Braddon – Australia 2025

@Tommo9 probably a mix of Anne Urquhart’s name recognition plus Gavin Pearce’s retirement plus Dutton’s unpopularity.

Last year at the state election the Liberal primary in Braddon was 45.6% and this seat nearly elected FOUR Liberal MPs. Now at this federal election it’s only 31.9%.

Similar story for Bass. In 2024 it was 38.0%, now it’s only 31.2%. In Lyons, 37.6% to 26.3%. Less relevantly, it’s the same in the far south. In Franklin it went from 34.0% to just 18.7%. In Clark it went from 27.1% to just 13.6% and they almost finished FOURTH.

How did this happen? How did Tasmanians get so mad at Dutton?

@Nether Portal Tasmanian Liberals’ success comes down to the fact that the leadership for the most part has been a small-l liberal (Gutwein, Rockliff, Hodgman previously). They’ve been able to get the balance right, and Scott Morrison, for all his faults, at least tried to pretend that he was in the ‘sensible centre’.

Peter Dutton other hand was completely unhinged and radical. He’s a conservative and Tasmanians don’t like his brand of politics. In Braddon, they also lost Gavin Pearce’s personal vote which appeared to be pretty big. Then you have Anne Urquhart who was selected as the ALP candidate, a high profile local who also has extensive parliamentary experience (in the Senate) competing against Mal Hingston, another boring old white male who was unknown quantity in the electorate, it was a no brainer that Urquhart was going to be at least competitive, though her winning by a similar margin to Pearce last election is just extraordinary. It’s to the point that I wonder if Gavin Pearce didn’t contest in 2019 and 2022 would Justine Keay have held on instead…

@Tommo9 – excellent points on the candidate selection. One thing that was skipped over a lot on this blog was that the Deputy Mayor of Burnie, Giovanna Simpson (who barely missed out on the last seat in state Braddon) ran for preselection here. I feel she would have had a greater chance at retaining with an increased name profile from council and could reuse state election resources.

Hingston was a mix of uninspiring, invisible, and genuine a deadbeat candidate who didn’t bother here. Urquhart on the other hand has a large profile being Labor’s duty Senator here so clearly they thought well whereas the Liberals thought they could chuck a random John Doe into the seat and call it a day.

Community preselections are most definitely needed

@Tommo9 @James, so it was a mix of the obvious fact that being too conservative affected Tasmania like it did the rest of Australia plus a poor candidate who didn’t do much campaigning and thought he was safe? Giovanna Simpson would’ve probably done better I agree. Not sure why she wasn’t selected.

This is such a repetitive issue for the Coalition, very poor candidates selected in crucial seats. Bruce, Mackellar, Whitlam, Dobell, Forrest, Indi, Grey, Hasluck the list goes on and on

@Up the dragons – The Coalition can only pick candidates from the membership of the Liberals/Nationals/LNP

Dunkley candidate shouldn’t have been selected again, Katie Allen failed in Chisholm where another candidate had been preselected early and was dumped, Trevor Evans shouldn’t have got another turn in Brisbane, Scott Yung was a poor candidate in Bennelong. Andrew Constance shouldn’t have got another go, he seeed more a spoiler than a serious candidate.
Where Liberals appeared to take the Tony Barry advice and go for diversity, it didn’t help them at all.
One thing I believe that helped the Nationals was confining Barnaby Joyce in his seat and not commenting on National issues. That probably helped in the races against Independents, removing him as an issue, imo.

I’m sensing a trend where Gympie ignores the problem candidates on the extreme right of the Liberals and instead criticises moderates for little to no apparent cause. Kate Allen, Trevor Evans and Andrew Constance are victims of a landslide defeat, plus in the first two their electorates are trending left. It is quite a reach to claim their campaigns are the problem.

Also there seems to be an assumption that there are normal, high-quality people in the Liberal party membership that would be outstanding candidates but they seem to be getting passed over for extremists and shonky businessmen for some unspecified reason

@Adda:
The extreme Right means Reactionaries and Fascists. The Liberal Party has never tolerated people like that, even a publicly stated preference for the death penalty would doom a candidate at preselection.
Katie Allen was well beaten in Higgins, a seat Labor had never won before.
The appearance was that the Party gave her the slot over a preselected candidate in Chisholm at least partly because she is a woman.
There’s nothing reactionary or even slightly conservative in the Liberal platform, but the Moderate candidates were either comprehensively beaten or are battling large swings.
That says to me that voters aren’t interested in Labor Lite.

No it says that voters arent interested in Dutton, they found him intolerable. His policies were not attractive to moderate Liberals particularly working women. Its about the leader and the policies more than the candidate a lot of the time. Moderates perform better than conservatives and thats a fact. The swing against Katie allen while lower than the national average is due to anti-liberal sentiment in the Chinese community

@Tommo9 Dutton’s campaign wasn’t even remotely radical. Nuclear power, cutting fuel excise and reducing perceived government waste is about as unradical as you can get.

Gympie’s thesis makes a lot of sense.

