Sussan Ley’s leadership of the Coalition has survived a serious early test. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s acts of defiance have left the Liberal Party further weakened, however, and sparked a more public battle between its centre-right and far-right powerbrokers.
Price is now free to freelance from the back bench after Ley sacked her for failing to declare support for the Liberal leader at a Wednesday press conference, and for refusing to apologise for a “deeply hurtful” and misleading dig at the voting patterns of Indian migrants. Price also alleged on social media that Alex Hawke, who helped elevate Ley to the leadership, had berated her staff in “cowardly and inappropriate” conduct.
Hawke says Price’s actions have not come from a vacuum.
“It’s not all coming from her. She’s getting bad advice from some actors,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “They gave her bad advice to come to the Liberal Party and run straight away for the deputy leadership. That was bad advice.”
The Saturday Paper reported in May that former prime minister Tony Abbott planted the seed for Price’s post-election defection from the Nationals, after which she jumped straight onto Angus Taylor’s right-faction bid for leader – a joint ticket that Abbott backed.
Abbott confirmed his firm support for the senator this week in a statement to The Saturday Paper.
“I think Jacinta is one of the few Liberal MPs with a proven ability to provide national leadership,” Abbott says. “Australia should always be grateful that she spearheaded the successful campaign against racial division and, yes, she’s quite properly concerned about a government that can’t get immigration numbers under better control.”
He later posted to X that Price will be a “big loss to the frontbench”, but he was confident she will continue to make a “strong contribution to our public life”.
Liberal concern about Abbott’s continued involvement in the party’s internal affairs has been circulating since he officially left politics in 2019 when he lost his Sydney seat of Warringah to independent Zali Steggall.
Hawke leads the party’s centre-right, or “soft right”, faction, and some senior Liberal insiders see him targeted for what he means to Ley’s leadership.
“He and the moderates are now working together, and it took the few moderates that are left in that party room. Hawke did Sussan’s numbers and he managed to galvanise,” one insider tells The Saturday Paper. “He and Angus Taylor despise each other.”
The Saturday Paper contacted Taylor for comment this week, but he did not respond.
Price’s accusations of Hawke threatening her and her staffers was a rare public airing of internal discipline. She posted that the Liberal MP had warned that a failure to comply with his requests might see her “end up like another female member of the Coalition”. That reference drew anger from Jane Hume, whose comments about Chinese spies in the election campaign contributed to her ousting from the Liberal front bench. Hume said this week Hawke was acting as a “henchman”.
Hawke tells The Saturday Paper he did not berate anyone.
The ongoing stoush is yet more evidence – after the controversy over National Party MP Barnaby Joyce’s net zero repeal bill – of deep divisions within the Coalition as it pulls itself together after the May 3 election loss. It also follows the other net zero-related test of Ley’s leadership: the short-lived break-up of the Coalition in late May.
The Price stalemate and ouster has stunned the party only by its early timing so close to the election. The fracas also served to overshadow an otherwise solid week for the opposition, whose coordinated pressure in the Senate forced Labor to accelerate the release of home-care packages for older Australians.
“We had a huge week last week on the aged-care policy. Massive, like we actually had the government literally on the straps. And what did we get? Maybe 48 hours of it before Jacinta did what she did, right?” one moderate Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper.
Of Sussan Ley’s opponents, they say, “It’s basically that every time that she attempts … or when we have an opportunity to actually take a hit on the government, they choose instead to take the hit on her, and it’s a reflection of them, not of her leadership.
“This is a destabilisation strategy by that group, which is Sarah Henderson, Tony Pasin, Taylor, obviously, Jacinta Price, because that was that leadership team. And then obviously it’s all being egged on from the outside by Abbott and [Peta] Credlin.”
Abbott’s former chief of staff now Sky News presenter Peta Credlin leant into the controversy this week sympathetically interviewing Price and stating that her sacking is the “beginning of the end” for Sussan’s Ley’s leadership.
It’s understood senior members of the Right faction were also privately counselling Price over the past week to apologise. James Paterson and Andrew Hastie are among the Right party figures to back in Ley’s leadership in the wake of Price’s demotion.
“I despair for this party,” a senior Liberal insider tells The Saturday Paper. “It’s just beyond belief.
“What is a senator from the Northern Territory who was elected as a National – certainly wasn’t elected as one of us – what is she doing making comments like this in the first place? Stick to your lane.”
The party room widely agrees that Price forced Ley’s hand. In the ABC interview that sparked the week’s turmoil, Price took aim at her political opponents over migration. Taking up the theme of this month’s national anti-immigration rallies, which featured neo-Nazis, she singled out the Indian–Australian community and ignored Australia’s non-discriminatory migration policy and five-year citizenship process.
“There is a concern with the Indian community, and only because there’s been large numbers, and we can see that reflected in the way that the community votes for Labor at the same time.”
Price continues to say she regrets “not being clearer in my comments” and that she “never intended to be disparaging towards our Indian community”.
