Speech | From oblivion to resurrection to The Sydney Institute
17.30 Thursday, 19 June 2025

On election night 2013 while we celebrated Tony Abbott’s victory, a political tremor hit the Federal electorate of Indi.

A Teal Independent toppled local Liberal MP, Sophie Mirabella.

At the time, they wore orange, not teal. And we thought it an unfortunate casualty and hoped it would come back next time.

Instead, Cathy MacGowan replaced herself with Helen Haines and four elections later Indi is still in Teal hands. 

In 2016 another political tremor hit Mayo in South Australia.

Rebekkah Sharkie defeated Jamie Briggs, and despite her best efforts then Georgina Downer too.

Then in 2019 Tony Abbott himself fell when a political tremor struck Warringah, and Katherine Deves lost to Zali Steggall at the election after.

These tremors built into a political earthquake in 2022 that took out Kooyong, North Sydney, Mackellar, Wentworth, Curtin and Goldstein too.

The biggest swing to elect a Teal was in Curtin. It was 16 per cent, and Liberal MP, Celia Hammond lost to Kate Chaney.

Two elections earlier we held Curtin by more than 70 per cent of the vote.

Add these contests up and we were running at none for 16.

Well, we were. The earthquake has had aftershocks in 2025 with Bradfield now falling – once the ‘safest’ Liberal seat in the nation. 

But we now have 1 for 17 – we got Goldstein back.

Each time Liberals looked for easy answers: we need to do more door knocking, phone canvassing (and just to remove any doubt, the candidates that topped each of those internal metrics all went on to lose), more listening posts, a fresh candidate, a woman, someone more conservative, someone more moderate, high profile, community profile.

Until this election none worked.

My journey from oblivion to resurrection started in the Adjournment debate just before 8pm on 21 June 2021.

We were in the second winter of Australia’s lockout and Melbourne’s lockdown.

I knew all was not well even if I could not say what was going to happen in the twelve months to follow.

I gave a speech in the House very deliberately titled “Honouring the trust given” that, according to YouTube has, last I checked, been viewed a total of 248 times.

It was a narrative I was writing with a deep forbearance of what was to come.

I spoke of the shallow offering of those who boast of being a political weathervane to endear themselves to the electorate.

Earlier that year I had warned Party members of the Green and Labor forces marshalling against us, at the time, under a purple ‘Voices of’ banner.

It did not fall on deaf ears, but sometimes to understand something you must live it and in the great Australian tradition many said: she’ll be right.

But something said to me this time Goldstein wouldn’t be.

As State borders reopened and Melbourne came out of its dark lockdown winter, we got our benchmark poll that came back that told some uncomfortable truths.

Now aspects of that polling didn't surprise me, but of course it was very hard to interpret considering the extremity of the events that we had just come out of. Two years of lockdown, people were traumatized. They were angry and they were spraying in lots of different directions. It wasn't clear whether it would settle or whether it was part of a broader systemic change.

Some people did know better. And I have since been told this was consistent across what most of what we now call the ‘Teal’ seats.

All that voters were waiting for is someone to unite behind.

And of course, trademark Tim, I had never been subtle in most of the things that I had done. And at least I continue to this day.

I’d been using my time as Chair of the House Economics Committee during the COVID years and exposed corruption in industry superannuation funds.

And at the time, much of the media dismissed this as a kind of an indulgence. But of course, now the evidence shows that the corruption inside industry super funds was greater than what preceded the banks in the leadup to the Royal Commission.

And Deidre Chambers-like an obscenely well-resourced candidate miraculously appeared. And their last job was on the payroll of one of the arms of industry super funds.

Once Christmas was over, State governments closed COVID testing centres every absent rapid antigen test was like taking a step in the long march over the cliff of no return.

Of course, campaigns being campaigns what they are. They're ferocious and I'm not going to try and pretend that I didn't fight very hard and nor would my opponents. In fact, they were incredibly frustrated with me. And you had to keep your spirits up, not just for yourself, but of course for your supporters because as soon as they see defeat in your eyes, they feel defeated themselves.

You had to see the humour in it. I jumped at the opportunity to attend the final Executive Council meeting so I could pen my name next to his Excellency’s as we jointly ended my political career.

And after a hard-fought campaign after taking the tough love that only my husband could issue that you needed to see defeat “as a gift”, I walked out to Green Point and did a press conference to own the result mindful of the words from MacBeth that “nothing in his life became him like the leaving it”.

How you go out matters. Sage words someone else should also observe.

As he always does, my husband told me ‘I’ll be ok, if you’re ok, so I need you to be ok, so you need to go away’, so I went to London and despite the intention of pursuing dancing, friendship and alcohol; I found much of it lying in Hyde Park reading books.

My friend Paul Ritchie had given me a copy of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership: Lessons from the Presidents for Turbulent Times, and as I turned the pages, I kept reading a young Teddy Roosevelt in my preceding decade.

