Leading liberal strategist unloads on party's pollsters for strange polling, says Coalition strategy skewed by flawed Voice referendum modelling

Sky News AU

08-05-2025

Yaron Finkelstein, a heavyweight in the Liberal advisory ranks for more than a decade, has called out the Coalition's pollsters, Freshwater Strategy, for their modelling that weighted voters' responses to the Voice referendum.
Mr Finkelstein, once an adviser to former prime minister Scott Morrison, blamed the Liberal Party's resounding election defeat, in part, on a 'catastrophic failure on the research and polling'.
'We now know that pollsters were weighting against the Voice referendum results, which is a technical way of basically saying that we want to look at these results through the prism of the Voice referendum. It was almost looking at it all through voice-coloured glasses,' he told Sky News AM Agenda host Laura Jayes.
Labor's 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum, which the opposition staunchly opposed, was defeated 60.1 per cent to 39.9 per cent, with more than nine million Australians voting No.
Mr Finkelstein explained the flawed election poll modelling, which essentially counted a No vote as a tick for the Coalition, had skewered the results to improve the Coalition's chances in seats where it eventually fell significantly short of victory.
'The referendum was a moment, and I think it gave Coalition folk too much emphasis on one moment,' he said.
'It was as if they were unable to understand that a voter could vote Yes in the referendum and still be very interested in border protection, or vote No in the referendum and still want Medicare funding boosted.
'There's a multi-dimensional character in the voter.'
Founder of Freshwater Strategy, Michael Turner, has provided polling to the Coalition for seven years, including the 2019 and 2022 federal elections.
Mr Turner admitted his consultancy firm overestimated the level of No voters that would defect to the Coalition from Labor.
'Particularly, those who voted No at the Voice referendum. Early indications suggest that 'Labor-No' voters just didn't switch over to the Coalition in the big numbers estimated,' Mr Turner told The Australian Financial Review.
Throughout the election campaign, the Coalition largely focused on policies pertaining to housing, energy and lowering inflation.
It also funnelled some of its energy into attacking its opponent over the failed referendum.
Mr Finkelstein said the flawed interpretation of the polls, with a focus on the referendum results, led to the party 'fielding resources in all the wrong places.'
'That's a campaign catastrophe," he said.
Tasmanian Liberal Senator Jonathon Duniam also rebuked the party's polling, blaming the numbers for ill-advised campaign tactics.
'We had bad pollsters giving us bad numbers, way off the mark, totally out of line with all of the published polling,' he told Sky News on Tuesday.
'Our own polling here in Tasmania pointed to the wipeout we ultimately got and so there are some people in our campaign headquarters who are going to have to answer some questions for us around what went wrong here.
'From campaign headquarters, we were told, no, there's nothing else you need to do – we're on track, things are good.
'So we were let down by pollsters and strategists, which frankly gave us a bum steer of the worst order. And now we have the result to fit those bits of bad advice.'