The writing was on the wall for Peter Dutton long before Anthony Albanese fired the starter's gun on the election race that would see the Coalition decimated.
On Sydney's northern beaches, defeated Liberal candidate James Brown — former soldier, RSL chief and Malcolm Turnbull's ex son-in-law — was in clean-up mode on Tuesday.
Among the rituals of Australian politics, one of the most desolate is a losing candidate's obligation to tidy up. To make good despite bitter disappointments.
Buntings are pulled down, thank-you messages sent to donors and close supporters — most of whom vanished into the night after Saturday's brutal Coalition drubbing.
Brown had high hopes at the start of the campaign.
With a well-resourced team and about 500 volunteers, the Liberal moderate was gunning to break teal independent Sophie Scamps's hold on the beachside electorate of Mackellar.
Among his crew's duties on Tuesday? Dumping boxes containing 600 pristine corflutes with Peter Dutton's face.
Coalition HQ had sent the posters at the start of the campaign and demanded they be put up across the wealthy electorate's "insular peninsula" suburbs, alongside thousands of posters that Brown's campaigners had already distributed.
"We said not in a million years. It's not going to happen," said a source on Brown's campaign. "For every one we'd put out, we'd lose 10 votes."
"Every person who came up to us — with the exception of male tradies — said 'this government doesn't deserve to be re-elected', that 'I'm a lifelong Liberal, but there's no way I'm voting for this party with this leader'.
"All the other campaigners said the same thing. He was that toxic. And we knew it weeks out."
Recriminations have been swift and brutal over the Coalition's catastrophic defeat on Saturday.
They range from white-hot anger over basic campaign mistakes to deep questions about the future of the Liberal Party, its relationship with the Nationals and the movement's appeal to younger and female voters. Dutton and his office, as well as key shadow ministers, are on the receiving end.
Even the Liberal Party logo is a problem, according to media and marketing guru Russel Howcroft, who said it did not appear to have changed in decades, "like a really bad 1980s Fosterisation of Australia".
"It's geriatric, right? When I look at that logo, it says to me, this is a party which resists change at all costs," Howcroft told Gruen Nation on Wednesday night.
From a supposedly solid winnable position at the start of the year, to the biggest calamity for the Liberal Party since its inception at the end of World War II, how did it all go so terribly wrong?
Three drivers of Dutton's downward vortex
Conversations with insiders before and after Saturday's result revealed three broad themes. Each of which accelerated the downward vortex that pulverised Dutton and delivered Anthony Albanese a stunning landslide majority.
First, the opposition leader was fundamentally personally unpopular. The wrong man at the wrong time in history, yoked to Trumpism even as he sought to distance himself from it.
An unsympathetic character that his team could ultimately do very little to fix. Efforts to soften his image floundered. When he stood beside his young adult son, Harry — and couldn't give his own kid a straight answer — it backfired the moment he was asked about the challenges of buying a first home.
For Liberal seat campaigners who couldn't address the leader's lack of charisma, they simply ignored orders from HQ and took matters into their own hands. Like keeping posters of Dutton in a storage room where they could do no harm.
"We didn't even hang one in our office in case someone looked in and saw it on the wall," said the Liberal Mackellar campaign source.
Andrew Carswell, former chief media advisor to Scott Morrison, admits there's even guilt among some in the Liberal Party for backing Dutton.
"When Dutton became leader, most supporters knew deep down he simply wasn't electable. They knew it," Carswell said.
"But those views were worn down over time. Because you want your side to win, you pour your heart into it, shoulder-to-the-wheel, so those concerns gradually get erased over time. And you believe the bullshit and spin. Then suddenly you wake up after last night and think: I knew he wasn't electable!"
Second, Dutton and his closest circle were fundamentally deluded about their ability to beat Albanese, an opponent they fatally underestimated. They were led astray by friendly polling — both leading up to and during the campaign — and an echo chamber of media boosterism that left them flying blind and too low towards the mountain range ahead.
