Peter Dutton repelled voters with a Tony Abbott-style political playbook ahead of last year’s federal election, presenting poorly designed and badly explained policies, helping Labor secure a landslide win, a party review has found.
Released on Friday, as the opposition leader, Sussan Ley, fought to hold off a leadership challenge, Labor’s election campaign review said Anthony Albanese’s positive message and policies designed to improve voters’ lives resonated with the electorate, while Dutton’s “negative, arrogant and aggressive” approach was a major barrier to support for the Coalition.
But it warned Labor needed to modernise, rebuild its grassroots membership and work harder to thwart potential challenges from independents, describing the increasingly complicated national political landscape as looking “more and more like 150 by-elections with unique local dynamics”.
The review said the Coalition’s headline policy proposals turned off voters, including a plan for government-owned nuclear power and restrictive work-from-home rules for public servants.
“Peter Dutton’s campaign was marked by inconsistency and missteps, including policy backflips, poorly coordinated announcements, and a lack of message discipline,” it said.
The report said Dutton’s efforts to make the campaign a referendum on Albanese’s first term failed because Labor was successful in framing the debate as a choice between Albanese and Dutton.
The review found Labor should do more to demonstrate the importance of voting its candidates into the Senate, giving the party a better pathway to legislate lasting reforms, and warned AI as well as targeted disinformation were risks to future winning campaigns.
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Albanese defied expectations at the 3 May 2025 poll, winning 94 seats – Labor’s biggest majority in the lower house since federation. The party held all of its seats, defeating high-profile Greens MPs and even ousting Dutton in his own seat of Dickson.
It praised effective local campaign measures, urging continuous engagement with voters as critical to fighting off well-resourced challengers, including teal candidates.
“Without a sustained local campaign and visible delivery, any seat – including those considered safe – can become vulnerable to a three-cornered contest triggered by a candidate exploiting a sudden shift in community sentiment.”
The report does not mention Donald Trump, despite voters rejecting the Coalition in part because of the perceived similarities in policy and style between the US president and the Liberal leader.
It confirmed findings by the respected Australian Electoral Study, conducted by the Australian National University and Griffith University, which found a collapse in support for the Coalition’s economic policies, including Dutton’s decision to oppose tax cuts, saw the Liberals squander a nearly 40-year advantage on the economy.
That study found Dutton’s unpopularity “broke several records” while Albanese was the more favoured political leader and rated better on key attributes.
The Liberal party’s own election postmortem review has been delayed amid legal threats and warnings that its findings could defame Dutton and members of his campaign team, including his former chief of staff, Alex Dalgleish.
Liberal sources confirmed to Guardian Australia that lawyers had been engaged over the report, written by party elders Nick Minchin and Pru Goward.
The ABC first reported Dutton and other campaign officials had received the review but its public release had been delayed, in part because Dutton had not been given a right of reply to key findings.
Responding to the Labor review, the party’s national president, former treasurer Wayne Swan, said it must keep growing and modernising campaign machinery.
“Labor’s grassroots strength remains a cornerstone of our electoral success. We must take this historic opportunity to build a stronger and larger membership base,” he said.
“As noted in the review, Labor’s second term must be focused on delivering tangible improvements to people’s lives, maintaining consistent and effective engagement with local communities, and continued caucus unity and stability.”
Swan is due to step down as president at the party’s national conference in July, with the former Labor minister Kate Ellis set to assume the role.