Lib anger at failure to use funds effectively

QUESTIONS are being asked inside the Coalition about poor decision-making that might have cost it the chance to win the election outright.

Late candidate preselections, poor funding for key seats and large-scale campaigns in safe conservative electorates between Nationals and Liberals made Tony Abbott's job of seizing the prime ministership much more difficult than it needed to be.

It appears the Coalition will secure 73 seats, three short of a majority in its own right. The Australian has been told, however, that the Liberals and the Nationals spent close to $2 million fighting each other in seven electorates across the country.

In the NSW seat of Riverina, the Liberals spent nearly $400,000 trying to win the seat off the Nationals following the retirement of Kay Hull, including placing two full-page advertisements in the local paper the day before polling day.

The Nationals ended up winning the seat comfortably.

In Western Australia, it is understood the Nationals devoted a similar amount of resources to successfully beat long-time Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey in the seat of O'Connor, forcing the state Liberal organisation to direct funds towards Tuckey's campaign to try to save him.

It is money that could have been spent on the campaign for Hasluck, which is still up for grabs.

Senior Liberal and National sources believe that if extra resources had been directed at Labor seats, it could have made enough of a difference to give the Coalition an outright win at this election.

In the seat of Banks in NSW, which the Labor Party only retained with 51 per cent of the two-party vote, the Liberal candidate, Ron Delezio, told supporters he had only $20,000 with which to campaign, and the party didn't do a direct mailout of postal vote applications.

Liberals also did not direct mail postal vote applications in the key seats of Greenway or Lindsay, giving Labor a considerable edge when those votes are tallied.

It is also understood that while Labor realised Banks was in trouble during the campaign, the Liberals had not even polled the electorate to find out if it was winnable. In Bonner in Queensland, where the former Liberal member Ross Vasta was successful, the LNP realised it needed to direct resources his way only after a media report that Labor was concerned about holding the seat.

Liberals were concerned about the slowness to get candidates in the field in the seats of Greenway and Lindsay before the campaign began, seats Labor won only by the barest of margins.

Abbott is believed to have been furious with the slow candidate selections, something that happened because of factional wrangling. During the campaign, irate Liberal supporters in Greenway flooded the party's website with complaints that they had not seen their candidate out on the hustings, including one former campaign worker from the successful 2004 effort to win the seat off Labor.

The Liberal candidate for Lindsay, Fiona Scott, told The Australian she decided she would like to run for the seat shortly after the 2007 election, yet she won party preselection only shortly before the election was called.

Lindsay had been held by popular Liberal MP Jackie Kelly for the entirety of the Howard government until Kelly's retirement in 2007. Yet the Lindsay campaign team did not seek her advice during the campaign and Scott admitted to The Australian she had not even spoken to Kelly.

The disappointment with the performance of the Liberal campaign in NSW has led some senior Liberals to question whether state director Mark Neeham's position is tenable, with the state election only seven months away. One senior source at state level said: "He has to go because while the state election is hopefully unlosable, we want to win big . . . and after a performance like this, how can we have any faith he'll make that happen?"

In NSW, the Liberals had a net gain of only one seat from their 2007 performance, despite the unpopularity of the state Labor government and concerns in western Sydney about Labor's policies on refugees.

Victorian Liberals are also disappointed with their performance, losing the seats of McEwen and La Trobe to Labor. Liberals thought Labor had reached a "high-water mark" in Victoria at the 2007 election, yet it won two more seats this time around and almost picked up a further two (Dunkley and Aston). Yesterday, counting for the seat of Dunkley tightened dramatically, with Labor now only trailing by just over 600 votes.

The poor showing by Liberals is being put down to a home state advantage for Gillard, the unpopularity of Liberal state leader Ted Baillieu and the internal warfare that has broken out since the once-dominant Costello and Kroger faction split.