Angus Taylor, Donald Trump blamed for Coalition’s devastating defeat

Liberal senator Hollie Hughes has ripped into shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, saying he is incapable of leading the party and failed to deliver any economic ideas for the Coalition’s disastrous election campaign.

Party members have flocked to the airwaves on Monday morning to explain why Opposition Leader Peter Dutton suffered a catastrophic loss in Saturday’s election, including his own seat, as the Coalition is expected to fall to fewer than 45 seats in parliament.

Liberal senator Hollie Hughes has slammed Angus Taylor as a shadow treasurer.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, Janie Barrett

While Hughes openly questioned the leadership capabilities of Taylor, others pointed to the shadow thrown on the Coalition’s campaign by US President Donald Trump’s chaotic first 100 days in office.

Taylor, Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and immigration spokesman Dan Tehan are all in the running to become the new Liberal leader.

As the party reels from a generational loss, two sources close to defence spokesman Andrew Hastie said the West Australian, who had been touted as “leadership material” by colleagues, was unlikely to run and would instead bide his time.

This masthead reported in June last year the extraordinary rift between Hughes and Taylor as she blamed him for bumping her down on the Senate ticket.

The NSW senator quipped on ABC Radio National that, while she is set to leave parliament in June this year, she will have a vote for the next Liberal leader as she slammed Taylor.

“We had zero economic policy to sell. I don’t know what [Taylor’s] been doing for three years. There was no tax policy, there was no economic narrative,” she said.

Hughes argued that Treasurer Jim Chalmers skated through with no scrutiny from Taylor over the government’s big spending pledges and ballooning deficit.

Hughes told Radio National and Sky that, as the former shadow assistant minister for mental health, she had submitted “seven fully costed policies” to the shadow expenditure review committee and never heard back from anyone.

“Policies that had been developed, had been costed, just seemed to disappear into a vortex,” she said, adding that she had heard similar stories from colleagues.

“To be the opposition leader, you need to be very capable in the media. You need to be able to sell a message. You need to be able to put the narrative together, and you need to be able to bring the team together,” she said.

“I have concerns about his capabilities, but that is shared by a huge number of my colleagues, and [there’s a] frustration that they didn’t have economic narratives that they could push and sell during the election.

“Going from shadow treasurer to opposition leader, I’m not quite sure that’s going to change.”

Moderate Liberal senators Andrew Bragg and Dave Sharma were not as scathing in their radio interviews, but argued the party had to be less conservative if it wanted to win a future election.

Bragg agreed the Coalition did not push an economic narrative during the campaign, and said the decision to preference One Nation was wrong

“Ultimately, you’ve got to give people something to vote for. And I think traditionally, people have voted for the Liberal Party for a better life, a better economy, and I don’t think [there were] enough strong economic policies to win the day,” he said on Radio National.

“I don’t think preferencing One Nation is a good idea for the Liberal Party. I think John Howard was absolutely right about that. It’s a very bad optical position for our party, and I think it looks as if we were not learning the lesson that we need to recapture the centre.

“Elections in Australia are won in the centre. It’s very clear that the pathway for the Liberal Party going forward is to ensure that we have clear and differentiated, ambitious economic policy and that we have an inclusive social agenda.”

The party needed to win the big cities over again, former Liberal member for Wentworth Dave Sharma also told Radio National, as he said there was no chance of winning if the party was not moderate.

“There is no way we can ever hope to be the party of government unless we rebuild our appeal and our offering to those populations in the big cities, and then that will have to be our mission and will have to be, I think, probably our overwhelming focus as a party,” he said.

Liberal backbencher Jason Wood said Trump was a “total disaster” for the party.

“We would never have thought we would have had the fallout with Trump on Australia, with the tariffs, and we should have called it out … and then we had the work-from-home policy, and by that stage, momentum had completely gone away from us,” he said.

Deakin and Menzies, both in Melbourne, were among the Victorian seats that slipped from Liberal hands on Saturday, while the party was unable to recapture the seat of Aston, which has been held by Labor since a byelection following Alan Tudge’s retirement in 2023 and was heavily targeted by the Coalition.

Read more on Labor’s landslide election win

• Inside story: How the Coalition campaign was a catastrophe months in the making
• Some seats are still too close to call: Here are all the races that remain in doubt – plus every seat that’s changed hands
• Interactive: See how your polling booth voted in this election
• Live results: Track every seat in the country
• Live blog: Anthony Albanese plans second term, Liberals plan a leadership change

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