But the real lesson I took from Lincoln, Roosevelt, FDR & LBJ, as well as Churchill’s Last Lion was the necessity to fail first. Drive and ambition are essential for success in politics, but only failure can temper it. If you don’t have failure, you don’t have sufficient of the former, and if you don’t experience the latter the former will consume you.

Failure is necessary to become who you need to be.

I returned to Melbourne and in December that year a sage acquaintance who is Chinese, gay and Anglican urged me to run again over Christmas lunch.

Over the carvery I confessed “I am not sure I have it in me”. And he replied “you haven’t been defeated, you’re being tested – even God tested Job”.

I wasn’t religious, but those words swirled in my brain: I challenged myself to look at the situation differently.

Over that summer I went to the beach and decided to rid myself of the burden of indecision so I could get on with my life.

History is a good place to start.

The last time an MP retook a seat they lost to an Independent: Never.

Last time a Liberal defeated a Teal MP: never.

Last time a Federal Liberal defeated an Independent elected at a general election: once, 1914 in Gippsland.

So, I mapped out what I thought would broadly happen if I recontested: step by step. Preselection. Fundraising. You know the drill.

My conclusion was simple: I’d lose. And believe it or not, I felt a great sense of relief – I didn’t have to run, because I couldn’t win.

I remember that sliding doors moment well. Because just as I was putting my laptop down to grab my gin and tonic, I asked myself: what happens if I did it in reverse? Started at victory and mapped out a path back to that gin and tonic.

And what stood out was that it looked almost exactly like the campaign that just removed me. There was a path. It was narrow. And I had to start almost straight away.

This was December 2022.

What I will outline from here is not all of what we did, nor anywhere near it.

But it is a simple starting point that the two major Parties have not accommodated itself to.

Until this election, Labor had struggled to confront the Greens. And despite the result, Labor still hasn’t really grappled with them.

The catastrophic result for the Greens was a mix of implosion on their part, and my Party’s part.

The one seat that should resolutely have come back to a major Party was Ryan, yet it stayed in Greens hands - everything else went to Labor. The reasons are complex, but also simple.

Labor is largely set up to fight the Liberal Party. Workers v capital. Party of government v party of government. And it flows to the methods of how they campaign because of how they must. 

They aren’t set up to respond to insurgencies well, like any other large corporate is to a disruptor. 

The same is true for the Liberal Party and the Teals.

When you’re part of a Party you rise and fall with it, and you’re also hostage to its fortunes and people hold the brand to account.

When you’re an independent, you are the brand. So, the contest is specific, the individual matters and the campaign must also reflect the specific nature of that contest.

Parties rarely have the bandwidth for it, the candidates with the knowledge or capacity to design nor execute such a strategy, nor the tolerance to allow for deviation or creativity lest it set precedent for elsewhere. 

So, for Labor fighting the Greens, and more recently us fighting the Greens, and more recently fighting the Teals, we run a national campaign and hope a rising tide will lift all boats.

It eventually worked for Labor, but only when both of its competitors started hacking at their hulls.

It hasn’t worked for us. 

And the problems flow from there.

Because the Party expects the national campaign to do the heavy lifting, it lets its structures guide what is seemingly the most important part of the campaign – candidate selection.

The Liberal Party anchors its campaigns around candidate selection because it wants to give its members a say. It might work against Labor.

But by starting its campaign around candidate selection, it is setting the candidates up for failure, at least against a Teal.

It is also failing itself, because when candidates fail their answer is to declare they were no good, start again, and learn nothing.

To win the Liberal Party needs to focus on building its campaign first.

It needs to understand that structure should not dictate its campaign behavior and it must put winning as its primary objective before candidate selection.

And that is precisely what we did in Goldstein. I still cannot believe it leaked. In March 2023 I presented an hour-long presentation to the Goldstein membership.

It wasn’t just what, but how, and when we had to execute a plan all the way to election day. And every decision would be focused on us winning, including that if I was the wrong candidate – I would step aside.

The plan was adopted by the 300-odd members in attendance, with 3 abstentions.

Our preselection for our candidate was a full twelve months later.

In public I won’t go through the plan. The sections I am prepared to talk about in public have been covered in a stich of columns from Parnell McGuiness’ reflections on our research program, Summeyya Ilanbey’s insights into our high-wire fundraising and Janet Albrechsten’s commentary on our unapologetically liberal messaging.

And there is a lot of secret sauce.

We knew we were on track when a warning email came out from the Teal camp on 29 October 2024 – 8 months before the Federal election – expressing Teal panic.

But there are some things that are not secret. And we cannot hide because they were in full public glare.

One thing that stood out to me observationally from watching the Teals through to what we built in Goldstein was the importance of building a movement.

Where the Teals have been successful they have started with local powerless Labor and Greens supporters, and they have used them to build the nucleus of a new movement. And they have then appropriated others who have felt absent a connection to purpose or power to give it to them.