"We had, frankly, a tone-deaf campaign based on that polling that was way off the mark," Tasmanian Liberal senator Jonno Dunium told ABC's Afternoon Briefing on Tuesday.
"The people making decisions around what was said, where and when, by whom, got it wrong and they based it on bad polling. We are now reaping the results".
On the first day of the campaign, Dutton exposed the scale of his over-confidence, declaring there was "not one political expert in the country that is predicting that Mr Albanese can form a majority government after the election".
This columnist mused the following day that it was "one of those moments that might come back to bite". And how.
Third, Dutton and his team were helplessly under-prepared for the fight, erratic and disorganised on policy development and too inexperienced to cope with the rigours of a federal leader's campaign.
Albanese was fit and ready. Dutton and his team lacked the chops to take on Labor's ruthless election machinery.
"It was like the South African rugby forwards against a grade 12 team," said one Coalition supporter and donor. "If I could take my personal money back, I would".
'I think we all knew that'
What has become more evident is that Dutton's problems did not start when the election was called.
Twelve months ago, on Mother's Day, the leader's chief of staff, Alex Dalgleish, issued a call to his counterparts across the Coalition's shadow ministerial offices.
Something big had emerged over the weekend that "he really wanted to share with us", said one person familiar with what unfolded. People's eyebrows were raised, given such meetings were "infrequent" at the time.
"The next day, we're all hanging on the line thinking 'f***, f***, what is it? Some polling? What?'
"We were told at the start of the meeting that he would share this big thing at the end. This pearl of campaign wisdom that only he alone could have discovered."
At last, Dalgleish dropped his big reveal to the Coalition's top apparatchiks. "He says: I want to share with you all that it occurred to me over the weekend that this time next year, the election will be over," said the source.
If Dalgleish thought his revelation would galvanise the team, he would have been disappointed. It became a matter of both consternation and bemusement for others in group chats after the call.
The exchange is notable because there was already speculation in some parts of the media that Albanese would go to an early election in August of last year. Had he done so, the Coalition would have been even more ill-prepared than they turned out to be.
The common internal explanation for why Dutton took so long to develop and announce policy was that he spent much of 2024 giving Albanese room to fail. He was also eager to keep the Coalition "unified" and avoid "needless" internal bruising debates.
There was good reason to think in these terms.
Still reeling from the 2023 Voice loss, Albanese struggled until the start of this year to regain his mojo. Polls relentlessly showed the prime minister was on the nose with voters weary over the cost of living.
Dutton's strategy followed Napoleon's edict of never interrupting your enemy when they're making a mistake.
But that didn't mean voters were ready to remove a first-term prime minister. And certainly not with an alternative that increasingly felt full of new risks.
Nuclear disaster
The opposition leader's nuclear policy was a case in point.
The idea was brought to life by Nationals leader David Littleproud, who called for a national debate on the topic a day after Scott Morrison's 2022 defeat in an election that hinged on net zero and climate policy.
Littleproud reportedly told party insiders that it was a way to "give us something to talk about on Sky", where late-night hosts were whipping up a long campaign against Labor's renewables focus.
By March last year, the nuclear thought bubble had morphed into something more concrete. Dutton told The Australian newspaper the Coalition would announce ahead of the May budget his plans for potential sites for "small modular nuclear reactors".
The news was a lightning-strike moment. It fixed Dutton on a course towards having to reveal specifics about which towns would host future atom burners, and away from a more theoretical discussion about the technology's potential in some distant decade.
Insiders tell the ABC that Dutton embarked on the bold plan without first testing the community's appetite for the idea. Or even consulting widely with his own shadow cabinet.
There was no polling and there was no modelling, establishing a pattern that would be repeated in the year to follow on other major announcements, including Dutton's budget reply speech on his gas reservation plan, work-from-home ban and public service cuts.
Behind the scenes, Liberal campaign director Andrew Hirst scrambled last autumn and winter to test the public's appetite for such a bold move, which would end John Howard's 1999 nuclear power moratorium.
But, as the complexities of adopting and selling nuclear power as a signature policy statement became more apparent in focus groups, Hirst succeeded in getting Dutton to delay announcing locations until June or July, abandoning the pre-budget announcement.
