The leaked review of the Liberal Party’s 2025 election defeat details campaign failures and organisational problems. What it avoids is the harder question: what policies or direction might rebuild support.

The leaking of the Liberal Party review of its disastrous 2025 election campaign suggests the Liberals have another continuing problem – a traitor in the ranks, or perhaps more than one as different versions of the election review document were tabled by the Government in the House of representatives and the Senate.

This would be unfair to the leaker(s). They would, no doubt, insist that they want to help the Liberal Party, by ensuring that the recommendations the review made are implemented and not ignored, which seems to have been the fate of many of the recommendations made in the review of the Liberal Party’s loss of the 2022 election.

Most of the analysis in the latest report is of what went wrong in the disastrous campaign for the 2025 election, and how to fix those issues. The focus inevitably was on the party leader, Peter Dutton, and what he did wrong.

Not least, according to the review, was that he and his office took over the responsibility for the campaign. However, as the first recommendation of the version of the report tabled in the House of Representatives puts it:

“The party must never again allow the Parliamentary Leader and Office to effectively run the campaign. The Federal Director [of the Liberal Party] is the Campaign Director and must have overall responsibility for the conduct of the campaign.” The first sentence has been removed from what must be a later version of the report that was tabled in the Senate.

That recommendation flows from much of the description in the body of the report of what went wrong during the campaign, and how Dutton or his office were responsible. There isn’t much that is new in this. The bungling over policies and announcements (and the lack of them) was well reported at the time. Indeed, the reporting of what was going wrong as it was happening – for example, the attack on working from home, or on major cuts to the public service – added to the damage that was being done to the party’s electoral prospects.

Dutton also has to take the blame for the party’s failure to develop appropriate policies, though that blame is shared by the parliamentary Liberal party. The review said, “The absence of a comprehensive suite of policies was the result of three years of poor policy processes followed by the parliamentary party…There were not only significant policy gaps but also the promotion of policies which defied the Party’s values, such as the opposition to an income tax cut and the denial of flexible working arrangements between employees and employers.”

It added, “It should be noted that the evident failure to look at each policy through the electorate’s prism, which was overwhelmingly about the cost of living, was a cumulative and unarrested flaw. Assessing the impact of a policy, or the government’s policy, on a particular demographic, for example young voters, was another necessary but often absent discipline.”

The recommendation that flows from this is not about policy directions, but entirely about process. It is in these terms:

“The Federal Parliamentary Party, which has the privilege of determining the Party’s federal policies, must in future and especially in opposition, comply with its obligations under the Federal Constitution [of the Liberal Party] to consult with the Party Organisation on the formulation of policy, and to do so in a timely manner.”

The review recognises that two of the major problems it faces concern the impact of the Teals, and the ‘female vote’. As to the latter it says, “The combination of a leader unattractive to women, and policies or messaging that alienated women was a major factor in 2025. Further research to understand the loss of the female vote over the past decade must be undertaken urgently.”

However, it goes on to say it had good female candidates but they “could not overcome the leadership and policy obstacles.”

As for future policies to meet this problem it says nothing, other than that senior women must have a voice at the decision-making table.

The problem with the Teals is analysed mainly in terms of campaigning – getting better intelligence on Teal candidates, begin campaigning “as early as possible” and “emphasise community engagement”. No mention here of the policies that the Teals advocate that have proved attractive to voters and whether the Liberal Party needs to re-evaluate its own policies in areas such as climate.

Indeed, the report and its recommendations are primarily about process and organisation. Lots of investigation to be done into various groups, including migrants, but little about how the Liberal Party is to meet the challenges from the Teals on one side and One Nation on the other, nor the fact that it has ceased to be attractive to younger generations of voters.

It’s more post-mortem than a blueprint for a future Liberal Government.