Months before election day, the Coalition was soaring. In truth, a catastrophe was already unfolding

Peter Dutton was full of bravado as he rose to grill Anthony Albanese on what everyone in Parliament House knew would be the final question time before the election. It was March 27, and the opposition leader was a few hours away from delivering one of the most important speeches of his life: a budget reply address on the eve of an election being called.

Cleverly, his team had released its big policy – a pledge to halve petrol excise for a year – that morning so it didn’t get overshadowed by news of Albanese launching the campaign.

“The prime minister has caused a lot of pain to Australian families over the last three years,” Dutton said. Looking down at Albanese from across the dispatch box, he dared him to match the Coalition’s fuel excise promise.

Sitting behind Dutton on the opposition backbench, a Liberal MP was feeling bullish about the chances of a Coalition victory.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Coalition frontbenchers feeling pleased with themselves during the final question time of the 47th parliament.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“Seats we will win,” the MP texted a press gallery journalist as he rattled off 19 electorates the Coalition would pick up on May 3. Among them, a handful of previously safe Labor seats such as Gorton and McEwen in Melbourne, Werriwa in Sydney and Whitlam on the NSW South Coast.

The Coalition would also win back Curtin from a teal independent and two inner-city Brisbane seats from the Greens, the MP predicted. OK, the MP conceded, the Coalition could lose a single seat. This result, a net gain of 18 seats, would amount to a stunning repudiation of Labor and put Dutton in the box seat to form a minority government.

The cocksure MP held on to his seat on Saturday night, but at least a dozen of his colleagues did not as the Coalition flamed out in its worst-ever defeat. Among those who will not return to parliament: Peter Dutton, who lost the Brisbane seat of Dickson he has held since 2001. At best, three of the MP’s predicted 19 gains will prove correct, but they will be swamped by Liberal losses that few saw coming.

“A total shitshow,” is how one prominent shadow minister sums up the result.

As for Anthony Albanese, it was a comeback from poll doldrums that will secure his place in Labor legend as the first prime minister to win back-to-back elections for the party since Bob Hawke.

Brash texting was not the only sign of hubris. At the first shadow cabinet meeting of the year in late January, Dutton and his frontbenchers began discussing their “statements of expectations”. These are the letters new ministers send to their departments outlining policies and directions.

The topic would need to be addressed some time before the election, but some shadow ministers believe the timing reeked of overconfidence. Adding to the argument: some Coalition frontbenchers were already talking about getting rid of particular departmental secretaries.

But not everyone was in the thick of it.

‘They got complacent’

MPs and candidates across the country, including some shadow ministers, said the circle of trust around Dutton was always small and narrowed as the term went on.

Shadow ministers were regularly left in the dark about timing and tactics, with only the leadership group of six MPs in the loop alongside Dutton’s chief of staff, Alex Dalgleish, and media boss Nicole Chant.

Dutton’s team became known in some quarters as the “f--- ’em crew” for its propensity to brawl with a perceived enemy, be it the media or moderate forces in the party.

Backbenchers and other MPs felt there were two personas to the Dutton operation: the man himself, who would always respond to a text and hear out an idea even from a more moderate Liberal, and his office, which many found standoffish, controlling and unwilling to collaborate.

By February, reputable polls showed the Coalition on track to win 73 seats and possibly as many as 80. A majority of Australians were predicting a Dutton prime ministership, and rich-listers were courting him. “In February, they thought they were going to win based on the numbers, so they decided to go small target,” says Andrew Carswell, Scott Morrison’s former media boss.

The global winds seemed to be blowing the Coalition’s way. Governments around the world were being turfed from office as incumbency became a curse. Even the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed for almost the entire period since World War II, lost its majority last October. The trend continued this year with the defeat of German chancellor Olaf Scholz.

In a dire sign for Albanese, centre-left governments were swamped by a rising tide of conservative populism – a trend exemplified by Donald Trump’s remarkable return to the White House after winning the popular vote. “The other side saw Trump and thought this is where the world is going,” a Labor insider says. “They got complacent.”

On January 25, four days after Trump’s inauguration, Dutton appointed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price the Coalition’s shadow minister for government efficiency, a role with an unmissable link to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) razor gang. A week later, shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash praised Trump as “a man of action”, promising Australians “they’ll get the exact same attitude under a Peter Dutton government”.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Michaelia Cash and Dutton at the Mount Pleasant Bowling Club in Perth – one of the few sightings of Price during the opposition leader’s campaign.Credit: James Brickwood

Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce says the party let expectations of victory spin out of control. “Enthusiasm gets ahead of history when people believe you’ll have a one-term government. We’ve only had one in the history of Australia,” Joyce says.

