Sussan Ley, who resigned as Australian Liberal leader after being ousted by Angus Taylor, has given her first interview since leaving politics, describing a Greyhound bus trip across the United States that left her struck by a deep public "disconnect" from institutions and government. Travelling incognito from North Dakota to Texas, she said the experience reinforced her belief that Australia's multicultural model, which she credits with giving different communities space to belong rather than erasing their differences, has succeeded where America has not, offering a pointed contrast as One Nation's influence grows in her own former electorate.

Speaking to the ABC's 7.30 programme with Sarah Ferguson, Ley said she had expected to find strong national pride but instead encountered widespread disinterest and estrangement between ordinary Americans and the institutions meant to represent them, meeting vagrants, ranchers, nuns and ex-prisoners along the way. Asked about Pauline Hanson's call for a "monoculture" to replace multiculturalism, Ley said she saw US communities sitting "uncomfortably alongside each other" rather than blending as they do in Australia, while cautioning against drawing direct parallels between the two countries. Her journey took her from snowy North Dakota to a queue in Amarillo that felt like immigration detention, and finally to Donald Trump's border wall in southern Texas, where a guard told her there was little to see and photography was banned.