The position of opposition leader in the ACT is not associated with job security. One crack at an election is all anyone usually gets.
Elizabeth Lee ended days of speculation on Tuesday by announcing she would contest the Liberals' party room ballot on Thursday in an effort to keep her job, after the Liberals lost their seventh straight election.
Ms Lee said she believed she was still the best person to lead the party, in effect saying she needed another election to lead the party back to government.
Jeremy Hanson, who led the party to its defeat in 2016 and has been an MLA since 2008, had wasted little time after the election to confirm he would be a contender. He's no stranger to party room ballots.
The obvious framing of this is another duel between the moderates and the conservatives. In many ways, it is.
But both Ms Lee and Mr Hanson have sought to set out the terms of this contest differently.
Mr Hanson's case purports to be based on the logical conclusion that the Liberal leader needs to come from an electorate where their preferences can secure a second seat; he said the party needs to move beyond the right-versus-left squabbles and onto the concerns of Canberra's suburbanites.
Ms Lee's case centres on the need for the party to have stability, to take on feedback, and change a little. The leader needed to be the best for the party and the ACT, she said, not selected for location. Ms Lee, too, wasn't interested in the moderate-conservative divide when prompted by journalists on Tuesday. No, the Liberals needed to be about making sure Canberrans got the services they paid rates for and deserved.
So who wins the contest?
Mark Parton, the quota-grabbing Brindabella Liberal, shared a telling photograph on Facebook late on Monday night, taken at the ClubsACT's Clubs and Community Awards that evening.
There was Mr Parton with Ms Lee, newly elected member for Ginninderra Chiaka Barry, current deputy Liberal leader Leanne Castley and Peter Cain, who was the incumbent Liberal member for Ginninderra.
All smiles, here together were the five people needed to assure Ms Lee's leadership, pictured the night before Ms Lee announced her intentions at a press conference. If Mr Hanson has the support of all elected Liberals who were not pictured, he still only has four: Deborah Morris, James Milligan, Ed Cocks and himself.
It would be enough for Ms Lee to settle the duel, but hardly points to total subsequent disarmament afterwards. That would require ongoing effort.
Interestingly, Mr Hanson and Ms Lee are both correct about one important thing. To demonstrate they are an alternative government in 2028, the Canberra Liberals cannot be focused on their interminable internal quandaries. Much better to be going hammer and tongs at policy development and knocking the government.
The result in 2024 indicates the conservative moniker has little impact in the suburbs: Mr Hanson was the top-polling candidate in Murrumbidgee, the Liberals did very well indeed in Brindabella, and Labor's partially dubious attacks on Leanne Castley's position on abortion seemed to have no bite in Yerrabi.
Where it did sting was Kurrajong, the inner city seat where the Liberals suffered a 3.3 per cent swing against them, despite their leader at the top of their ticket. It's a course the party will need to correct. Overall, the party went backwards by just 0.4 per cent; Labor went backwards by 3.7 per cent. They're not the forever opposition some assume them to be.
Perhaps Ms Lee's offer of a shadow cabinet position for Mr Hanson, whom she banished to the backbench late last year in one of the term's more fractious moments, was the most astute political move made on Tuesday.
Time will tell whether it's like sleeping with a grenade under one's pillow or whether it instead refocuses the party's attention on carving a path into government.
