The ‘teal-slayer’ with courage to defy the HQ orthodoxy
Comeback kid Tim Wilson shows central office why Liberals must be bolder – and unapologetic about it.
At his March campaign launch at Brighton Town Hall, Tim Wilson told his supporters that winning the bayside Melbourne seat of Goldstein was “ground zero” for the Liberal Party’s comeback. One out of two, then. An electoral boulder knocked out the opposition last weekend. But Wilson is the star of the Liberals’ 2025 federal election.
He is the bloke who defeated Zoe Daniel, the teal MP who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding largesse from Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200.
The prevailing wisdom was that only female candidates could knock off the teals in seats such as Goldstein and Kooyong in Melbourne; Wentworth, North Sydney (since abolished), Warringah and Mackellar in NSW; and Curtin in Western Australia.
The teal women attract support from women especially. Maybe if there were a massive nationwide swing back to the Liberals, a bloke could ride that incoming wave. But otherwise a man wouldn’t stand a chance.
Prevailing wisdom is a bit like a sacred cow. It’s there for the mincing.
On social media this week, Wilson has been dubbed the “teal-slayer” – he is the only Liberal to unseat a teal MP despite other impressive, hardworking, albeit new Liberal candidates such as Amelia Hamer (Kooyong), Ro Knox (Wentworth) and Tom White (Curtin).
Wilson spoke to Inquirer shortly after he claimed victory in an emotional press conference from the grounds of St Andrew’s church in Brighton.
The rain is bucketing down. His phone is exploding. Wilson is gathering his thoughts. “It’s disappointing to be the one light in what’s a somewhat dark situation,” the former Morrison government minister says.
With polls showing the Coalition was within sight of taking government a few months ago, the Liberals blew it. This was the party’s worst election result in 70 years, removing leader Peter Dutton too.
“The expression I use is defying electoral gravity,” Wilson says.
Exactly a week before Wilson claimed victory, Daniel, who drives a teal-coloured customised Tesla, was kitted out in a sparkly rhinestone ZOE cap on a pre-poll booth in the suburb of Hampton.
The bling faded. And not even a mountain of money – $420,000 from Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 last year, plus another $50,000 a month before the election – was enough to beat Wilson.
While Dutton was exiting the political stage with grace on Saturday night, Daniel jumped the gun. Celebrating her win at the Elwood Bowls Club with her cheering supporters to the tune of David Guetta’s song Titanium, Daniel said: “This has been incredibly hard, but we did it.”
Thousands of postal votes had not yet been counted. Daniel was ahead on Sunday morning, but Wilson would ultimately take the lion’s share of postal votes. The final tally from the citizens of Goldstein was 46,585 for Wilson, 33,441 votes for Daniel.
How did the 45-year-old Liberal resurrect his career after voters booted him out in 2022? Senior Liberals had effectively written off the teal seats in 2025. What makes him different from others who tried to unseat teals?
And, what’s in the crystal ball for the ambitious, talented Wilson? Liberal leader? PM?
Within months of his election loss, Wilson started analysing what went wrong. “If I was the problem, I would’ve got out of the way,” Wilson tells Inquirer. He wasn’t the problem. Voters didn’t like Scott Morrison. “That’s what people said,” Wilson recalls of that early post-election research. That gave Wilson an opening, albeit small, to returning.
This was not Wilson’s first rodeo so he had the smarts and confidence to reject the orthodox path for candidates.
“The normal party process is preselection, raise money, campaign, win or lose based on what’s happening nationally. We looked at and went, ‘OK, we can’t run a campaign that way. We have to start with raising money.’ ”
Unlike Daniel, who had enormous financial support and other logistic backing from Holmes a Court’s Climate 200, Wilson did the hard yards himself. He arranged a dinner in May 2023 in a private room at Elwood Bathers, a waterfront restaurant overlooking Port Phillip Bay.
His pitch to 20 donors at the table was simple: “I’m prepared to do this, but I need you to put down this amount of money now and to make commitments to me for the next two years.”
“I was, at that time, a former minister in his early 40s, and giving up two years of work is a very expensive thing to do when the historical precedent was the Liberals were going to fail,” he says.
With money behind him, Wilson got to work.
“I was sitting in focus groups, obviously not in the room but watching from a distance. And what it showed was that people wanted a sense of ambition. They didn’t think that there was any sense of courage in a lot of what was being put forward.
“Once again, we were also testing whether I was a problem or part of the solution.”
In other words, did gender matter to them?
“It was something I was very mindful of. I had to be sober about this. But what we found was the only people who were excited (by having a woman represent them were) were Labor voters.”
Wilson says if Liberals want to win elections, they must resist the temptation of buying into identity politics. In other words, “selecting a candidate on the basis of gender is choosing to fight and lose on your opponent’s turf”.
By listening carefully to the focus groups, Wilson learned that teal voters were starting to question Daniel’s performance. They were also starting to see teals as evangelists and aggressive. And that was turning people off.
The brains trust to reclaim Goldstein is Wilson – with help from Jason Falinski, a NSW Liberal who lost his seat of Mackellar in the 2022 teal wave – and Trevor Evans, who lost his seat of Brisbane to the Greens in that same election. In a thundering second-term win, Labor took Brisbane along with the inner-city seat of Melbourne, turfing out Greens leader Adam Bandt. Leading up to the Goldstein preselection race in March last year, Wilson knew he would have to go his own way – “unless the party was actually prepared to be far more courageous than it had been at that point”.
“My baseline assumption was that I can’t rely on the party’s national campaign to lift me. That, in the end, has proven to be correct.”
Wilson says by the time the preselection was settled in March 2024, his “campaign was already half-built”.