Between 2016 when the leader was a moderate and 2025 when the leader was a conservative, the Liberal party has lost diabolical levels of support in inner and middle belt Melbourne. Swings of 20+ % against the Liberals in booths in suburbs like Ivanhoe, Heidelberg, Eltham, Camberwell, Blackburn, Box Hill, Glen Waverley, Carnegie. Liberals once dominated these areas but are now competing with the Greens for second place. They will never win another election without gaining moderate, centrist voters back

Echoing Trump with DOGE and ending WFH and cutting 41000 public servants and starting a decades long project for nuclear is a radical agenda and the voters punished Dutton for it. To say otherwise is quite divorced from reality.

Many who see themselves as “moderate and centrist” (which is a furphy, but anyway) will still vote for a conservative platform if it is competently run and the candidates are likeable. Dutton ran a campaign that was not conservative, incompetent and unlikeable. 0 for 3.

Except the issue isn’t a lack of conservatism. It’s copying unlikeable policy stances from overseas and a lack of focus on the issues that actually matter ie. cost of living. Swinging from nuclear to ending WFH to attacking “woke” education curricula doesn’t gain votes, it’s a scrambled mess of policy that shows they are not ready for government. Australian voters don’t want things that rock the boat, and Dutton presented a radical agenda that promised to upend stablity.

I don’t think your conclusion matches the rest of your argument. We agree that the campaign was incompetent. I’m saying that’s because they didn’t have a coherent way of thinking undergirding it, so they need to pick one. Labor, for all the ideological mess they’ve been since Keating forced them to adopt liberalism, at least have a vague goal in mind (“fairness”). What’s the goal of the Liberals?

If Australian voters don’t want to rock the boat in any circumstances, why have they just reduced the major party vote share for the sixth consecutive election? You can argue that Dutton/the Liberals looked unready for government, but that’s not because their agenda was ideologically radical, it was because it looked off-the-cuff and incoherent.

The irony of the Media led wailing over Trump is the Tariffs are a nothingburger for Australia ATM, as Albanese recognised by making one statement in response, then remaining silent.
The effect of Dutton grasping the Tarbaby was ending up claiming not to know Trump at the debate.
Trump’s foreign policy of opposing China Russia and Iran may be seen by history as America’s first same foreign policy since Reagan, imo.

Let’s break this down. Both of you have points.

Question: Is nuclear radical?
Answer: No.

Question: Was Dutton a problem?
Answer: Yes.

Question: Did moderate candidates lose because they weren’t conservative enough?
Answer: No, they lost because they were picked for marginal seats that were lost in a landslide that could’ve been avoided with a better leader and a better campaign.

Question: Was Dutton’s campaign conservative?
Answer: Yes, obviously. Not sure how it isn’t.

Question: Is DOGE a radical policy?
Answer: No, if done properly. The way it works in the US is not good.

Question: Is Trumpism effective in Australia?
Answer: No, as the election results prove. I’m not saying Australians went to the ballot box and said “I’m not voting for Dutton because of Trump”, but rather they didn’t like Dutton or Trump and the left campaigned hard on painting Dutton as “Temu Trump” even if that isn’t very accurate.

And this whole conversation shows exactly why the Liberal Party should split. There will never be any agreement on this and the party will keep tearing itself apart over it. So why not split, and see how each performs?

I can only speak for myself. I have wanted to vote for the Liberal Party for most of my adult life, but I have never been able to bring myself to do so, mainly because of the social conservatism in the party. If there is a conservative out there who is voting for Labor instead of the Coalition because the Coalition isn’t going hard enough on culture wars – well, we’ll both get what we want if the Liberal Party splits.

It’s a radical agenda because it’s a disruptive agenda. The policies I mentioned like starting nuclear and sacking 41k public servants clearly are so. Voters don’t think in terms of ideology, it’s not about whether they are conservative or moderate, but whether they address their core concern (cost of living) and how much possible disruption they cause. The latter is what generally sinks elections in Australia – you need to only look back on 1993 or 2019 or 2004, or any others to view how the electorate thinks of disruption. When a change of government happens, it is by not scaring the horses and presenting as not causing disruption (ie. Rudd calling himself an economic conservative, Albanese in 2022, Tony in 2013 claiming no cuts to the ABC, SBS etc)

I don’t think there is any way to portray nuclear as a non-radical agenda and it can’t be packaged as a friendly, non-disruptive policy to the electorate. Spending more than a trillion dollars (because $600B is a clear underestimate) to change Australia’s energy makeup is clearly radical. And cutting 41k public servants, ending WFH, attacking “woke” education and talking about changing curricula are simply red meat for conservatives that are radical stances, but which are also not popular.

I’m also ignoring the general history of nuclear as a controversial policy and the issue of waste storage and which electorates will have to be subject to that.

Dutton swapped out a Liberal in Gavin Pearce for a moderate in Mal Hingston, failed completely., then picked the salmon industry over water conservation, another huge error.
In the near Brisbane and Brisbane seats, the State Government decision to persevere with Labor’s Olympics boondoggle plus break a promise not to build another stadium in SEQld doomed them, imo.

