Key marginal tele-conferencing help open up a path to victory

Liberal strategists identified the need to hammer home the economy and promote Adani.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on election night with his wife Jenny and daughters Lily and Abbey. Picture: AAP

Scott Morrison’s strategy to claim victory in the “unwinnable election” was thrashed out over nine days and sold directly by the Prime Minister to tens of thousands of voters through a series of teleconference calls into key marginals.

The government’s plan was ­underpinned by two key themes identified by party strategists ­between the April 2 budget and the April 11 announcement of the election — the need to hammer the economy and promote the Adani coalmine.

Internal polling conducted by Crosby Textor showed Josh Frydenberg’s first budget was a major positive with voters — including women — and focus group testing confirmed these ­results.

Liberal Party federal director Andrew Hirst — lauded for masterminding the Coalition victory — grasped the significance of the findings; the 2019-20 surplus and “back in black” narrative could provide a “narrow” pathway to victory for the Coalition. The Liberal Party’s quantitative research showed the budget had driven a lift in the Liberal Party’s primary support from 38 to 41 per cent.

Scott Morrison on election night with his daughters. Picture: Adam Taylor.

These polls were based on surveys in 20 key marginals, including the seats the government needed to win from Labor as well the seats it needed to hold.

It showed that Warringah and Gilmore in NSW were under threat, but that losses could be offset in Queensland and Tasmania. If Warringah and Gilmore were lost, everything that could go right would need to go right for the Prime Minister to clinch victory. The huge swings in Queensland were also driven by an equally important decision taken by LNP MPs to attack Labor’s prevarication over the Adani coalmine.

Resources Minister Matt Canavan led the charge for the government to commit to the mine in the days following the April 2 budget and sign off on the project’s groundwater management plan.

He likened the result in Queensland yesterday to an Australian version of the “yellow vest” protest movement in France, ­describing it as a “high-vis revolution” or new “workers’ revol­ution” underscoring the need for sensible ­action on climate change.

“Australians don’t torch crap in Martin Place. We just quietly go to the ballot and make an impact there,” he said. “Why should Australian workers have to lose their job for no environmental benefit?

“Australian miners are the most visible people in the airport, but in the past few years they’ve been the most invisible to the ­Australian Labor Party.”

Buoyed by the internal research after the budget, Mr Hirst and Mr Morrison took the decision to make the economy the centrepiece of the Liberal campaign and tear down the credibility of Labor’s high-taxing, big-spending agenda.

The Prime Minister didn’t deviate from the message and, in the campaign’s final week, turned his focus to aspiration, telling the Liberal Party campaign launch in Melbourne that he would help Australians to “realise their simple, honest and decent aspirations”.

A source close to Mr Morrison told The Australian: “It was a 5½- week campaign to sell the budget. We just had to trust the fact that the budget was our message. The biggest drivers for our vote were the economy and tax.”

Mr Morrison also incorporated a series of “teleconference town hall” events in the final week of his campaign, reaching tens of thousands of undecided voters.

The conference calls were likened by the party to “talkback radio” because it allowed people to ask questions of the Prime Minister while giving thousands of others the chance to listen to his responses. In the campaign’s last seven days, teleconference events were held with the Prime Minister in four different states, allowing him to promote his economic message and a flagship $500 million scheme to boost home ownership for young people.

The seats targeted included Gilmore, Macquarie, Lindsay, Robertson, Dobell and Parkes in NSW; Swan in Western Australia; Flynn in Queensland; and Bass in Tasmania.

Some Queensland MPs yesterday insisted the Adani factor was more significant than the focus on the economy in turning the tide in favour of the government. The Australian revealed a delegation of Queensland MPs had met with the Prime Minister in the days following the April 2 budget about the need to sign off the federal groundwater management approval for the project. Early research on the 2019 results was showing that coal regions in Queensland swung 9.9 per cent to the LNP compared to 0.4 per cent to the rest of Australia.