The leaked review shows how chaotic campaign management and policy announcements ignoring key demographics cost the Coalition the election.

In 2022, the Liberal Party’s post-election review referred to ‘a sense that the Liberal Party is failing to adequately represent the values and priorities of women in modern Australia’. In 2025 nothing had changed. Women, together with Gen Z and Millennials, and significant multicultural communities were a ‘demographic loss’ to the Liberal Party.

The recently leaked 2025 review, conducted by Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, pinpoints key defects in the Liberal Party campaign – shortage of policy development and lack of coherent campaign strategy due to the rupture between Peter Dutton and the party’s federal director, Andrew Hirst. The first recommendation is that ‘The Party must never again allow the Parliamentary Leader and Office to effectively run the campaign’.

The working from home policy is cited as a prime example of campaign mistakes due to lack of oversight by the federal secretariat (which already permitted working from home). The review noted the lack of senior women or anyone in the secretariat with responsibility to apply a ‘female lens’ to campaign strategy and to develop partnerships with bodies such as Hilma’s Network.

The 2022 Liberal Party review had recommended a network to promote female representation in the party; Senator Jane Hume as co-author of that review said such a network was so fundamental to the future success of the party that it should be financed by a levy on parliamentarians.

The Dame Margaret Guilfoyle Network (MGN) was eventually launched in March 2024. Needless to say there was no levy on Liberal Party parliamentarians and with membership fees of up to $150 for non-members of the party there was little evidence of any activity.

The list of 2025 federal election policies attached to the MGN website does not include a women’s policy and the ‘Plan to Make Communities Safer’ does not mention domestic violence, despite current crisis levels.

Although not included on the MGN website, there was actually a 2025 Coalition election policy on family and domestic violence. The review includes a scathing account of its launch – apparently done in Tasmania with announcement of a women’s shelter for the NSW seat of Robertson but nothing for Tasmania.

Hilma’s Network was an independent initiative by Charlotte Mortlock, a former Sky News anchor and Liberal staffer determined to keep her network independent of party control, unlike the MGN and more like Labor’s EMILY’s List. Mortlock was able to assume a very public role in support of Liberal women parliamentarians and candidates and obtained $150,000 from the Liberal Party’s Cormack Foundation. She made no headway on policy, however, and hostility from Dutton’s office was reported to the review.

The party’s failure to apply a gender lens to the working from home policy or the nuclear policy is noted by the review. The party also failed to apply a gender lens when it opposed point blank Labor’s policy on student debt or on income support for students on mandatory placements during teaching, nursing and social work degrees.

Women were 60 per cent of the three million Australians to benefit from Labor’s student debt policy. Like Trump on President Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan, the policy was described by the Coalition as ’elitist’. The review mentions this mistake but only in the context of the youth vote. Neither does it mention that the shadow minister for women was notably absent from election policy debates, unlike the minister.

The review canvasses the ‘Trump factor’ and its trajectory. On the day he was sworn in as president, Trump issued executive orders on three related issues – establishing the Department of Government Efficiency; ending Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs; and ending remote work for federal employees. Five days later Dutton appointed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as Shadow Minister for Government Efficiency.

The mass public sackings of federal public servants in the US seemed a forerunner of the Coalition’s promised cut of 41,000 Canberra public servants to eliminate government waste and DEI. Not mentioned in the review, the Liberal-aligned campaign organisation, Advance claimed the hostility to Canberra was justified given its ‘Yes’ vote in the Voice referendum showed it had no understanding of real Australians.

As the review notes, Trump’s policies and tariffs quickly became deeply unpopular in Australia and Dutton failed to display the ‘flexible and nimble response’ required to distance himself from them.

The review credits a candidate with the label ‘Temu Trump’, so successfully applied to Dutton. The real credit belongs to Greens MP Stephen Bates. In the last Question Time before the election he asked the Prime Minister, “Why would you invite Donald Trump to Australia when you’ve got a Temu-Trump sitting right opposite you?” A video of the exchange uploaded to TikTok attracted more than two million views and #temutrump became a trending hashtag on all the major social media platforms.

One interesting section of the review provides feedback from Sean Topham, of the Topham Guerin advertising company. He considered that Coalition MPs had failed to provide a high volume of digital content compared to Labor front benchers and MPs or the NZ Nationals he had worked for in 2023. He suggested that in addition to existing KPIs, MPs should be tasked with producing digital content to reach key demographics.

Also interesting is the review’s section on third-party engagement, suggesting the ALP, Greens and Teals invested much more significantly here and thus negative campaigning could be contracted out. It does not mention the negative campaigns against Labor, Greens and Teals run by Advance as well as by Australians for Prosperity, Repeal the Teal, Better Australia or Keep the Sheep (important in the seat of Forrest). In Goldstein, Repeal the Teal accused Independent Zoe Daniel and her volunteers of being Hamas supporters.

It is clear why the Liberal Party’s Federal Executive did not want to release the review. It identifies reasons for failure and goes against the current directions of the party. The 2022 review was released but not implemented for the same reason. The big contrast is with how Labor learned from its 2019 failure. The Emerson and Weatherill review was a fine example of what such reviews can achieve when parties are prepared to implement them.