robust.
Hastie was seen as the fresh face of conservatism while Taylor presented himself as nostalgia in a suit. Neither approach quite landed. And the decision was left up to the backroom, not the membership.
News reports suggested that Hastie spent some time in the lead. This was not to be.
By the end of January, Hastie had dropped out and made it clear that he would not be contesting the leadership, leaving the path open for Taylor to challenge Ley, which he did, and won.
Everyone now knows that Hastie has his eye on the leadership…
Overseeing this leadership spill, seen as critical to the survival of the Liberal Party, were reported powerbrokers James Paterson (for Taylor) and Jonno Duniam (for Hastie).
When the core leadership group walked out to face the press, Senator Duniam was there with them.
Some even picked him as a future party leader.
The months since the leadership spill have been some of the most difficult on record for the Liberal Party.
A malaise has taken over the membership and commentariat. Even rusted-on Liberals have been drawn over to the drama and hype of One Nation. People want to be part of the winning team. Like it or not, Pauline is winning.
When Angus Taylor took the leadership, he was presented with a poisoned chalice and now he has the unenviable task of either drinking it or chucking it away and rebuilding the entire Liberal Party from ideological scratch.
The leadership scuffle and general state of the party has, by his own admission, had an impact on Jonno Duniam.
On June 14, The Australian wrote:
Liberal frontbencher Jonno Duniam says the ‘exhausting’ leadership change that saw Angus Taylor topple Sussan Ley crystallised his decision to quit politics, while conceding One Nation was a serious chance of picking up a Senate seat in his home state of Tasmania.
They further quote Senator Duniam:
‘The leadership change earlier this year was a point in time where I thought, “I’ve had enough. I think there are things that I need to tend to that are more important than this.”
‘It was a difficult time for our party.
‘It’s not the first leadership change I’ve been a part of, but they are energy and time-consuming, they don’t generally help in a party’s pursuit of government and good policy and good outcomes, but at that point in time, it was clear to me it was something I needed to do. I’d made it clear to Angus and others that it was on my mind.
‘The leadership change was an exhausting process. It was a difficult one. We’d come off the back of dealing with Net Zero again internally … that personally was very exhausting. I’d only just taken on the Home Affairs portfolio. We had our response to [the] Bondi [Beach massacre], again a deeply exhausting process, one that I put a lot of effort into, supported by others, of course.
‘When the leadership change came along, it started to really wear on me. It was less about the direction [of the party] and more about my personal energy levels and to that end, that is why I made that decision.’
Duniam has also said that it is too early for preference deals with One Nation.
‘If we’re just going to raise the white flag and say, “It’s over now, we’ve just got to do deals with others to get across the line…” then we’re not doing our job properly.’
Duniam’s home state, Tasmania, is stacking up to be a problem for the Liberals anyway, with Pauline Hanson’s daughter having a second crack.
And so it was that we saw the resignations of two Tasmanian Senators, Jonathon Duniam and Wendy Askew.
‘Obviously,’ said Duniam, ‘I acknowledge that I am leaving at a difficult time for the Coalition. This was an extremely difficult decision to make – albeit that it is one I have been considering for quite some time.
‘I have spent 25 years in politics, the last 10 of those as a Senator for Tasmania – and I have given everything to these responsibilities, often at the expense of family. Twenty-five years is a long time in any vocation and, when you take your role seriously, it always comes first. It is time I reversed my priorities and I can’t do that if I am to stay in politics.’
After the frontbench reshuffles are done, and with Duniam removed from the conversation, we are left, once again, with Taylor and Hastie.
Angus Taylor is facing appalling polls which are calling into question their status as a major party. In any other time, Taylor would have been rolled, but there seems to be an understanding that this situation is not Taylor’s fault and if he was to be challenged, who would the Liberals replace him with, Andrew Hastie? Would that help? You tell me.
Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
