Federal election 2025: Top Liberal Julian Leeser warns party to steer clear of Trump-era Republican party

Liberal frontbencher Julian Leeser says the Liberals must stay as far away as possible from the Republican party and be prepared to publicly criticise US President Donald Trump.

Mr Leeser, who defended his northern Sydney seat of Berowra against a teal challenger, suffered a six per cent swing against him, making his one blue-ribbon seat now marginal.

But Mr Leeser a said the Coalition could be electable in time for the next election, despite copping its worst-ever loss in May when it was reduced to less than 45 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives.

But he said the party had to demonstrate it had listened and learned, including when it came to copying US President Donald Trump.

Mr Leeser, who was reinstated as shadow attorney-general by new Opposition Leader Sussan Ley on Wednesday, said that when out doorknocking, voters told him they would not vote Liberal because they hated the work-from-home ban, did not like Peter Dutton and believed the former opposition leader was “a Donald Trump”.

“We as a party need to be very clear about who we are and who we’re not and we shouldn’t be a pale imitation of the Republican party,” Mr Leeser said during an exclusive, 40-minute interview with The Nightly.

“Australians were very worried about the President’s approach on a whole range of things, and I think we need to be prepared to call him out and to criticise him, and not to be afraid to do that and to put some real distance between our party and his.”

Mr Leeser, who previously warned Liberals against indulging in “American glitz,” “red Trumpian hats,” and “a political diet of anger,” said he wished Mr Trump and the American people success.

“But they are not us, his party is not us, and he is not a model for leadership in this country, and we should stay as far away from that as possible,” he said.

“The Liberal Party of Australia is not the franchise of Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

“And if we go about aping elements of Donald Trump’s Republican party, we are in all sorts of trouble.

“Because while I love the great Republic, it is not Australia, and while I want to see a strong United States, so much of what Mr Trump is doing is contrary to the views of traditional centre-right parties.”

Asked where the Liberals most mimicked Trump, Mr Leeser cited pledges made by Coalition figures to “Make Australia Great Again,” as well as Mr Dutton’s proposed Australian-style DOGE.

“When he was seen to be doing things and we were making noises that sounded like him,” he said.

“When there were people talking about Make Australia Great Again.

“We don’t need to be made great again, we’re already a great country, we’ve never not been a great country,” he said.

“As a small government centre-right party, there is nothing wrong with the Liberal Party wanting to spend taxpayer dollars effectively.

“But when the DOGE-style appointment was made, it mimicked what President Trump was doing and made it harder for us to distinguish ourselves from the President and his party.”

Mr Leeser did not single out Senator Jacinta Nampijimpa Price, the face of the No campaign during the Voice referendum, which Mr Leeser quit the opposition frontbench to support, for criticism and instead said there were several colleagues who made Trumpian comments.

But Labor was delighted when Senator Price said mid-campaign during a campaign event with Mr Dutton, that the Coalition would “Make Australia Great Again.”

The comment reinforced the Government’s strategy to liken Mr Dutton to Mr Trump, who slapped Australia and other countries with tariffs during the election campaign, temporarily crashing the stock market and pension balances.

Earlier in the year, and five days after Mr Trump’s inauguration, Mr Dutton appointed Senator Price, who has subsequently defected from the Nationals to the Liberals, to oversee a department of government efficiency.

The policy was widely seen as an imitation of Elon Musk’s quasi “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which the billionaire has now abandoned after a political backlash affected his private companies, including Tesla.

In March, the Coalition’s campaign spokeswoman and then-shadow finance minister Jane Hume told the Liberal party’s think tank, Menzies Research Centre in March 2025 that it would be an “expectation” under a Dutton government that public servants would work five days a week from the office.

Senator Hume’s policy followed US President Donald Trump’s inauguration day return to in-person work memorandum, demanding that government workers return to the office, subject to allowed exemptions.

The suite of policies, as well as the plan to slash tens of thousands of public servants, became politically toxic by the final weeks of the campaign. This was around the same time Mr Dutton denied in an interview with the Latika Takes podcast that he had been attempting to copy Trump.

Mr Leeser said that the policies not just left the Liberals exposed to charges of mimicking Trump but also underlined that the opposition was out of touch.

“When we came up with those policies we demonstrated that we don’t understand the way Australians live now,” he said.

“The working from home thing was devastating.”

He said the 2022 loss of Liberal seats to the teals, such as Curtin in Perth, Wentworth and Mackellar in Sydney and Kooyong in Melbourne, meant the major party had been overrepresented by the perspectives of Queenslanders and regional MPs, and this needed correcting by the time of the next election.

“We should be aiming to come back next term,” he said.

This would require the Coalition winning back more than 30 seats in a single election — but Mr Leeser defended the ambition.

“You can think that’s funny, but I think political parties that are not trying to win every single election are not serving their supporters properly and are not focused properly,” he said.

“Anybody who thinks this is an election we need to sit out, or this should be a rebuild — in Australian politics, the swings can be wild and we’ve seen that at the state level where oppositions have had a small number of players come to government and surprise people.”

Asked how the Coalition should target Anthony Albanese, who made history by increasing Labor’s majority from 78 to 94 seats while becoming the first Prime Minister to be re-elected since 2004, Mr Leeser said national security and the economy were the obvious areas and that the Coalition had been leading on both until the election campaign.

Mr Dutton waited until the final weeks of the campaign to release his defence policy and matched most of Labor’s spending while opposing the Government’s tax cut in favour of a temporary cut to the fuel excise instead.

Mr Leeser said the Coalition had to overhaul its economic message and combat Labor’s sugar-fix high-spending offerings with genuine structural reform.

“It’s not just good enough for us to copy the Labor Party’s policy on an issue and hope it will go away because we’ve agreed with the Labor party. We need to have policies that reflect our own values,” he said.

“We need to think about economic issues, in a comprehensive way not just by offering sweeteners.

“We need to show Australian families that we have a comprehensive economic plan to deal with the cost of living challenges Australian families face.”