Former Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes arrives at a Liberals party room meeting for a leadership ballot at Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday, May 13, 2025. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
Former Senator Hollie Hughes has severed ties with the Liberal Party, declaring the organisation had descended into “absolute rabble” and that she was no longer willing to stay silent about internal dysfunction.
In interviews on Nov. 19, Hughes said she remained a supporter of leaader Sussan Ley but was fed up with colleagues she accused of sabotaging the opposition leader.
“She’s doing an outstanding job but there are people who are undermining her,” Hughes told 2GB. “But there are some people who are completely inept, who are lazy, who are not across the details.”
Hughes said she believed Ley had handled recent internal debates well, particularly the party’s shift on net zero.
“I think what she has done over the last couple of months, bringing really giving people an opportunity to air their views and discuss and then the net zero policy that she brought out, I think was incredibly solid, and she’s done a great job since then,” she said.
But the final straw, she said, was the NSW division’s decision to keep supporting net zero despite the federal party abandoning the target.
“But if you’ve got a state parliamentary party at odds with the federal parliamentary party. I don’t know how it works, so I decided that’s it, enough.”
Internal Rift Exposed
Hughes, who represented NSW from 2019 until losing preselection before the 2025 election, said she resigned because she was “sick of it,” adding: “Enough’s enough.”
She said she wanted the freedom to call out what she described as chronic underperformance from some MPs.
“I’m not going to do what some former parliamentarians have done, [which] is stay in the party yet snipe from the sidelines. I come on and I talk to you and I want to be able to say what I want to say without being restricted by party rules,” she said.
Speaking later to Sky News Australia, Hughes accused a group of Liberals of undermining Ley’s leadership, naming senators Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Sarah Henderson and suggesting they were acting on behalf of Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie.
“Quite frankly, Jacinta and Sarah, I think, are being used by the two men who want push forward with a challenge, but don’t have the gumption to do it,” she said.
