Kellie Sloane did not come into politics planning to lead the NSW Liberal Party within one term. Yet here she is, elevated in a bloodless party room coup after Mark Speakman concluded he could not cut through in the media and could not turn around dire polling.
A former television journalist and charity CEO, the first term state MP for Vaucluse and shadow health minister, has been handed one of the toughest jobs in Australian politics: rebuilding a damaged brand in Australia’s largest state while standing opposite a popular first-term Labor premier.
Sloane’s rise tells us as much about the state of the Liberal Party as it does about her. Federal colleagues have just walked away from the net zero emissions target for 2050, shredding what was left of the Coalition’s climate consensus and confirming for many voters who equate climate action with the target, that the party still hasn’t come to terms with the politics of the 2020s.
NSW Liberals, stung by polling that shows metropolitan voters strongly backing net zero, have gone the other way and held the line, explicitly maintaining a 2050 target. Sloane, a moderate whose leadership only became inevitable once the right started counting numbers against Speakman, now has to navigate that contradiction: leading a state party that wants to look modern and electable while its federal colleagues double down on a climate culture war.
In politics you don’t get to choose your timing. Sloane didn’t want the leadership this quickly, but once the right began moving against Speakman, the choice became stark: either a moderate made a move or the leadership would eventually fall into conservative hands.
The story that has emerged is of Sloane’s allies approaching Speakman to step aside so that the succession remained in moderate control, rather than risk an ugly spill later. In that sense the transition was orderly, no public brawling, no contested ballot. But it was still a coup, driven by internal frustration that the Opposition had failed to land blows on Chris Minns, with polls showing little prospect of a change of government in 2027.
That context matters because it shapes how her colleagues will judge her. She takes over in circumstances where the most likely outcome at the next election is still a Labor win. Minns is personally popular and presents as sensible. He hasn’t yet made the sort of glaring mistake that turns a first term government into a one term wonder.
The last election result was not a landslide, meaning that Labor’s win was modest and its majority threadbare. That creates an awkward benchmark for Sloane going forward. If she fails to gain ground, or worse, if the Coalition goes backwards as is more likely, the optics could be brutal.
You’re in: Kellie Sloane has been appointed the NSW Liberals leader – after only winning her seat in Parliament at the last election
Even if she performs better than anyone else realistically could have, a negative seat count would be seized on by the party’s right as proof that the moderates’ experiment failed and they deserve a chance to do better.
Internally, then, her first task is discipline. Speakman’s problem wasn’t only a lack of media cut through; it included a sense that the party room was permanently restless, with too many MPs more interested in factional positioning than building a credible alternative government.
Sloane will get a short honeymoon because she is a fresh face, a new story for the press gallery and for voters. She might even get an easier than usual ride from the media, given her background and likeable persona.
But honeymoons in opposition usually don’t last. She has to convince ambitious colleagues (particularly those on the right) that their best chance of ever serving in government again is to back her rather than white ant.
If the party looks like it is already measuring her up for a political coffin, voters will treat the NSW Liberals as a protest movement rather than a government-in-waiting.
The climate divide with Canberra makes this task harder than it otherwise should be. The federal party’s decision to abandon net zero may well be electorally suicidal in the very kinds of affluent, professional and socially liberal seats that used to be the Liberal heartland.
But Sloane also needs voter support in outer metro Sydney seats if she’s to form government, and we need to wait to see what their reaction is to the diverse opinions on net zero within the Liberal Party.
NSW Liberals have already signalled that they will keep their own net zero target, and Speakman upon departing urged the party to maintain its environmental credentials. But the pressure from Canberra will be intense.
Kellie Sloane at least brings a point of interest to the job – her TV background. Seen above on Sunrise with Samantha Armytage, Andrew O’Keefe and Mark Beretta
Federal Liberals will argue for consistency, for one national message, and for avoiding mixed signals. That is code for getting state branches to bend the knee to whatever position the federal leadership has cobbled together to keep its own party room quiet.
Victorian Liberal senator Sarah Henderson has already said that Sloane should dump the net zero target, claiming that party members in NSW want that. This debate won’t end anytime soon.