The senator, who drew strong praise from the right for her leadership of the “No” campaign in the October 2023 referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, was repeatedly asked by reporters this week if she had confidence in Ley as leader. Her consistent reply was, “Those matters are for our party room.”
Another Liberal MP describes her response to The Saturday Paper as missing “multiple off-ramps”.
“As it’s dragged on, there’s been a kind of view [in the party room] of Jacinta, ‘You got yourself in this mess, and then you could have fixed it up multiple times. There were multiple off-ramps that you’ve missed,’ ” the MP says.
“This has gone on for a week. Something had to give. And to be honest, as soon as I saw that press conference, and I know others had this view, it’s sort of like, this isn’t sustainable. You can’t answer questions like that.
“But obviously a lot of the membership, particularly the more right-wing membership, will be pretty upset about it.”
One insider says Price has “found out what happens when you test the boss’s authority”.
The opposition leader has been in constant damage control over the past week, however, including multiple community meetings and targeted social media posts. After copping criticism for not moving quickly to counsel Price directly and for not atoning on her behalf, Ley finally apologised to the Indian–Australian community on Thursday and “others who were hurt and distressed”.
She says she was giving Price space to “reflect” and act. Asked by a journalist if her leadership was under threat because of “how this has been handled”, Ley responded, “Absolutely not.”
Speaking to reporters in Hobart to announce Price’s sacking late on Wednesday, Ley said “confidence in the leader is a requirement for serving in the shadow ministry”, before adding that the Northern Territory representative is still warmly welcomed in the Liberal Party.
“She’s an outstanding Australian who has achieved much, and I know that she is admired and loved by many in this country.”
For her part, Price said she took the opportunity to express to Ley disappointment that the key point she was making about the “damaging impacts of mass migration” was being disregarded by some Liberals. Instead, she says, they “chose to indulge agenda-driven media commentary on this matter”.
For some colleagues, this statement was a reminder of her Trumpist calls to “make Australia great again” during the election campaign, and ungracious references on election night to media bias and “mudslinging” by Labor. Price also raised the prospect of a ban on abortion, and her latest remarks stirred internal concerns about her parroting neo-Nazi phrasing.
Price has the support of some of her former Nationals colleagues, including Senator Matt Canavan, who this week described her as a “political rock star” who would be welcomed back in the junior Coalition party.
As for any impact on Sussan Ley’s leadership, the Liberal MP who criticised the dragging on of the saga says, “I don’t think it’ll impact it in the short term, primarily because most of Jacinta’s core supporters were never voting for Sussan anyway, and there was a sort of recognition that potentially Jacinta was getting ahead of herself. I don’t think she has the support in the party room that she potentially thought she had, so I don’t think there’d be too many people upset on her behalf.”
There is a view among Ley’s supporters that she may even have firmed her grip on what is widely regarded as the worst job in politics.
“It probably strengthens,” the MP says. “That she has shown that strength, and those more middle-of-the-road – if you go down the theory that this was an orchestrated attempt to destabilise those middle-of-the-road supporters of Sussan – are not going to come across to Angus or anyone else because of this.”
“What is a senator from the Northern Territory who was elected as a National – certainly wasn’t elected as one of us – what is she doing making comments like this in the first place? Stick to your lane.”
The moderate Liberal also says Ley is being continually battle-hardened as a leader by her opponents. More is expected throughout the rest of the year.
“This reminds me of her first week in leadership, where her mother was literally dying, and the Nats turned up and blew up the Coalition, and you go, ‘Why are you doing that right now? Why now? What’s the urgency?’ ” they say.
More to come is a certainty.
Price can now use her backbench freedom to campaign on a whole raft of issues – she mentioned Indigenous matters, net zero, migration, the Chinese Communist Party, and the “indoctrination of children in our classrooms”, among others, in her statement on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the Ley leadership group continues a push to modernise the Coalition in what they regard as an existential battle for the party.
“You don’t have to be a genius to know that if you don’t win the metro Sydney seats, you’re done,” the moderate MP says.
Hawke says attempting to reflect and represent modern Australia is not a left or right concern. He says it is generational.
“We cannot just keep the older generations and then not appeal to the middle before we even get to 18- to 25-year-olds, but losing 35- to 50-year-old people. We have got to appeal to each generation on Liberal values. And that work has to be done,” he tells The Saturday Paper.
“I’m insistent on it, and we’ve got to reflect modern Australia. Sussan’s right about that. Again, not left or right.
“It’s a diverse country, and that’s why we’re having this debate right now. We can’t say to the biggest diaspora in the country – fantastic migrants, very open to the Liberal Party, very aspirational – that we don’t think that they make good migrants. They do. They’ve been fantastic Australians.”
Of Price, Hawke says, “I worked with her really closely on the ‘No’ campaign. I have a high opinion of her. This has diminished that between us, and that’s sad, and especially her breaching our personal confidence is very sad.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
September 13, 2025 as “‘I despair for this party’: Inside Jacinta Price’s sacking”.
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