@Nicholas the problem with splitting the party is it may not work out. I’ve suggested before why not just kick Antić, Canavan and Deeming and their mob out of the Coalition like they did with Hanson and Rennick. Also the thing is nobody is gonna vote Labor because they think the Coalition isn’t conservative enough because Labor are even much less conservative.

Someone needs to get the balance right again. Howard knew how to do that, though I concede that it was obviously easier at the time.

@Adda I see what you mean though I’m confused about when Dutton specifically targeted the curriculum.

I’ll just leave this quote here:
“We must offer an ambitious economic agenda and a centrist, inclusive social vision. Reclaiming enterprise and the centre is not a departure from our values – it is a return to them.” — Andrew Bragg, 2025

Interesting. I had completely forgotten about the whole Olympics thing.

I’m really not sure why people think the 2032 Olympics is A. unpopular in Queensland (it’s not), B. impacting Crisafulli’s popularity (again, it’s not) and C. had an impact on the federal election (yet again, it didn’t).

@Nether Portal

Sure, but don’t the likes of Antic, Canavan, and Deeming want to do the same to the moderates? And if they were all kicked out, mightn’t they form their own party?

I agree with you in finding it hard to imagine someone voting Labor over the Coalition because the Coalition isn’t conservative enough. But a lot of people seem to be very convinced that these people exist in significant numbers.

What was the point of voting for a moderate when their voices are silenced within the Liberal party? Take Bridget Archer and Julian Leeser for example. The party room left them out

If anything I think the conservatives in the Liberal party ride on the coat tails of the moderates and the conservative factional leader seem to over estimate how popular they are in the wider community.

When Cory Bernadi listened too much to the cheer leaders and created his own “Conservative” Party he struggled to get much more of the vote than Family First or One Nation

They have to start fresh. Full policy review (abandon nuclear embrace renewables), gender quotas, open preselection. Otherwise a new party is needed

And clean out the party from stooges like Alex antic and matt canavan (I know hes National but the lines are blurred in the LNP) who focus on culture wars and repel younger and female voters

@NP What balance? This is my whole point – the Liberal Party was created as an anti-socialist coalition between conservatives and liberals. That was fine during the Cold War, when Labor was socialist. But modern Labor is not. It’s a hodgepodge of liberalism over socialist roots. That’s why Labor’s primary vote was the first to fall to the point where them getting in the mid-30s is considered a great performance – they left space to fill which the Greens have taken (who, despite losing most lower house seats, still got 12% of votes). That’s created a problem for the Liberals – how do you define yourself against an opponent that has changed so much?

The balancing act worked for the Liberal Party as it was, but I’m not sure it works for the party as it is and, like Nicholas, I don’t think a split would be the worst thing. A small-l liberal party would likely be on the same page with many of the Teals, and some non-union Labor people may also be tempted to join them. A conservative party would be much more appealing in the outer suburbs as a threat to Labor, places where the Liberals are too on the nose for historical reasons, associated with looking down on the hoi polloi.

@bazza Bernardi thought that Thatcherism = conservative, which is at odds with pretty much everyone he brought into his party. Look at the economic platforms that Katter and Rennick have given their parties, and that gives you some idea of what his party should’ve been pushing. Bernardi also gave up on his party after about a year or two, which from what I’ve heard was greatly upsetting to those who merged their parties into his and left them wary of doing the same thing again.

For the Liberal Party to rebuild the first step should be to try and attract more members – but is that possible?

In the Teal electorates they have managed to engage a large number of volunteers who maybe previously were interested in politics but not formally members of a party. Can the Liberals attract these sorts of people? Is there a compelling reason for people to take up arms against the Labor regime which currently seems fairly sensible to the general public

@NP Rennick was never kicked out FYI, he lost preselection for the 3rd senate spot by 1 vote and then resigned to form his own party, presumably because that ended up being his only chance of keeping his seat.

@Bazza if Rennick can get swarms of volunteers all over Queensland in a matter of months for his own party…

Wonder why they would be attracted to Rennick but not the LNP
Does the LNP (or Labor even) actively try to recruit new members (outside of branch stacking)

Rennick has name recognition among voters who take notice of what’s happening. He questioned the Covid Response, which was enough to panic the Moderates on State Council into kicking him off the viable part of the Senate ticket.
Huge own goal there.
ABC Election coverage gave you a fair idea of where the Liberal part of the LNP is at. James McGrath said the model for the Party federally is lower charges and service delivery, hallmarks of the BCC Schrinner administration.

@Gympie – that model has worked well for the Libs in NSW recently too. Let’s see if they can bring that to the federal level where they have consistently tried to to reduce services. It is also a harder position to argue from the opposition that you are going to continue delivering current services more efficiently

I’m not sure it even makes sense at a federal level. Service delivery is something we expect as a focus from local and state governments. Federal governments are expected to have their eyes set a bit higher. It’s not exactly visionary stuff.