NSW Liberal election review stalls amid internal squabbles
Two months after the NSW Liberal Party was voted out of government, a review into the election loss is yet to begin amid arguments over who should lead the process.
A review into the NSW Liberal Party’s state election loss has made no progress after two months and there is still nobody to run the probe, with party figures calling for a wider dissection of the entire campaign structure.
The Australian understands disagreements over efforts to commission former Victorian deputy state director Tony Barry to co-lead the review remain as a faction of senior Liberals, including former federal Liberal director Brian Loughnane, try to scuttle the plan.
Initially appointed to lead the inquiry, former NSW Liberal leader Kerry Chikarovski stood down in mid-April, which halted the process.
The resignation of the NSW Liberal president Maria Kovacic to run for the Senate vacancy days later has meant no movement has been made.
After successive losses at the 2022 federal and 2023 state polls, Liberal sources said the entire campaign operation needed to be examined, particularly the election strategy, which one insider said was akin to “bringing a knife to a gunfight”.
Those opposed to Mr Barry’s appointment were characterised as championing an “in-house review” that would not rattle the status quo. This included the efficacy of the party’s longtime polling and strategic advice firm Crosby Textor, or CT Group
A spokesman for CT said: “C|T Group will, as we always have in the past, participate in any independent post-election review.”
Mr Loughnane denied having any involvement in the review: “No one from the party in NSW has spoken to me about their state election review. I am not involved.”
Promoting Mr Barry’s appointment, one source said the Liberal Party’s election strategy was increasingly being outmanoeuvred by modern tactics employed by Labor, the Greens and teal independents.
One senior Liberal source said any review was unlikely to be too scathing given Dominic Perrottet restricted NSW Premier ChrisMinns to minority government despite the Coalition spending 12 years in government and facing myriad internal
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