Sussan Ley fights for conservative airtime as she struggles to hold together a fractured opposition | Josh Butler

Strip away the pinball machines and photo booth props at Cpac, and the scale of Ley's challenge in simply keeping the Coalition alive, let alone making it competitive again, becomes clear

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Aside from one crude caricature distributed in the crowd, Liberal leader Sussan Ley's name was almost entirely absent from the rightwing Conservative Political Action Conference in Brisbane.

But stripping away the sideshow attractions - Pauline Hanson's pinball machine, George Christensen's photo booth props - the thread running through the two-day event was the challenge Ley has to simply hold her party together amid a volatile fracturing of the conservative landscape, let alone for the Coalition to be competitive again.