Ley was 13 when her family arrived in Australia. They bought a hobby farm in southern Queensland before moving to Canberra, where Ley embraced the capital’s punk rock scene. She had spiky purple hair, wore a dog collar around her neck and “a razor blade in one ear with a nose piercing that went to [it]”.

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That was when Susan became Sussan, with the extra s guided by numerology.

Ley set her sights on becoming a pilot. At 19, she worked three jobs – in the public service, cleaning and waitressing – to pay for flying lessons. Despite gaining her commercial licence at 20, she could not land a role; few companies accepted female pilots. Instead, she became an air traffic controller, where one day a male co-worker said: “How does it feel coming to work every day knowing you’re not wanted because you’re a woman?”

When a shearing contractor in Queensland called her in as an emergency bush pilot, mustering stock from the sky, Ley jumped. “I packed up my whole life in 48 hours. I squeezed everything into my 1969 Holden and left Sydney. I went from about as city as you can get to as country as you can get … They used to call me ‘City Sue’,” she has said.

Ley met her future husband in the shearing sheds and spent two years working 4.30am to 10.30pm as a rouseabout and cook. Her life until that point had been “privileged and a little spoilt”, Ley has said, but the manual labour did her good, and the couple settled on a farm in Victoria.

Ley’s interest in politics burgeoned over the decade as she studied tax law, economics and accounting while raising three kids under five, and owning a small business in a rural community. “What brought me into politics was this slowly dawning realisation that people in the Canberra bubble, a long, long way from where I was, didn’t understand what my life was like,” Ley told The Betoota Advocate podcast earlier this year.

She joined her local Liberal branch, but failed her first attempt at preselection, before her shot at Farrer came through. Ley campaigned in a caravan painted bright blue, winning by 206 votes in 2001.

Her political career from then is better known. She became a parliamentary secretary in the Howard government and assistant minister under Abbott. She was promoted to cabinet in 2014, as minister for health and sport, and added aged care when Malcolm Turnbull took over.

Then her career stumbled. She resigned from the frontbench in 2017 over an expense scandal that sprung from buying an $800,000 investment property while on a taxpayer-funded trip to the Gold Coast. But she was back as environment minister under Morrison in 2019, and has been Dutton’s deputy since 2022.

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When she took up that role three years ago, Ley told this masthead she wanted to help the party connect with women.

Her specific goal was to win back the six seats that fell to teal independents. As Saturday’s vote attests, that has fallen well short. It is one of many tasks Ley faces as she starts what will be her toughest adventure yet.

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