I gave Wilson a reference in his preselection race, where he beat two female challengers, Colleen Harkin and Stephanie Hunt. I’ve known him for a number of years. He’s smart, politically canny, philosophically sound, which is more than one can say about many Liberal MPs.
At the core of Wilson’s comeback is belief. A belief in himself. And a belief in what he says about economic prosperity, social cohesion and institutions that underpin our freedoms.
In the lead-up to the election proper, Liberal headquarters was using the same strategy it used at every election, spreading the gospel that independent MPs mostly voted with Labor and the Greens.
That wouldn’t work in Goldstein, says Wilson, where most teal voters are former Labor or Greens voters. The Libs were basically telling them to vote teal again – as a safe alternative to voting for Labor or the Greens.
Wilson needed Liberal voters back. But there was another constraint: too much micromanagement by Liberal Party HQ. Just about everything had to be approved. The snail-paced checks at party HQ didn’t suit the times.
It was also plain dumb for a central office to control every morsel meant for social media given that most events were filmed by a phalanx of cameras.
Inquirer has been told by other candidates and MPs that federal operatives “didn’t understand that we had to connect to some people on a more emotional level”.
The choice facing candidates was ask HQ for permission, seek its forgiveness or do neither. What did Wilson, a seasoned political operative, do? He won’t say.
Only that “we ran our own race. It became obvious business as usual wouldn’t work against a teal. Too much is being left too late … the one luxury we didn’t have was time.”
Unlike the messy and nondescript policy melange offered by Dutton and shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, Wilson was cracking the economic whip, telling supporters at his March campaign launch:
• “If you cannot be prudent then debt will define your decisions.”
• “Debt markets get serviced before patients in hospitals, contracts to upgrade public schools and criminal justice for those who break the law.”
• “Bond markets will come before women’s change rooms at Trevor Barker or McKinnon Reserve, Brighton Beach or Peterson Reserve.”
• “Even Keynes would be horrified: Jobs growth is limited to those servicing government programs.”
• “Energy prices continue to rise. And it is hollowing out what is left of our value-added economy.”
• “Sovereign risk is now a reality. Workers and investors are saying the last mile isn’t worth it.”
• “When families buckle under the pressure of household budgets their emotional bonds break too.”
Wilson made another point: “The greatest fear of a politician is loss. I am liberated from that fear.”
It’s fair to say Wilson is among the more fearless of the current batch of Liberal MPs. While the Liberals’ message on nuclear has been half-hearted, Wilson has been sharp about that too.
Wilson recalls being asked about nuclear at an early community forums at the Whistling Kettle cafe in Hampton. He was being niggled by the questioner. Would he buckle?
“It was one of those moments where you had to make a call about whether to be timid or say what you really think.”
Wilson decided this was going to be “my best campaign or my last one – so I embraced Churchill’s dictum: ‘In politics if you don’t know what to do, do nothing, if you don’t know what to say, say what you really think.’
“So I told the truth. That Malcolm should have led on it. He didn’t. That Morrison should have led on it. He didn’t. I can’t wait for it to happen – because nuclear isn’t an end, it’s a beginning to reindustrialise Australia and lead to investment in energy-intensive industries and a new manufacturing base and the creation of well-paying jobs for the next generation.”
John Howard often said the party founded by Robert Menzies was most successful when it was a “broad church” combining the political traditions of classical liberalism and conservatism.
Fair or not, some voters view conservatives as political warriors, but not empathetic enough, and Liberal moderates as sensitive folk who can’t land political punches.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Wilson captures the best of that broad church.
“I believe very much in institutions, in the liberal Judeo-Christian heritage of this country. I believe deeply in the sense of family. I just don’t have a rigid definition of what a family is. I’d rather people make mutual bonds and commitments of responsibility to each other more than I care who they’re doing it with. I don’t want to live other people’s lives for them.”
The economic rationalist and classical liberal proposed to his partner, Ryan Bolger, on the floor of parliament during a debate on gay marriage in December 2017. They married in March the following year.
Wilson has been outspoken on Labor’s tax agenda, on teal zeal about climate policy, on Victoria’s preposterous Covid lockdowns, on the rising power of superannuation funds, on the need to reposition the Liberal Party “back to its roots where home ownership is recognised as the source of economic security and family”.
Wilson is not interested in incrementalism. He scoffs at what he calls the “technocratic fiddlers”.
“We need to be bolder and far more courageous; we need to be completely unapologetic about it.
“If you’re not trying to sell an alternative vision for this country, I don’t know what you’re selling.”
The newly returned MP says a key moment in the campaign came in February at the Bentleigh Festival, in the biggest shopping strip in the electorate. He spent hours being high-fived, hugged and asked for selfies by voters.
“Particularly small business people,” he says, “who were emotionally invested in the win and made it clear our win was now the anchor of their hope that there would be a brighter future.
“By the end of the day … the entire festival was awash with Liberal blue.”
It was the same vibe at pre-polling booths.
“A Jewish man wouldn’t let go of my hand until I promised we would win, and I had no choice but to tell him we would as he cried,” Wilson says.
“At one point I had to take myself off early voting to decompress from the extent of emotional energy from voters about how important us winning was to them, and that they had invested so much hope in us.”
Wilson has been involved with election campaigns for nearly 30 years. “Most are pleasant, some are angry,” he says. “Some are silent because people are going in to deal a mercy killing.
“This one was highly charged with emotion. And even today people tell me how emotional it makes them that we got there.”
What’s next for Wilson? “I want to change the country,” he told Inquirer barely an hour after claiming victory in a seat that has been Liberal since 1984 – except for the recent teal blip.
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