The Coalition’s apparent political dominance had a Wizard of Oz quality. Pull back the curtain and there wasn’t much there. As they soared in the polls, the Dutton team’s policy platform was stuck together with Blu-Tack and sticky tape. Coalition and Labor insiders agree that the Coalition’s disastrous result was a catastrophe months in the making.

“We didn’t do the work,” a Coalition MP despairs, summing up a widely held view among colleagues. “We haven’t had a serious small business or industrial relations policy. Or tax policy. Or anything on investment or cutting regulation.”

Another Coalition MP offers: “We had party room meetings in the back end of last year when we were assured the work had been done and the policy was there waiting to be announced. Dutton was saying ‘we were at various points ready to announce things, but it made more sense to allow Labor to keep f---ing up’.”

The MP continues: “We cautiously trusted them at the time. But it became obvious nearer to the campaign that that work was not actually done and that we believed we could win the election without a proper economic agenda.”

Alongside the cut to petrol excise, Dutton’s budget reply also unveiled a plan to create a domestic gas reservation.

Details had been revealed only two days earlier by Dutton’s office to key shadow MPs, including Angus Taylor, Ted O’Brien and Susan McDonald. The policy previously agreed on by shadow cabinet, and briefed out to energy companies, was to force gas companies to reserve gas only from future projects, minimising sovereign risk. The policy that was announced, requiring gas producers to divert up to 20 per cent of existing export supplies, sparked a furious reaction from industry over a lack of consultation. Some shadow ministers had major issues with the new plan.

Dutton spruiked the policy for the first week of the campaign but faced relentless questions about details from the press pack. Each day, Dutton teased that it was coming.

“The reason the modelling was late is because it didn’t exist”, an exasperated Coalition MP explains. “It was effectively retrofitted.”

Campaign chaos

Throughout the campaign, Dutton insisted that the party’s internal polling showed a closer result than polls published in the mainstream media. Three days out from election day, the Coalition’s pollster recorded a national primary vote of 37 per cent. The election results show the party currently languishing on a primary vote of just 32 per cent.

In the lead-up to polling day, former Liberal MP turned Dutton adviser Jamie Briggs was confidently telling associates that, based on internal polling, there was no need to worry about marginal Liberal-held seats such as Sturt in Adelaide. In the end, Labor picked up the seat easily with a 7 per cent swing.

“It was definitely wrong,” a Liberal frontbencher says of the party’s polling. “We spent millions of dollars on it and will be keen to know what went wrong.”

Filling his cup: Peter Dutton kept going back to service stations during the campaign.Credit: James Brickwood

Tough questions are being asked about the Coalition’s shambolic candidate-vetting process.

The party’s 2022 review identified this as a flaw, but the problems were as bad three years later. The Liberals had to jettison their candidate for Whitlam in week one of the campaign because of problematic remarks about women in combat roles. Labor’s dirt unit continued to dig up embarrassing stories about Liberal candidates, but little mud was hurled the other way.

“We were preparing for a deluge of shit that never came,” a shocked Labor insider says.

Dutton’s economic woes were apparent with his first big offering of the year: a policy to allow small and medium businesses to claim $20,000 of meals for staff each year on tax. The sop to the small business lobby was hardly a major reform and did not address workers’ cost-of-living worries.

Albanese and Chalmers could barely contain their glee as they ridiculed the opposition’s “long lunch” policy. The opposition refused to release costings for the policy for weeks, allowing the government to use Treasury resources to produce inflated estimates of its impact.

The slapdash approach to policy formulation continued to hobble the Coalition throughout the campaign. In January, this masthead reported that Dutton would go to the election without a policy to cut income taxes because the budget could not afford such generosity. He held firm when Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced a modest tax cut for all Australians in the budget, vowing to repeal the measure if elected. It was a remarkable move for a party that prides itself as the party of low taxes and aspiration.

Chalmers would reflect on election night that he could not believe the Coalition had handed Labor such a political gift. In the words of his hero Paul Keating, he had been hit in the arse by a rainbow.

