‘Multicultural communities, younger people and women’: Liberals come to grips with change needed

Federal Liberal MPs say the party must broaden its appeal to have any chance of winning new seats and reclaiming its heartland after Victorian voters delivered a second stinging rebuke in six months.

Shadow finance spokeswoman Jane Hume and shadow immigration spokesman Dan Tehan, both federal Victorian MPs, said their party had to target new groups of voters to have any chance of reversing a decades-long decline in Victoria.

Shadow Minister for Finance Jane Hume.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Hume is working with former federal director Brian Loughnane on a review of the Liberals’ crushing defeat in the May federal election.

That review is close to being finalised and will examine the myriad issues facing the Liberal Party, including a low number of female MPs, how the campaign was lost and how to win over new supporters.

The review had been held back until after the state election and a decision has not been taken on how much, if any of it, will be publicly released.

Federally, the Coalition slumped to hold just 11 of Victoria’s 39 seats at the May election and at state level the party has won just one election since 1999.

Hume said it was a positive her party appeared likely to hang on to Kew and Mornington against strong challenges from independents, and potentially beat another independent to reclaim Hawthorn from Labor.

“I think we have blocked every teal [candidate] so that clutching of pearls about abandoning those seats is wrong,” she said.

“Multicultural communities, younger people and women are clearly gaps in our representation,” she said.

“We aren’t appealing to them right now, and we need to deal with that if we are to be truly representative. We are supposed to be a party for all Australia, which means we can’t narrow cast our message or membership.”

“No party can win an election with a primary vote in the mid-30s, without preferences from the Greens,” she added.

Tehan, the federal member for Wannon, said the Victorian state branch of his party must “be able to broaden the electoral map” to win seats the party has not held before – particularly in Melbourne’s northern and western suburbs, where Labor’s vote went backwards – and deliver a message of optimism to voters if it is to reclaim government at the next election.

“If you look at where we wanted to make inroads, I don’t think in the end we were able to,” Tehan said.

“We have to be able to broaden the electoral map in Victoria, if we are to win government.”

“Liberals need to think long and hard about what is the message of hope that we will be taking to the Victorian people in four years’ time? What do we need to do to bring Victorians together?”

He said the Labor Party was a very effective political machine and the Liberals must “make sure that we have the latest techniques that will deliver us the messaging that we need to deliver government”.

When he became leader in May, Peter Dutton promised the party’s policies would “be squarely aimed at the forgotten Australians in the suburbs”, but he said formerly blue ribbon seats would not be abandoned to Labor and the teal independents.

In May’s federal election, the Liberal Party lost blue ribbon seats in Melbourne including Higgins, Goldstein and Kooyong as well as the eastern suburban seat of Chisholm to a combination of Labor and teal candidates. A similar result in Sydney saw seats like Bennelong, North Sydney, Mackellar and Wentworth fall.

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