NSW Liberals vow to stick to ‘sensible centre’ as Labor celebrates crushing victory

Liberal moderates in NSW will push to force the party back to the “sensible centre” of politics after a shattering federal election result left it clinging to relevance in greater metropolitan Sydney, with senior MPs setting out to distance themselves from the decimated federal division.

As the party sifted through the rubble of Saturday’s devastating defeat, NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman issued a strongly worded rallying cry that urged his party to do more to appeal to women and multicultural voters and called for an end to the “wild fluctuations” in energy policy.

The prime minister walks to Bar Italia with fiancee Jodie Haydon, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Bennelong MP Jerome Laxale.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“I’m not here to finger-point about the past, but to look to the way forward,” Speakman said. “I’m determined that, at a state level, our policy development is rigorous, timely and firmly grounded in the sensible centre of Australian politics.”

As of Sunday afternoon, the Liberal Party had suffered a 4.8 per cent swing against it across NSW, and been gutted across greater metropolitan Sydney, where it may now hold only four seats. While the seat of Bradfield remained too close to call, independent Nicolette Boele was ahead of the Liberals’ Gisele Kapterian with a 3 per cent swing in her favour and 78 per cent of the vote counted late on Sunday afternoon.

Bradfield had been the last remaining Liberal enclave in what was once a blue wall in the city’s east and north. Boele, the teal challenger, said she expected it would be “several days” before there was a result in the seat, but regardless the nationwide result “shows that Australians overwhelming reject the negative, toxic politics we’ve seen during this campaign”.

The four seats certain to remain in the Liberal column — Cook, Lindsay, Berowra and Mitchell — are all now on margins of less than 10 per cent.

Senior moderates in NSW said the continued losses to teal candidates in what was once the party’s heartland, coupled with the failure to make gains in outer suburban and regional seats such as Werriwa and Gilmore, showed the party’s rightward shift had failed.

Peter Dutton with his wife, Kirilly, and sons after addressing the crowd at the election night function in Brisbane.Credit: James Brickwood

“It’s very clear that the strategy of sacrificing inner-city seats to win in regional and outer suburban areas has utterly failed,” NSW upper house MP Chris Rath, a senior moderate figure, told the Herald.

“We just lost everything.”

Liberals who spoke to the Herald on Sunday described a feeling of shell shock at the magnitude of Saturday’s defeat, and questions were immediately being raised about the party’s internal polling.

Two senior NSW Liberals said that as recently as six weeks ago, the party’s NSW apparatus had been confident of winning back the seat of Mackellar – held by teal Sophie Scamps – and was expanding its map of battleground seats. In the end, Scamps picked up a 2.5 per cent swing towards her.

Of particular frustration was a perceived failure to learn the lessons of the 2022 federal election in which Scott Morrison was driven from power and teal candidates picked up the seats of Wentworth, Mackellar and North Sydney. Recommendations from the review into that election such as the need to appeal to women and younger voters had been ignored, they said.

“We didn’t learn the lessons from the 2022 election,” Rath said.

“We have to do a much better job of winning over voters in cities, women, young Australians and multicultural communities. That is the pathway back both at a state and federal level.”

Others said candidates such as Kapterian had been hamstrung by a lack of policy offerings targeted at women voters in particular. A party spokesman declined a request to interview Kapterian.

The Liberals’ candidate for Bradfield, Gisele Kapterian, voting at Turramurra Public School on Saturday.Credit: Steven Siewert

Speakman’s unusually forthright statement made clear NSW’s determination to differentiate itself from the federal brand of the party.

Amid criticism of the Dutton campaign for a lack of cohesion, Speakman said he was determined to have a policy platform that was “rigorous, timely and firmly grounded in the sensible centre of Australian politics”.

The party’s values of “aspiration, innovation and opportunity are timeless”, he said, but the Liberal Party needed to do more to relate to “modern-day NSW, including for women and people from non-English-speaking backgrounds”.

He also made a pointed call for an end to “wild fluctuations” in energy policy, and urged the party to engage in “substantial tax and productivity reform”.

“If we want sustained solutions to cost of living and housing crises, we need more than tinkering, but instead a national conversation on substantial tax and productivity reform to reverse declining prosperity,” he said.

And in what appeared to be a rebuke of Dutton’s nuclear energy policy, Speakman said the party needed to end the “wild fluctuations” on energy policy.

“If we want lower power bills and reliability we need to provide certainty to investors in new energy, which means avoiding wild fluctuations in policy, seen for 20 years at a federal level, and having our 2020 infrastructure road map as the starting point.”

Labor’s Dan Repacholi, who retained his seat of Hunter, watches the count with the party faithful on Saturday night at Cessnock Leagues Club.Credit: Dean Sewell

For Labor, the results in NSW were almost too good to be true. Seats such as Paterson, Gilmore and Werriwa that had been seen as likely losses at the start of the campaign all gained swings in the party’s favour.

In Bennelong, the seat once held by former prime minister John Howard, the Liberals had expected to mount a serious challenge. The result in the end was not even close, with Labor’s Jerome Laxale picking up an almost 10 per cent swing towards him over Liberal candidate Scott Yung.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited the Bar Italia cafe in his seat of Grayndler with Laxale, and paid tribute to the MP for winning the seat despite it being made notionally Liberal by a redistribution.

Asked what factor he thought weighed most heavily on the seat, Laxale said: “Peter Dutton”.

“His nuclear policy, his flip-flops on work from home, the fact they didn’t support any cost-of-living relief through the term … this is what cost the Liberals all along,” he said.

“They’ve got a lot of work to do.”

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