Meanwhile the Liberal Party has narrowed because it has become focused on its own structures to manage the power within and ceased to be a movement that gives purpose or power to people.  

The strength of our campaign is because we rebuilt beyond the Party a movement for change. We held constant meetings of engagement to find our friends and mobilise them as part of a team that went beyond the membership structure.

By the end of the campaign, we had more volunteers than the Teals and a level of engagement in the community that far transcended our traditional engagement.

We also focused our campaign on a pathway of persuasion. We knew we had to guide people on a journey from meeting people where they were, to guiding them and leading them where they needed to be.

And this is another lesson that unfortunately some need to learn because one of the deep frustrations from the research we did early in the piece looking at every single campaign that has been run by my party against an independent since they have started in their recent wave to being election elections is the messaging has always been the same. We have literally lived the definition of insanity by thinking we are going to keep doing the same thing and delivering a different result.

We did a lot of research looking at the psychology of what both moved voters but also then what persuaded them to come back. And of course the evidence speaks for itself.

More importantly we gave people not just something to fight for, but we told them who to fight for. We had a clarity of purpose that stirred people that was completely misaligned to the messaging of the national campaign.

Our local campaign and the national campaign could not be any more disconnected. On every topic the Party went small – we went locally BIG. Big on energy. Big on economic reform. Big on fiscal prudence. Big on housing affordability. Big on community safety.

And we sold unapologetically liberal solutions. Bold, aspirational, unapologetically liberal solutions. And what stood out to us was how many younger voters responded. I still remember the number of young women who kept telling our campaigners how much they wanted us to win.

Our team and structure is more united and shares a much higher sense of purpose than we ever have before. And we have an incredible sense of satisfaction and achievement that transcends anything we have experienced before. People now want to be involved. And we will make sure they can and will be involved.

The results speak for themselves. The country went in one direction. Goldstein went the other, even though we had a negative redistribution and our Teal opponent had the most money from Climate 200 of any Teal candidate.

It’s quite simple. In 2016 the Party chose me, and the community went along with it. In 2025 I was elected because the community chose me.

And most importantly – we chose to learn.

We made a choice to learn together, and we chose to grow together too. And that is why we all share this victory and we are all so proud of what we have achieved together.

We are honest enough with ourselves that had we not lost in 2022, we would not have won in 2025 because we would not have learned, and we would not have grown.

After my Party’s devastating defeat the challenge for it is to show the same willingness that we showed: to learn and grow.

The temptation after events like these is to be revisionist and project a genius in hindsight. It is quite the opposite.

We won because we took a slow, methodical approach to designing a campaign plan that thought out every step of what we needed to do, by when and executed it over nearly three years.

We understood the unique circumstances we faced. The focus was clear. And the contest to come will not be the same, and just as the Teals polled Goldstein this week, they’re already ready behind.

Anyone who attended my preselection on 24 March last year will know my opening paragraphs about the political tremors and earthquake were the same that day as they are tonight, and so ultimately shall be the spirit and some of the words of its conclusion.

On 3 May Australians were left with no choice but to re-elect a bad government, because my Party had let Australians down.

Everyone is writing their own narrative about why, but as I was not there I will keep my views to myself.

But there is one thing I could say that we did in Goldstein that I do not feel we did nationally.

Inspired by the words of, Harvey Milk, “you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right”.

Australians explicitly know their country is heading in the wrong direction. They know that the ripples lapping onto our shores are slowly growing into waves as the storm clouds form and we are a nation that can no longer look with as much certainty to our once allies.

The waves are growing in pace and strength from compounding economic, technological, environmental, and security gravitational forces. And as people are trying to understand what they mean for themselves and our nation they are looking for a leader who can guide them as both an interpreter of what they mean, and how we will respond.

But we don’t have that in this Prime Minister, nor government. And instead Australians feel anxious, and without leadership of where to turn together, so we are turning on each other and it is eating into our unity. 

And we now have a Deputy Prime Minister openly talking about regional conflict, the risks of a sovereign debt crisis are rising and artificial intelligence risks restructuring the employment market in the next three years.

This government’s numerical majority betrays its vulnerability. But its defeat is not up to them, it is up to us.

Our task is to be the answer to this Menzian moment. 

For too long Liberal governments have timidly tinkered because they have lacked the courage from core belief.

Australians live through bread-and-butter challenges today, but their confidence comes from a belief in a nation that can provide for tomorrow.

To win we must pursue our historic mission and sell Liberal hope.

Because Liberalism does not live in the words we say, but in the aspirations Australians live.

The Australian liberal project is built from a spiritual belief in our shared success and calls people to not just vote for ourselves today, but us tomorrow.

Liberalism lives when Australians set their sights one angle higher with a range one step farther to the horizon. 

Because we paint a vision of a better nation, we place the policy stepping stones to get there and tell a hopeful and persuasive story about why we should walk this path together.

Thank you.