LATIKA M BOURKE: The Libs were an endangered species after ScoMo’s loss, now Dutton’s made them near extinct

The recriminations and the blame game for the Coalition’s disastrous loss continue, but there is an immediate lesson that the centre-right must learn as it charts its way back from electoral oblivion.

“It was described to me the day before the election as a ‘bin fire,’” Karen Andrews, former Coalition Cabinet Minister who retired at this election, told The Nightly on Tuesday.

“That was an understatement.

“The Coalition is facing an existential crisis.

“The first warning bell sounded in 2022, but the thinking of many in leadership positions didn’t change; if anything, they locked into the old losing ways.

“The 2025 result has sent shockwaves. Recriminations are disappointing to hear at this time.

“If those with the ability to influence the direction of the Party had stood up and voiced their opinion when they had the chance, perhaps the situation would not be so dire now.”

Ms Andrews is right. The party not only missed a vital opportunity to regenerate its appeal and mission after 2022 but went on to make an even more cataclysmic mistake in misreading the country following the 2023 Indigenous Voice referendum.

That referendum revealed a divided country on that subject, but the weekend’s Labor landslide exposed the delusion that has preoccupied the centre-right’s thinking about what that result subsequently said about Australia.

While both sides have misread the Voice, it is the Coalition that is set to pay the heaviest price from this mistake following Peter Dutton’s devastating wipeout, when he became the first sitting opposition leader to lose his seat.

It was a humilating fall from the overblown confidence he held after the defeat of the Voice, that he could be prime minister within one term of Labor government.

To be sure, Anthony Albanese blundered by foisting the referendum on an unprepared public during a cost-of-living crisis. The Prime Minister did so, having misread his narrow first victory in 2022 as an endorsement of progressivism, rather than a Covid-battered public repudiating the unlikeable Scott Morrison.

Badly crafted and even more poorly articulated, the Voice was comprehensively rejected, particularly by Labor voters in the heartlands. Teal Green and inner-city Labor seats voted differed and said yes.

This stark contrast tricked the Coalition into thinking this division was a more permanent and went beyond the single question of the Voice than it it.

Mike Turner of Freshwater Strategy, who disastrously returned grossly overstated and incorrect polling to the Liberals, prompting Mr Dutton’s repeated claims that he was on track to win a majority and at the expense of Labor in its heartlands, admitted as much.

“First, polling appears to have overestimated Labor ‘defectors’ to the Coalition,” he wrote in a piece for the Australian Financial Review, explaining how he missed the landslide.

“Particularly, those who voted No at the Voice referendum.

“Early indications suggest that ‘Labor-No’ voters just didn’t switch over to the Coalition in the big numbers estimated.”

Wait, Labor voters who said no to the Voice aren’t automatically Coalition supporters? Colour me shocked, said no one ever.

The Voice was a poorly constructed idea with good intent that no-one could explain well. But it wasn’t a culture war that said anything more permanent about Australians.

But as Turner’s admission shows, the right mistook the result as proof that it showed a British and American-style realignment was underway in burbs of Australia, whereby wealthy progressives vote left and the once working class align with the right, propelled by predominantly cultural values.

Saturday’s result exposes this delusion for what it was. Peter Dutton went hunting in the suburbs, stopping by petrol bowser after petrol bowser to promote his 25-cent cut to the fuel excise.

It was a band-aid solution that did cut through, but it also sent a wider message — it was primarily a policy aimed at voting dads, tradies and bros — the kind that might like Donald Trump.

Mr Albanese also went hunting in the suburbs. On the first and last day of his campaign, he stopped by Mr Dutton’s seat of Dickson. In the final weeks of the campaign, he handed out pre-polls at a voting station in the Queensland seat of Bonnor, standing opposite to now-defeated LNP MP Ross Vasta.

It was Mr Albanese, who Mr Dutton derided as being preoccupied with the concerns of the types of inner-city Lefties that dwell in his Sydney seat of Grayndler, who came back with the swag.

One by one, the suburbs fell in Labor’s favour on Saturday night.

Labor claimed Deakin from frontbencher Michael Sukkar, won Leichhardt in far north Queensland, Banks in Sydney’s south west, and collected a swag of predominantly white suburban seats in Brisbane, in Bonnor, Petrie and Forde. The party turned Tasmania into a one-party state, bar Independent Andrew Wilkie’s seat of Clarke.

It didn’t stop there. Labor cleaned up in the cities too, taking back Melbourne and Griffith in Brisbane from the Greens and Sturt from the Liberals in Adelaide.

And what Labor kept is also instructive. They held onto the multicultural suburban seats in Western Sydney, the once blue-ribbon seat of Aston in Victoria and staved off Greens challenges in Richmond and likely Wills in Melbourne.

The result has left Liberals stunned and now routed.

As the fallout rages from MrDutton’s election wipeout, attention is turning, naturally, towards how the party can rebuild and who will lead it.

Whether the party chooses Angus Taylor or Sussan Ley is almost beside the point. They are highly unlikely to be the leader who leads the party to its next election win, with the Coalition sitting on 39 to Labor’s 86 seats with 15 seats in doubt.

But the first lesson the Coalition must accept once and for all is that, whether by virtue of Australia’s wealth or the compulsory and preferential voting system, there is no realignment occurring in Australia.

In fact, if there is any realignment occurring, it’s a nationwide shift to the Left, based on Australia’s increasingly Zoomer-led voting bloc and its multicultural face.

The Voice did not expose a permanently divided, polarised or tribal Australia. The election shows it is the other way, that a centrist leader, even one that has been underwhelming in his first term as Anthony Albanese was, is capable of swaying the bulk of Australians.

In 2025, in a more fragmented information environment, Labor today has a broader appeal than even Kevin Rudd was able to achieve in 2007.

And unlike John Howard in 2001, Mr Albanese was able to use incumbency, combined with the global turmoil, to increase his margin to a landslide result as opposed to reducing his majority, as is customary for returning governments.

But this is also good news for the Coalition, if it is truly willing to listen and learn.

Firstly, the country is capable of uniting and preferring majority government. It has said no to experiments. The public rejected the Greens, who were effectively exposed as extremist, and possibly antisemitic, by both Labor and the coalition.

And while many of the teal independents put up strong fights, the Liberals were able to fend off most of their attacks, such as in Wannon in Victoria and Forrest in Western Australia.

Ironically, for all the hopes invested in the suburbs, it was only voters in the cities that appeared willing to hold their nose and see past the national leader in Peter Dutton to vote for their local Liberal candidates in Tim Wilson in Goldstein and Amelia Hamer in Kooyong and shun the teals.

It is a similar situation in Bradfield, where the new Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian is in a nail-biting lead over the teal insurgent 50.02 per cent to 49.48 per cent.

And make no mistake, the Coalition must heed this lesson. If Scott Morrison’s 2022 loss rendered the Liberals an endangered species, Peter Dutton has made them near extinct.

He wrongly believed that there were millions of smart and forgotten Australians, burnt by the cost of living and the Voice, that would make their quiet voices very loud on polling day.

They didn’t materialise because they never existed. The Coalition has been living in a fantasy. It must see reality, if it is to survive.