If Sloane yields to that pressure and drifts towards the federal line on emissions, she will instantly alienate the very metropolitan voters she has been elevated to win back, and she risks splitting her own state party in the process.
Equally, if she resists and unapologetically sticks with net zero, she will certainly deepen the already growing divide between state and federal Liberals. There is no painless option here.
The best Sloane can do is what she has signalled so far: decline to be drawn into commentary on federal decisions, insist that her job is to offer a modern, centre-right alternative for NSW, and quietly demonstrate through policy that she understands where the state electorate actually is on climate and more importantly on other state based issues.
Her own seat is a problem and an opportunity. Vaucluse is the very definition of a silvertail electorate: harbour views, some of the most expensive real estate in the country, and a reputation for privilege that Labor strategists can weaponise in their sleep.
Peter Debnam discovered that when Labor caricatured him as out of touch and he never really escaped the image of a rich toff who strutted around in his Speedos. Sloane has already been criticised for opposing housing developments and higher density in her electorate, putting her on the wrong side of the housing crisis in the eyes of even some Liberals.
Those positions might be popular locally as the sitting MP, but they complicate any attempt to present herself as a premier-in-waiting who gets western Sydney. Mark Latham is already calling her ‘caviar Kellie’, because of an unfortunate series of posts she made more than a decade ago about superyachts.
Peter Debnam – the Liberal opposition leader almost 20 years ago, and also the MP for Vaucluse – was ruthlessly caricatured by Labor as out of touch (as well as for fronting press conferences in his Speedos)
If Labor overplays the class war angle, however, it could backfire, especially if attacks on Sloane feel snobbish in reverse – by mocking someone from the east simply for being from the east. But she shouldn’t rely on Labor misreading the room.
She needs to show, quickly, that she is capable of talking credibly about cost of living, housing supply and public services in parts of Sydney that look nothing like Vaucluse.
Sloane must be therefore willing to back policies that might upset her own backyard. That doesn’t mean signing up to every Labor planning proposal, but it does mean moving beyond the instinctive ‘not in my suburb’ reflex that has characterised too much of the Liberal response on housing.
The other obvious vulnerability is the empty suit charge. Her television background guarantees she will be dismissed by some as all optics and no substance, the political equivalent of a polished promo reel.
That can be turned around, but not with stunts or crafted photo opportunities. Her best defence is hard work on policy, starting with issues where she already has some credibility. Such as health, where she has been an effective critic of pressure points in the system.
But policy alternatives need to be developed to avoid the appearance of mere carping.
She then needs to extend such alternative government substance to areas where the Coalition needs a story that voters might sign up to: on energy, infrastructure and integrity in government, for example.
If she can demonstrate seriousness in such areas, voters are less likely to see her media skills as a gimmick and more as a useful asset in explaining complex reforms.
There is, buried in all this, a potential upside. Voters in NSW have often been comfortable with one side of politics in charge in Canberra and the other in Macquarie Street.
With Labor likely to remain in office federally for some time yet, Sloane can pitch herself as a check and balance on Albo: a modern, socially aware, economically literate Liberal premier who offers change without chaos.
For that to work she has to make crystal clear that she is not simply a branch office manager for a federal party lurching further to the right. The more the federal Liberals look like an anti-net-zero, anti-urban, anti-compromise outfit, the more room there is for a state Liberal leader to occupy a distinct, genuinely centre-right space. But it won’t be easy.
The risk, of course, is that her own party won’t let her do that. If the 2027 result is poor, and poor will be defined unforgivingly, the same forces that undermined Speakman will turn on her. In that sense Sloane’s leadership is a test not just of her own political skills but of what the NSW Liberal Party wants to be.
If it really wants to return to government, it will give her time and tolerate some internal discomfort as she distances herself from Canberra on climate and other issues. To build a policy offering that looks like it belongs in this decade rather than the last one.
Sloane will be campaigning to win the March 2027 election in sixteen months time, and doing so isn’t impossible. But a two term strategy is more realistic, not least because it’s hard to imagine Minns hanging around to fight a third election if he wins the next one.
All of which is why she would rather have hung back than step up to be leader now. But in the end she had no choice. As Barack Obama wrote in his memoir A Promised Land: ‘you don’t choose the time. The time chooses you’.
