How to beat the teals? The city Liberals now have a template

The Age

2 days ago

What Wilson learnt was that Liberals who had voted for Zoe Daniel in 2022 would only switch their vote away from her if he was able to demonstrate that she had not delivered on their expectations. Scott Morrison was a lightning rod in 2022 but one of the mistakes the party made in 2025 was thinking that, with Morrison gone, Liberals who had switched their vote to a teal would be eager to come back.
In fact, what Wilson discovered was that Liberal voters lost to the teals were the hardest to regain. 'Labor and Greens supporters were casting a strategic vote for the teal,' he says. 'Whereas people who used to vote Liberal tended to have switched their vote out of conviction.'
While dislike for Morrison loosened Liberal voters' inclination to vote for the party, a positive motivation was also needed to complete the switch. Switchers were won over by one or more of the core promises the teals made in that election: more women in parliament, action on climate change and integrity.
Winning them back meant reversing that process. First, loosening voters' attachment to Zoe Daniel. Then, providing a motivating factor to switch to Tim Wilson.
So Wilson set about being the opposition member for Goldstein, focusing specifically on holding the local member to account. It's important to stress that this was a very unconventional approach for a major party hopeful. Between elections, the major party opposition usually focuses on the government as a whole, targeting its high-level policies. It is quite common for the Liberal Party not to confirm its candidate for an electorate until just months before an election.
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For Wilson to undertake the work of opposing a local member was, as he says, 'a leap of faith'. He had no guarantee that he would be preselected by the Liberal Party preselectors to stand in Goldstein when he undertook the bulk of his work. For two years, he laboured without pay and without any assurance that he would even get to run for the seat.
In that time, he made sure the electors of Goldstein knew when Zoe Daniel broke her promises. One such occasion was when the teal member went against her climate commitments by voting in parliament for a $2 billion fossil fuel subsidy.
He also made sure that he was constantly visible in the electorate. He deployed a technique he calls 'coffee swarms', providing social proof that being a Liberal was a community activity and talking to anyone who wanted to chat about policy.
Being Tim Wilson, there was never any suggestion that he'd mince his words or make himself a small target. 'Sometimes someone would come up to tell me they didn't like the Coalition's nuclear policy,' Wilson says, 'And that they'd vote for me if I walked away from it.'
'I'd say, I'm not going to do that. But I'll tell you why I'm going to fight for nuclear. They always walked away knowing that I have a big vision for Australia and I back things which support that vision.'
In March 2024, when Wilson stood for preselection, two female candidates came forward to challenge him. So could all his groundwork have ended up benefiting one of them, if he hadn't been chosen as the party's candidate?
'No,' he says simply. In most other electorates where a teal got elected, the Liberal Party preselected a woman to run in 2025. And it didn't work because it's not just about gender. 'In fact, sometimes the vote collapsed because existing loyalty fell away.'
'I realised that we needed to keep the existing candidates, regardless of their gender. What we needed to fix was our campaign. Part of the problem in politics is that people lose and leave or lose and are sacked rather than getting the opportunity to learn.'
Which often applies to policy as well. Good ideas which are designed to achieve important ends are dumped if a party blames them for its election defeat, rather than looking at its own failure to sell them.
'Personal growth is a big part of the way back out of the wilderness,' according to Wilson. 'Failure is a chance for growth. To learn the lessons of loss, you have to have lived them.'