For a party that prides itself on economic discipline and institutional competence, the picture painted in a confidential 64-page review of the Liberal Party's 2025 federal election campaign is deeply uncomfortable reading. According to reporting by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Nightly, the document, co-authored by former senator Nick Minchin and former NSW minister Pru Goward, concludes that the campaign was the worst the party has ever fought. It lays the blame squarely at the feet of then-leader Peter Dutton.
The review's core finding is structural as much as personal. The Liberal leader and his office micro-managed the opposition campaign, shutting out federal director Andrew Hirst and a head-office team who were told, as late as three months before the election, they had a chance of unseating Anthony Albanese's first-term government. That assessment, delivered to the Liberal Party federal executive in December, was meant to inform a public reckoning. Instead, the party tried to keep it secret.
In typical elections, the party leader is the chief spokesperson and the party director runs the campaign. Dutton's decision to combine the two roles made it hard to change strategy when challenges mounted, a problem exacerbated by incorrect internal polling telling him the Coalition was ahead. The review identified a serious breakdown in the relationship between the two men at the very centre of the operation. Hirst and Dutton had a distant relationship well before the campaign began, and could not agree how to attack Anthony Albanese's image or improve Dutton's.
The polling problem was especially acute. Dutton personally rang the party's pollster, Mike Turner of Freshwater Strategy, for advice on messaging and strategy. Based on the results of the Indigenous Voice referendum, Freshwater overestimated the Coalition's support. In five NSW seats, including Bennelong, Gilmore, Patterson, Robertson, and Werriwa, Freshwater put the Coalition ahead 54 to 46 per cent. The true figure was almost the opposite. The Liberal Party did not win one. The review recommends the party should never again rely on a single polling firm, and that pollsters must be answerable to the federal campaign director, not the leader's office.
Policy was another fault line. Voters did not like the Coalition's plan for government-owned nuclear power plants or restrictions on working from home. They would later regard the decision to reject the Labor government's income-tax cuts as contributing to an "incoherent" campaign, according to the review. Young people, women and non-English speaking Australians turned on the party, leading to the lowest primary vote in its history. The primary vote plummeted to its lowest level since the 1940s, slashing the party's representation in the 150-member House of Representatives to 43 seats.
The transparency question surrounding the review's suppression is, in some ways, as significant as the findings themselves. Minchin said that when he and Goward took on the task, both then-leader Sussan Ley and party president John Olsen had assured them the review would be published in full. That commitment was not honoured. The review was about to be released before Christmas when Dutton claimed it potentially defamed him and his former chief of staff. When the federal executive finally met, it decided to break convention and keep the review private, giving no reason for the decision.
Co-author and former NSW Liberal minister Pru Goward said almost 100 interviews had been undertaken with people intimately involved in the campaign. "No new leader, whether of a failing company or losing football team, has ever been able to change an organisation without understanding why the failure occurred and ensuring that understanding is shared with shareholders, players and supporters," she wrote in the Australian Financial Review. Her co-author was blunter still. Minchin told The Conversation he thought the suppression would go down badly with thousands of party members, supporters and donors. "They will be horrified by the decision to bury the review," he said.
There is a reasonable counter-argument available to the new leadership. New Liberal leader Angus Taylor, who took the position in a decisive 34-17 party-room vote over Sussan Ley, has said he wants head office to convert the review into a public action plan. The logic of focusing reform energy forward rather than re-litigating past failures is not entirely without merit, particularly for a leader who was not at the helm during the campaign itself. Shadow ministers had complained that "they had done substantial policy development but that it disappeared into the Leader's Office and mostly did not reappear", suggesting the institutional dysfunction ran deeper than any single individual. Publishing only a forward-looking action plan, rather than the full post-mortem, might allow the party to acknowledge failure without relitigating internal grievances that could destabilise Taylor's authority.
Yet from the standpoint of basic institutional accountability, that argument has limits. The Australian Electoral Commission records that the Liberal Party received tens of millions of dollars in public funding tied to its vote share. Party members, donors, and candidates who campaigned in good faith have a legitimate interest in understanding what went wrong. The review itself noted "a notable absence of reflection on how a decision-maker, that is a campaign director, paid official, MP or candidate, could have done better" from those who made the decisions. A party that accepts taxpayer-linked funding while suppressing accountability reviews sets an uncomfortable precedent.
The honest truth is that both impulses, accountability and renewal, are legitimate, and the tension between them is not easily resolved. Political parties are not government departments; they are private organisations with their own internal cultures and no legal obligation to publish post-election autopsies. At the same time, a conservative party that preaches transparency and institutional responsibility cannot easily dismiss demands for openness when its own conduct is under scrutiny. For Angus Taylor, threading that needle without appearing to shield the Dutton era from scrutiny may be one of the more consequential political judgements of his early leadership.