As that self-imposed deadline came and went, and the plans gradually expanded from "small modular" reactors to full-blown conventional power stations, Dutton repeatedly opted to wait.
He eventually revealed his full plans in early December, nearly eight months after first flying the flag, with modelling showing up to seven reactors around the country would be built at a cost of about $331 billion over 25 years.
Labor pounced and never stopped hammering the nuclear idea until election day. Dutton had turned what would be an election about Albanese's performance into a substantive choice between competing policies.
When the opposition leader mentioned, during the final campaign debate on Channel Seven a week out from Saturday's election, that he would endorse a nuclear power station in Dickson, Labor immediately weaponised the grab, Paul Erickson flooding social media posts that were pushed to tens of thousands of voters in the north-Brisbane seat.
Last year's nuclear policy process — the piecemeal announcement of a "captain's pick"; the post-fact scramble to make it work with focus groups; a long period of uncertainty and speculation about the details; before the final incomplete details were revealed — turned out to be a template for what would follow.
Frontbench sidelined
Dutton and his close team's policy chaos burned more than the public's patience. It left at least half a dozen senior shadow ministers with serious bruises and lingering resentments.
Andrew Hastie was overruled in presenting a Coalition defence policy with specific priorities for military spending, Dutton's office instead turning it into a simplistic percentage-of-GDP pledge in a move that appears to have come directly from Gina Rinehart.
Michaelia Cash was left stunned at a Perth press conference when Dutton announced they would not be pursuing her policy of overturning Labor's "same work, same pay" industrial relations legislation.
Angus Taylor lost fights on tax and infrastructure slush money for the National Party. Dan Tehan was blindsided by visa policy changes, Ted O'Brien and Susan McDonald on gas, Barnaby Joyce on veterans affairs and Jane Hume, who was given the all-clear to announce the WFH strategy only to have it dumped and left swinging when trouble arose.
Insiders are also quietly wondering why Hume was dumped as the opposition campaign spokesperson at a time when the Coalition was increasingly aware of its collapsing support among women.
Much of the blame for these battles — the sidelining, reversals or dramatic re-castings — are falling on Dutton and his office, which critics say should have been resolved a long time before the election.
"The exception was Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who announced whatever she wanted, whenever, day after day," said one senior Coalition figure.
"Our biggest problem was, we had children at the grown-ups' table. All that rank amateurism … and that leads you to 'let's be Trump now' or 'Gina wants that so let's announce it.'"
In February, during the first sitting week of the year, Dutton's office told shadow ministers to draft up their "letters of appointment" and declare which public servants should head up their departments.
Some shadows, says one source, were advised that some top bureaucrats had already been picked without their input.
Last-minute gas rush
As the election loomed in late March and Labor delivered its budget, Dutton's office was preparing to start the campaign with a bang, with a major new gas policy that would wedge Labor on the left.
The only problem? The policy was being recast at the final moment by the leader and his chief advisers.
For months, the Coalition had been consulting industry on a plan to clear obstacles for the opening of new offshore gas fields in exchange for a commitment to divert some of that supply into the domestic market.
Gas lobbyists told the ABC they could live with that plan, even if they didn't like it. In any case, its impact was likely to be limited on the east coast market given the Commonwealth's jurisdiction was offshore gas.
What they didn't expect was what Dutton announced in his budget reply — a major market intervention, with price cap and supply diktats that put the Coalition on the same page as anti-gas groups such as the Australia Institute.
The ABC has learnt that details of the policy were so controversial inside the Coalition that it was still being finalised as Dutton walked from his office to the House of Representatives to deliver his budget reply.
As the seconds ticked down, they fought over whether to include the word "penalty" in his speech.
"How the f*** do you go into an election without having this shit sorted out," said one insider who has since fallen out with the Coalition and now regards politics as a waste of time.
"The old John Howard good-policy-is-good-politics went out the window and they went on the spend-a-thon," the insider said.
