The political killing season was in full force last week, decapitating leaders who stood no chance of resuscitation.
Two Liberal leaders were replaced — in Victoria and New South Wales — and as it happens, both were women replacing men.
The irony of watching two moderate teal-esque women rise at a time when the federal party was ready to pounce on its first female leader, Sussan Ley, was lost on no one.
Six months into Sussan Ley's leadership, her grip on the party has all but disappeared — that is, if it existed at all. It was always tenuous, with every vote Ley had that has now quietly exited the party room.
Kellie Sloane, in her first term as the Member for Vaucluse, is now the NSW Liberal leader. (ABC News: Abubakr Sajid)
Ley's political future
The latest Newspoll, published overnight in The Australian, will set the tone for the last sitting week of federal parliament.
Insiders and journalists will be craning their necks to look for a stalking horse to emerge and pull the trigger on a leadership change.
The two main aspirants, Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie, have told colleagues they are not ready to strike for the leadership and the fairly stable Newspoll result may not, for now, provide the evidentiary base the conservatives need to mount the case that Ley's leadership is terminal.
The optics of rolling the party's only woman leader when NSW and Victoria have managed to elevate traditional 'small-l liberal" candidates is playing on the minds of some in the party.
The moderates have read the room and while they can see that Ley's political survival is tenuous, they will not make it easy for Hastie or Taylor to roll her.
The idea of a bloodless coup is fanciful.
Canberra is littered with tortured political tales of the terrible aftershocks that follow necking a leader.
Angus Taylor is a potential Liberal leadership candidate. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)
A test and an opportunity
A big test and also a big opportunity exist in the coming week for Ley.
Labor would prefer to strike a deal with the Coalition to pass its planned overhaul of the nation's environment laws. Speaking about the proposed laws and parliament's return, Jim Chalmers said last week: "This is the primary business of the Senate."
His call to get a deal done has angered the Greens, who have been clear that they will be voting against the current legislation, saying, "it has been written for the mining and forestry lobby".
Labor, meanwhile, says the changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act aim to speed up approvals for renewable and resources projects while creating a new environmental watchdog with powers to halt the destruction of nature and penalise those responsible.
While the legislation has been handed to a parliamentary committee not due to report until March 2026, Ley could cut a deal this week to guarantee its passage and, in doing so, restore some of her party's badly damaged standing on the environment so soon after it dumped net zero.
But there are questions about whether she can even secure the numbers from her own party and whether the Nationals or even members of her own Liberal Party may use the deal as a trigger to cross the floor or obstruct her call.
One senior Liberal source said the lack of authority to even do a deal is at the heart of Ley's conundrum.
The problem for Ley is that she faces the prospect of One Nation gathering more supporters, something that would galvanise the campaign of leading conservatives to push the party further on a range of policies, including immigration.
So, while the moderates in the Liberal party are excited by the green shoots in the country's two biggest states, with the appointment of Jess Wilson in Victoria and Kellie Sloane in New South Wales, when they look to Canberra, things look a lot bleaker — there are fewer green shoots and more wilted leaves.
Patricia Karvelas is host of ABC News Afternoon Briefing at 4pm weekdays on ABC News Channel, co-host of the weekly Party Room podcast with Fran Kelly and host of politics and news podcast Politics Now.
