The good, the bad and the ugly of the Liberal Party review

The Liberal Party’s decision to suppress the review of its 2025 election drubbing was a spectacular own goal, and all but guaranteed the document would be leaked.

The attempted suppression also ensured days of additional coverage and publicity, none of it much good for the party, with Peter Dutton telling me the report was a “gratuitous and personal” hit job on him, while the report’s co-author, Nick Minchin, defended the work.

So thorough was the cock-up – and so widespread the leak – that by Tuesday Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had tabled it in parliament, delighting Labor MPs and embarrassing the Liberals who had tried to keep it secret. (One small upside was that Liberal members who’d been unable to read the report finally got a copy.)

Post-election reviews can be brutal affairs but, for decades, the convention for both major parties has been to conduct them and then release them publicly, though there are exceptions. In 2016, for example, former Liberal MP Andrew Robb’s review of the Malcolm Turnbull-led election campaign was not released, but then Liberal director Tony Nutt maintained the convention of addressing the National Press Club on the topic and taking questions.

In 2019, Labor elder statesmen Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson conducted and released a brutal examination of how their party had lost the so-called “unlosable” election. It made for uncomfortable reading for former leader Bill Shorten, but it also contained valuable observations about how the ALP had alienated Chinese-Australian voters, Queenslanders and Christians, and how it had fallen behind the Coalition in digital campaigning. Labor aired its dirty laundry and confronted its mistakes publicly. And it won the next election.

The Liberals’ handling of this report was the exact opposite and it raises genuine questions about whether the party is ready to return to government.

Some parts of the review are excellent. It points out that needlessly alienating Chinese Australians and Australian Muslims is not exactly an election-winning strategy. It is correct to say that the party’s institutional structures have decayed, to argue for preselecting women in winnable seats, to highlight the lack of women in senior roles in the party machine and to examine internal polling problems that led to resources being directed to the wrong seats.

The review scrutinised the breakdown in the relationship between Peter Dutton and federal director Andrew Hirst, though perhaps there was too much focus on this. There are always tensions between the travelling party on the plane and the team at campaign headquarters during election campaigns.

In 2013, the mood in Labor HQ was so bad that former Gillard government staffers would boo when the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, would appear on TV screens, so unpredictable had his campaign movements become on a day-to-day basis. Clearly, in this case, those tensions were not managed well.

Dutton should have had a senior MP travelling with him to provide an alternative source of advice, as is usual practice. That he didn’t illustrates how insular his team had become.

As one senior party figure said: “You’d go to meetings, a tough issue would come up and people would just say, ‘Oh, we will deal with that when we’re in government.’ But a change of government after one term hadn’t happened in nearly 100 years.”

Report co-authors Minchin and Pru Goward highlighted this, too, arguing the opposition had behaved, to its detriment, like a government in exile for three years.

Their report is not perfect and there are some reasonable grounds to argue that it should not have been released, including the looming byelection in Sussan Ley’s seat, Farrer, the South Australian state election and the fact that some of the review was needlessly personal in its criticism of Dutton. It is also sloppy at times, with errant commas and basic spelling mistakes, even after the first draft was rejected in December, rewritten in January and presented as a second draft to the federal executive in February.

The Victorian division of McEwen, which the Liberals have been promising to win back at every election since losing it in 2010, was incorrectly spelt “McEwan” in the second draft, after not being mentioned in the first. It was seats such as McEwen that the Liberals had to win to wrest power from Labor. While it might seem a minor point, the correct spelling of such a vital seat should have been tattooed on the brains of every Liberal around the country.

Similarly, the report states former NSW Liberal MP Jenny Ware lost her seat to Labor’s David Moncrieff, but also had to face a teal challenger. It was actually in 2022 that Ware faced both teal and Labor challengers. No teal ran in Hughes in 2025.

Liberals who argued to suppress the report point out these failings and argue it was uneven and not up to standard. Those same Liberals are incensed about the descriptions of Dutton as grim and introverted (a line cut from the second draft), and that describing him as “unattractive” to women in one of the 18 final recommendations was over the top. That comment can be read as a reflection on Dutton’s personal appearance or more broadly as a reflection of his policy offering to women. Either way, it would not have been difficult to use a less incendiary word. It needlessly insulted both Dutton and female voters by suggesting a candidate’s looks influences how they vote.

At its heart, the battle over whether to release or suppress the review was about legacy protection. No one wants to carry the can for the Liberal Party’s worst ever election loss, which will be discussed by political scientists and historians for decades to come.

Consider what has come since that defeat. The party has elected and then dumped its first female leader. It has split with the Nationals, twice. It is either trailing or at level-pegging with One Nation – a party that has historically struggled to reach double digits – in published opinion polls. The most successful election-winning party in Australian history is teetering on the brink of irrelevance.

As the report’s authors stated: “While every submission criticised the actions of other decision makers and provided examples, there was a notable absence of reflection on how a decision maker – that is a campaign director, paid official, MP or candidate – could have done better.”

Hardly an election-winning strategy.