Aware the Coalition had been outplayed by Labor on tax, Dutton announced a one-off $1200 tax offset in his election launch speech on April 13. This involved spending $10 billion of taxpayer money on a single year of relief. Yet the details of the policy were formulated on the fly. Critical details – such as the amount of the offsets and cost to the budget – were finalised in the hours before the announcement was sent to journalists. Hugely expensive, the policy essentially vanished from the Coalition campaign after a few days. The Labor Party’s research found it sank without a trace.

“The economic team let us down,” a Liberal MP says. “They’ve been hopeless. Angus [Taylor] had three years to do a tax policy and never came up with anything.”

Another MP agrees: “Very little was coming out of the economic team of Angus and Jane [Hume]. We had far too little focus and MPs without requisite firepower in health, education and other key domestic areas.”

The Coalition’s gyrations over public service policy created the most confusion. Nationals leader David Littleproud declared last August that the “first thing we’ll do is sack those 36,000 public servants in Canberra”, indicating it would produce $24 billion in savings. By March, the Coalition was talking about culling 41,000 public servants, but the savings were revised down to $10 billion. It was then clarified that there would be no forced sackings – just a hiring freeze and natural attrition. Days later, campaign spokesman James Paterson said voluntary redundancies were also included in the Coalition’s costings. When the costings came out on Thursday, however, there was no mention of redundancies.

This came on top of the policy to force public servants to return to the office full-time. Announced by finance spokeswoman Jane Hume in a speech to a Liberal-aligned think tank at the start of March, this would be such a fiasco it had to be dumped in the second week of the campaign. Even more so than the proposal to build nuclear power plants, the policy proved radioactive with voters – especially professional women, who have become accustomed to the flexibility of working from home sometimes. Even Labor MPs admit they did not initially realise how much the issue would resonate beyond Canberra.

“It developed organically,” a senior Labor operative says. “Our candidates were hearing it on the doors and it started showing up in our research. The narrative spread throughout the community that the Liberals were against working from home.”

No defence

Then there was defence policy, supposedly a Coalition strength. Dutton could not match Labor’s tax cuts because the Coalition had committed to spending substantially more on the nation’s military as China flexed its muscles in the Indo-Pacific.

The plan to boost defence spending to 3 per cent of gross domestic product within a decade had been in the works for at least five months, yet was only released in the penultimate week of the campaign. The press release, distributed to journalists as newspaper deadlines approached, was a flimsy document with no plan for what the extra money would be spent on or a cogent rationale for why it was required. Liberal MPs were shocked to be asked to sell $21 billion in extra spending over five years without telling voters what they would deliver.

The late release of the policy shone a spotlight on the dysfunctional relationship between Dutton and his defence spokesman, Andrew Hastie. The former special forces troop commander had spoken openly to confidantes about his desire to serve in a different portfolio to broaden his image beyond defence. Dutton, however, kept him in place – a move, some Liberal MPs believed, was aimed at thwarting Hastie as a potential leadership rival.

Dutton and Andrew Hastie announce the Coalition’s defence promises … very late in the campaign.Credit: James Brickwood

“Dutton has fallen out with Taylor, with Hastie. Sussan Ley is frozen out,” a Liberal MP says. “Dutton has been very distant from his colleagues.”

The party never managed to broaden Dutton’s image from the one-dimensional hardman reputation he had developed as immigration, home affairs and defence minister.

A Liberal social media attack early in the campaign showed Albanese wearing three different outfits in a day – including a suit and some more sporty and less formal ensembles – and asked how he could be trusted.

“Our people should have been looking at that and learning!” an angry Liberal MP says. “All Peter wore for the entire campaign was boring blue suits. He started to take off his tie only later in the campaign at fuel stops.”

Dutton’s softer side never came through, as he focused on blokey environments like breweries and manufacturing plants.

Liberal MPs, past and present, are in shock about the political incompetence on display throughout the campaign.

“The lack of message discipline has been remarkable,” a former Liberal MP remarked on the eve of the election, despairing at the absence of simple “stop the boats” soundbites Tony Abbott deployed.

“I’ll be f---ed if I know what the Coalition message is, I’m baffled.”

It took until the seventh day of campaigning for Dutton to visit a service station to highlight his fuel excise policy. He tried to make up for this with 17 petrol station visits before polling day, but crucial time had been lost. A major week one announcement on funding for a rail link from Melbourne Airport to the city was – in a scene worthy of Veep – announced at a bucolic winery nowhere near the airport or railway. The Coalition wasn’t ready to campaign, let alone to govern.

