Australian election 2025: Critical mistakes, policy backflip led to Peter Dutton’s demise

While Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton started the five week campaign on an equal footing, things quickly fell apart for the Coalition.

While both Labor and the Coalition started on equal footing when Anthony Albanese called the campaign on March 28, Peter Dutton’s lacklustre performance quickly became a death knell for the party.

Five weeks later, an inability to gain momentum and a wanting policy platform, dominated by backflips, confusion and questions, resulted in a bruising defeat and an emphatic win for the government.

By 11pm, Labor had secured 84 seats, while the opposition hold was slashed to 33, with Mr Dutton losing his long-held electorate of Dickson. A further 26 seats remain undecided.

Cracks emerged early on. Just a week into the campaign, Mr Dutton was forced to hit eject on his call to return Canberra-based public sector workers back to the office.

Labor was able to weaponise the promise as a threat to working-from-home across all fronts.

Internally the policy also polled dismally with women – a core voting group who abandoned the Coalition in 2022.

Peter Dutton suffered a bruising defeat on Saturday night, with the Coalition reduced to just 33 electorates in parliament. Picture: Adam Head / NewsWire

Policy detail also an issue. Details like the cost of their flagship nuclear policy, its plan to sack 41,000 public sector workers and savings garnered by boosting gas into the energy grid, were also drop fed or left ambiguous up till polling day.

As it stands, questions around whether cuts to the public services would be applied only to Canberra-based workers or applied more broadly have been left unanswered.

On Saturday, as swathes of seats fell to Labor, including the prized electorates Menzies, Deakin and Banks, Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price conceded the Coalition’s policy platform played a part.

“I would have to say that certainly we could have provided our policies sooner to the Australian people to have a better understanding of what we wanted to do,” she told the ABC.

“We could have called out his lies earlier on in the piece.”

However she said it was Labor’s mud-slinging which undermined the opposition’s policy platform.

“If you sling enough mud in an election, it sticks,” she said.

Questions over policy, also allowed Labor to poke holes, with the last words spoken at Mr Albanese’s last major press conference before polling day telling.

Peter Dutton and his family during the Liberal election night event. Picture: NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

The Labor leader accused the Coalition of treating “the Australian people with contempt,” and said their energy policy was “absolute nonsense.

“These people are just not ready. They are just not ready for government. Australia deserves better and I’ll give them better.”

It would seem Australians agreed.

By the final two weeks of the campaign, polling had revealed that Labor would at least cinch a minority government, with the potential for a majority in reach.

Despite this, only one poll forecasted the walloping that ensued on Saturday night, with Labor securing enough seats to win just two hours after counting began.

Saturday’s election result also marked the first time a second-term government has increased its seat lead since 1955, when Liberal prime minister Robert Menzies increased the Coalition’s lead by 11 seats against Labor’s HV Evatt.

And while Labor’s 2025 win will no doubt go down in party history, for the Coalition it needs to be the start of at least three years of soul-searching if it stands a chance to regain lost ground in 2028.