"The machine came up with good policy, but it got overridden at the last minute by some 23-year-old. That was the story of most of the policy they announced".
Outside of the policy debacles, much of the post-mortem has focused on how Dutton and his team failed to see what was coming.
Faulty polling was one problem. Blinded by the scale of the souring mood for Dutton, the campaign never changed course. The final stage of any faltering political battle is "save the furniture".
Confidence in surveys that suggested Dutton was level-pegging meant he or the Coalition HQ never took evasive action. There is considerable resentment at how that played out in practice.
Jonathan Duniam, the senator from Tasmania, where the Coalition has been routed out of the lower house, says it "beggars belief" at how wrong the national HQ was, and that the opposition will now likely need to win two elections to regain government.
"The campaign we just concluded, where campaign headquarters was telling us what we could say, when we could say it, what sort of collateral we could deploy — and that was all off the back of polling that was so far off the mark," Duniam said.
Next time, he said, there would need to be a plan tailored to the state, with "good candidates" that could win seats. "That's to have a chance at forming government after the next election."
Labor should learn lessons, too
Labor is on track to win the biggest majority since John Curtin in 1943, or even James Scullin in 1929, which may end up sowing the seeds of future hubris, not least as Albanese's thumping victory was built on another historically low primary vote.
But Labor can take a leaf from Dutton's book, given the degree to which "delulu" derailed his campaign.
Not only was the Coalition's polling wide of the mark, its political senses were clogged.
Part of that has to do with the kind of feedback loop Dutton appears to have fallen into, and he's not the first in Australian political history.
As Albanese struggled with fallout from the cost-of-living crisis, Dutton's support rose, bolstered by a media cohort that reinforced the view he would win, though that did somewhat collapse after Easter when it became clear he had blown it.
The scale and breadth of the Coalition's loss is yet to produce much self-reflection from those outlets.
After three years of relentless red-meat culture war, Saturday demonstrated the astonishing degree to which voters didn't care. They weren't listening and they went the other way in a landslide.
Agility lost
Criticism has also emerged about the Coalition's campaign-craft in the TikTok era, where Labor and the teals are being lauded for out-gunning an outmoded Liberal machine.
As the influence on voters of a front-page newspaper story or a network interview wanes, campaigns are throwing their resources at the social media feed.
Sources said campaigns in tight-fought contests needed to spend between $25,000 to $40,000 a week on "boosting" messages through Instagram, YouTube and other platforms.
That work often goes through "contractors" that elevate posts, landing them with specific demographic groups, such as every female voter aged 18-40 years in a specific seat. Those messages reach them even if they're interstate on a weekend away.
One Liberal candidate told the ABC one of the problems with the party machine was that candidates had to get central HQ approval for every video media post.
The centralised bureaucracy meant there was often a 48-hour turnaround before they could respond to fast-moving local developments, the person said. In the meantime, the teal campaign had spent 24 hours "beta-testing" headlines to determine what worked best.
Liberals admit now they got the tone wrong.
"This election, we were the mean party," former Coalition defence minister Christopher Pyne told Gruen Nation. The party said "we're going to sack 41,000 public servants because we don't like public servants".
"Well, there's public servants all across the country, but not just in Canberra, so they're all thinking to themselves, 'Oh, they don't like public servants'. And hundreds of thousands of voters thought that party is not for us," Pyne said.
"If you want to be the mean party and divide the country, you're not going to get elected. Howard learnt that."
Another observer deeply familiar with the internal campaign complained "we're still campaigning as if it's 2004".
"We were NASA and they were SpaceX."
And like a rocket flying high on a broken engine, Dutton's problems were there all along, even if they weren't visible to all.
Once whatever gasoline and momentum he had evaporated, it was Wile E Coyote all the way to the deck.
Editor's note: A previous version of this article stated that all social posts needed to be approved by headquarters. It was video communications on social media platforms.
Credits
Words: Jacob Greber
Photographs: Matt Roberts, Ian Cutmore, Tobi Loftus, Mark Moore, Courtney Withers
Editor: Leigh Tonkin
