How to beat the teals? The city Liberals now have a template

With the recount in the Victorian seat of Goldstein reconfirming the outcome, it’s time to look at what the electorate can teach the Liberals about the way forward. There are two important themes: one is about how to best serve a community. The other is how to stick with good policy.

After losing Goldstein in 2022, Liberal Tim Wilson looked into historical precedents for regaining the seat. There were none. So in January 2023, he decided to create a precedent. He started with a hypothetical victory, reverse-engineering what the campaign to get there would have to do.

Liberal Tim Wilson has claimed victory in the marginal seat of Goldstein, which he held before losing it to teal Zoe Daniel in 2022.Credit: Paul Jeffers

“What I realised very quickly, after I did everything in sequential order, was that I had just unintentionally mapped out the campaign that had removed me,” he says. And that, if he was going to win the seat back from teal Zoe Daniel, he had to start right away.

By his reckoning, he’d beaten her by Christmas 2024.

Listening to Wilson describe what he did, I’m less amazed that he is the only Liberal to have regained a teal seat in 2025 and more amazed that it never occurred to the wider Liberal Party machine to do the same.

Some of the things Wilson did are just campaign common sense. Always observe your own focus groups, for instance. The reports compiled by the researchers’ guiding groups can miss important nuances. So ideally, the politician or a trusted campaign strategist should be watching as well.

Wilson was smart enough to use the focus group format to best effect. What he learnt from watching the groups he commissioned, using funds he raised himself, was the social dynamics of voter persuasion. This highlights another piece of common sense the Liberal Party really needs to rediscover. Focus groups aren’t for telling you who you should be or how you should act, and they’re certainly not for creating policies. Their strengths are that they can reveal insights on the way people think and how they influence each other’s views.

What Wilson learnt was that Liberals who had voted for Zoe Daniel in 2022 would switch their vote away from her only if he was able to demonstrate that she had not delivered on their expectations. Scott Morrison was a lightning rod in 2022 but one of the mistakes the party made in 2025 was thinking that, with Morrison gone, Liberals who had switched their vote to a teal would be eager to come back.

In fact, what Wilson discovered was that Liberal voters lost to the teals were the hardest to regain. “Labor and Greens supporters were casting a strategic vote for the teal,” he says. “Whereas people who used to vote Liberal tended to have switched their vote out of conviction.”

Wilson discovered that Liberal voters lost to the teals were the hardest to regain. Daniel and Wilson at an election event. Credit: Joe Armao

While dislike for Morrison loosened Liberal voters’ inclination to vote for the party, a positive motivation was also needed to complete the switch. Switchers were won over by one or more of the core promises the teals made in that election: more women in parliament, action on climate change and integrity.

Winning them back meant reversing that process. First, loosening voters’ attachment to Zoe Daniel. Then, providing a motivating factor to switch to Tim Wilson.

So Wilson set about being the opposition member for Goldstein, focusing specifically on holding the local member to account. It’s important to stress that this was a very unconventional approach for a major party hopeful. Between elections, the major party opposition usually focuses on the government as a whole, targeting its high-level policies. It is quite common for the Liberal Party not to confirm its candidate for an electorate until just months before an election.

For Wilson to undertake the work of opposing a local member was, as he says, “a leap of faith”. He had no guarantee that he would be preselected by the Liberal Party preselectors to stand in Goldstein when he undertook the bulk of his work. For two years, he laboured without pay and without any assurance that he would even get to run for the seat.

In that time, he made sure the electors of Goldstein knew when Zoe Daniel broke her promises. One such occasion was when the teal member went against her climate commitments by voting in parliament for a $2 billion fossil fuel subsidy.

He also made sure that he was constantly visible in the electorate. He deployed a technique he calls “coffee swarms”, providing social proof that being a Liberal was a community activity and talking to anyone who wanted to chat about policy.

Being Tim Wilson, there was never any suggestion that he’d mince his words or make himself a small target. “Sometimes someone would come up to tell me they didn’t like the Coalition’s nuclear policy,” Wilson says, “And that they’d vote for me if I walked away from it.”

“I’d say, I’m not going to do that. But I’ll tell you why I’m going to fight for nuclear. They always walked away knowing that I have a big vision for Australia and I back things which support that vision.”

In March 2024, when Wilson stood for preselection, two female candidates came forward to challenge him. So could all his groundwork have ended up benefiting one of them if he hadn’t been chosen as the party’s candidate?

“No,” he says simply. In most other electorates where a teal got elected, the Liberal Party preselected a woman to run in 2025. And it didn’t work because it’s not just about gender. “In fact, sometimes the vote collapsed because existing loyalty fell away.”

“I realised that we needed to keep the existing candidates, regardless of their gender. What we needed to fix was our campaign. Part of the problem in politics is that people lose and leave or lose and are sacked rather than getting the opportunity to learn.”

This often applies to policy as well. Good ideas which are designed to achieve important ends are dumped if a party blames them for its election defeat, rather than looking at its own failure to sell them.

“Personal growth is a big part of the way back out of the wilderness,” according to Wilson. “Failure is a chance for growth. To learn the lessons of loss, you have to have lived them.”

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.