Born ready

On the day after Dutton’s budget reply speech, Albanese walked into the prime minister’s courtyard to prorogue the parliament and launch the election campaign. Before the cameras started rolling, one of the reporters asked if he was ready. “I was born ready,” Albanese replied, displaying the swagger he would display throughout the campaign.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made Medicare key to his re-election pitch.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

It was confidence born of preparation.

Labor insiders trace their comeback to the end of October, when Labor boss Paul Erickson addressed a meeting of the ministry at Melbourne’s Commonwealth Parliament Offices. Despite Albanese’s insistence the government would serve a full term, a January election was a real possibility and Labor wanted to be ready to campaign. Erickson presented research showing voters believed Dutton was “reckless and arrogant” even though he was riding high in polls.

Key to flipping the script, he argued, would be to turn Medicare into a cost-of-living argument, and using healthcare to portray Dutton as a risk to living standards. The strategy had been set. By early January, Albanese had unfurled Labor’s “Building Australia’s future” slogan and launched a campaign-style blitz of Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia as a test run.

The prime minister all but gave up alcohol at the beginning of the year, besides a rare beer, to keep his mind sharp for the gruelling months ahead. And while Dutton began the year with his work lunches policy, Albanese was determined to turn Labor’s traditional advantage on health into an election-winning issue.

Labor’s headquarters made a call to go early with its centrepiece Medicare spending announcement in February, a month before the election was called.

“The strategic call from the leadership and from the party was: you’ve got to get out,” a senior Labor source says. “You can’t release your forward offer, your platform for re-election, during the campaign. It’s too late. People will need to digest it and in this era it’s much harder to communicate with voters; communication is so atomised.”

Political professionals use the phrase “the grid” to describe the issues they want to campaign on. “We staked out our ground early and stuck to our grid relentlessly,” a Labor operative says. “We knew they would try to talk about culture wars and immigration to blow us off course, but we were disciplined.”

Albanese’s first stop of the campaign was an urgent care clinic in Dickson; his final site visit before voting day was to one in Longman. He whipped out his Medicare card countless times during the campaign, when he announced the election, and in delivering his victory speech.

Paired with this positive message was a relentlessly negative campaign to brand Dutton as unelectable. In workshopping meetings in the weeks leading up to the election, one Labor operative suggested “Cuttin’ Dutton” as a campaign slogan. This was wisely rejected for the “He cuts, you pay” line, which allowed Labor to highlight both Dutton’s nuclear power policy and potential cuts to government services.

Labor’s campaign stretched the boundaries of truth to the limit, including the false claim that the Coalition would cut existing Medicare urgent care clinics. Coalition MPs are now bemoaning that they took too long to call out Labor’s lies, but this attack line had been coming for months, indeed years. An attack on Dutton’s health record was not just forseeable but inevitable given he tried to introduce a GP co-payment when he was health minister.

Although few would notice it until the campaign began, Albanese made a concerted effort to sharpen up his rhetoric and cut back on the woolly, long-winded answers he had become known for. While Dutton engaged in pointless sparring with the press pack, Albanese masterfully conducted his campaign doorstops.

Labor insiders stress Albanese’s campaign was not a cult of sycophants. On Labor’s morning campaign strategy call, senior ministers such as Penny Wong and Tony Burke would challenge Albanese in robust conversations.

Ministers such as Wong, Jim Chalmers, Don Farrell and Katy Gallagher travelled with Albanese during the campaign to provide counsel, alongside veteran operatives such as principal private secretary David Epstein and media chief Fiona Sugden.

By election day, Albanese was confidently predicting Labor would pick up Dickson, a call many dismissed as bluster. After watching the early vote returns at Kirribilli House with a small number of staff, his partner Jodie, son Nathan and Wong, he headed to the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL, where the faithful cheered as it became clear Labor had dramatically expanded its majority. Albanese soaked up the atmosphere for hours with Labor staff, party boss Paul Erickson and Erickson’s wife, Dimity Paul, a senior ministerial adviser who had just had the couple’s first child.

After months of near sobriety, Albanese allowed himself to relax and enjoy some beers. The discipline, the grind, the travel: it had all been worth it. Dutton’s parliamentary career was over, and Albanese’s prime ministership was about to begin again.

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