Liberals' failure needs a paternity test
Every public poll found that women are losing interest in the Liberal Party which, while supporting female-only spaces and sports, strangely struggles with the idea that there might be a role for female-focused policies.
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In defence of my one big thing there is, well, economics. And S&P Global's concern that we are overspending and hiding the amount of debt we're in from ourselves.
There are also big things which are not policy related. The campaign was lost due to bad data and confused messaging too.
Until the final days, Liberal campaigners clung to the belief that they would win seats off Labor, based on their internal polling. The polls were wrong. As soon as the election results started rolling in, that became evident. By 8pm on Saturday, two hours after polls closed, texts were being exchanged about what exactly had happened.
Explaining the discrepancy between his rosy predictions and the electoral wipeout in the Australian Financial Review the day after the election, Mike Turner from Freshwater Strategy blamed an invalid assumption, originated by the Liberal Party, which he says skewed the data the Liberals were receiving. This assumption was that Australians who had voted 'no' in the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum would swing in behind the Liberal Party. The architects of the 'no' campaign confused concerns over a big change to the Constitution, combined with antipathy towards the fashionable distractions of the corporate class, with a readiness among everyday Australians to hop into the trenches to defend against progressive culture wars.
This may have informed some of Dutton's statements during the campaign. But the election was neither won nor lost on culture wars as such – except insofar as these statements contributed to the second big campaigning mistake: a lack of disciplined messaging.
As I said to a Liberal from campaign headquarters who asked my opinion in the first fortnight of the campaign, Dutton was like a man who had stepped into an elevator and suddenly couldn't stop farting: his messages were firing out willy-nilly and many of them stunk. He made the same mistake Albanese made during the Voice referendum. He needed to be focused on why the Liberal Party thought it could do better on the cost of living and how it would set Australia up for a prosperous future, but too often he wasn't.
Culture is important – don't get me wrong – but arguing over it is a luxury of the well-to-do classes, who aren't caught up worrying about first-order issues like rising costs. That's a lesson the Greens and Liberals could equally learn from losing their leaders.
What's more, the obsession with the Voice-weighting theory obscured deeper problems with the data informing the Liberal campaign. All this should be fodder for the coming Liberal Party election review, which this time would benefit from complete independence.
Because there wasn't just 'one big thing' underpinning the Liberal loss in the 2025 contest. Instead, it was the way in which many big things compounded during the campaign which led Australians to disregard their disappointment with Labor's wobbly first term and decide Albanese was the lesser of two evils. Failure is proverbially an orphan, but here it will pay to insist that paternity tests be taken.
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