Katina Curtis: Unheeded lessons come back to bite Liberals who admit they need to change ‘everything’

No one saw this coming. The scale of Labor’s victory on Saturday night surpassed even the most optimistic predictions of insiders. “Oh my God, I don’t believe it, this is a dream,” one teary-eyed supporter said while watching at Labor HQ as the results rolled in. A member of Anthony Albanese’s inner circle was heard having a entire conversation that consisted of just repeating, “Holy shit!” On the other side, the mood was grim and continues to be so. Liberals are grappling with losing the election, losing their leader and losing many colleagues. Internally, many are calling for a deep and honest review of what went wrong. Others say a good start would be looking at the unheeded lessons from the 2022 campaign. Asked what needed to change, one Liberal laughed bitterly and said: “Everything.” Despite years of warnings about the need to lift their game on gender equality, the Liberals will be left with between four and six female Lower House MPs plus another two from the Nationals. That’s out of a likely 43 seats. Thank goodness for the Senate, where it seems half the Coalition senators will be women, or the joint party room would truly be a sausage-fest. Another lesson that has also gone unheeded is the need to make the party attractive to voters who live cities. You know, the places where almost all of Australia’s population lives. In 2022 the party lost nearly all of its inner metropolitan seats (mostly to teals) and failed to hold ground in outer metro areas. “No party that is seeking to form government has a pathway to a majority solely through rural and regional electorates,” Jane Hume and Brian Loughnane warned in their review. Peter Dutton targeted the nation’s outer suburbs heavily over the past three years. The result? The party now holds just seven seats considered metropolitan, in Sydney and Brisbane plus Canning which covers Mandurah. None in Melbourne, none in Adelaide, none in Hobart. It may win in Bullwinkel, but that’s still on the line and Labor is quietly confident in holding it. “It’s a bit of a mystery and that’s a problem,” one insider said of the growing city-country divide. Keith Wolahan, who lost his outer-Melbourne seat, said the party had to acknowledge the cities Australians lived in now, not the ones they used to live in. A Labor source echoed these sentiments, saying Dutton and the Liberals appeared to have a notion of what life was like in the suburbs that was out of step with the reality of life in the suburbs. Another Liberal identified young, aspirational families as the key demographic that didn’t vote for them at the weekend. Labor did a better job of talking to these voters. It also had an actual offering for them. Albanese’s key takeaway from the Democrats’ loss in the US election in November was that he had to give people a reason to vote him in again, an offering for the future. The Liberals’ key takeaway appeared to be that Trump-style culture wars worked. They didn’t. Labor also had a well-oiled campaign where the party headquarters, leader’s office and other travelling ministers all pulled in the same direction as each other. In many ways, Albanese stuck to the winning playbook from 2022, including holding his launch in week three in Perth, and doing nearly the same sweep across the country in the final week. He even held his election night party at the same venue, the Canterbury-Hurlstone RSL. But Labor was also agile enough to update what needed updating. That included Albanese’s messaging. He was high-energy, always on message and in a good mood throughout the campaign. In contrast, Dutton seemed scattered, contradicting himself or his frontbenchers from one day to the next and appearing to make up detail and even whole policies on the fly. Things were announced but the party’s website not updated, leaving MPs and candidates unsure what they should be telling voters about it. Labor outgunned the Coalition on social media to sell its messages and get ahead in defining Dutton. It also recognised the importance of engaging properly with social media influencers and new media, including podcasts. This too paid off, particularly with women in their 30s who were turned off by Dutton but appear to have backed Labor rather than the Greens or independents. In WA, the party spent a year preparing high-quality ads for every candidate to run in hyper-targeted locations on social media, YouTube and streaming video services. It worked. Labor people reported that for the first time ever, voters were telling them on their way into polling booths, “I saw you on my TV.” And then they voted for them.