A confidential Liberal Party review into its catastrophic 2025 federal election defeat has been leaked to multiple news outlets, exposing bitter internal recriminations and a finding that the party's treatment of migrant communities may have been as damaging as its widely reported collapse among women voters. The Sydney Morning Herald reports the review asserts the party's capacity to "thoughtlessly offend" migrant voters was potentially a bigger electoral liability than the desertion of Liberal women.
The 64-page document, conducted by former senator Nick Minchin and former NSW minister Pru Goward, drew on close to 100 interviews with candidates, MPs, and party officials. Its conclusions are unsparing. The review's conclusion states that "the 2025 Federal Liberal campaign failure is widely considered to be the worst campaign the party has ever fought."
A leaked copy of the document reveals 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. One state party director's assessment, quoted in the review, has since become the document's most-cited line: "Peter Dutton made himself captain, coach and ballboy."
So disliked by women voters that some female candidates begged the leader not to visit their electorates, Dutton and his senior staff took control of the campaign without consulting head office. Voters did not like the party's plan for government-owned nuclear power plants or restrictions on working from home, and the decision to reject the Labor government's income-tax cuts was later regarded as contributing to an "incoherent" campaign.
In the 2025 campaign, 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. The review recommends the party never again rely on a single polling firm, and that pollsters must not have a direct line to the leader without the federal director's knowledge.
Perhaps the most striking passage in the leaked document concerns internal accountability. "There was little feedback from those decision-makers in this campaign about their own shortcomings," the report says. "While every submission criticised the actions of other decision-makers and provided examples, there was a notable absence of reflection on how a decision-maker, that is a campaign director, paid official, MP or candidate, could have done better."
The controversy is compounded by the party's refusal to release the document. The federal executive has decided not to publish the review. That decision contradicted assurances given to both Minchin and Goward when they took on the assignment. Co-author Nick Minchin lashed out at the suppression decision, saying he was "extremely disappointed" and surprised. It went against earlier assurances he and Goward had been given, he said.
That assurance was given when Sussan Ley led the Liberal Party, but new leader Angus Taylor never confirmed he would release it after winning the leadership in February. Goward, writing in the Australian Financial Review, argued that "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."
There is a reasonable counterargument to be made for suppression. Post-election reviews contain frank assessments from individuals who spoke on the understanding of confidentiality. Publishing such documents can discourage honest feedback in future reviews, and the party has said it has accepted all recommendations, which arguably matters more than public disclosure. Taylor's supporters would also note that re-litigating the Dutton era in public does little to assist the party's rebuilding effort ahead of the 2028 election.
Minchin said he was "optimistic" the party would present a "competitive" offering at the next federal election, saying Taylor had made "a very successful transition into the leadership" and appointed "a very competent front bench." He also noted the party would need to demonstrate to women voters, as well as all voters, that it had understood the mistakes of 2025 and would correct them.
The tension here is real and cuts to the heart of what a healthy party institution looks like. Transparency serves accountability; confidentiality can serve candour. Both values matter. What is harder to defend is a party that claims to accept all the findings of a review while simultaneously ensuring that neither its members nor the public can read what those findings actually say. The 2022 election loss, by contrast, saw the public release of a review authored by former party director Brian Loughnane, providing a level of transparency conspicuously absent this time. For a party whose own review found an "absence of reflection" among its senior figures, the decision to bury the document does not exactly signal that the culture has changed.