LATIKA M BOURKE: Why comeback kid Tim Wilson could resurrect Liberal Party

Teal-slayer Tim Wilson is a changed man. Gone is the arrogance and ego that used to dominate his public persona, and in its place is a far more humble, tenacious and resilient sounding character.

As he paused to stifle the tears in accepting victory in his old seat of Goldstein in Melbourne, he recalled how the outlook appeared for him and the Liberals just three years ago.

“We were written off,” he told reporters at a press conference in Brighton.

“Three years ago people said that Goldstein could not be won.

“I was written off, the Liberal party was written off in this part of the world.”

He outlined the approach that he took immediately after his defeat in 2022 to change and earn back the trust of those voters he and the Liberals lost.

“One of the things that I’m most proud of in this campaign is how much it was a genuine community-connected campaign,” he said.

“The privilege of public service once is something that has been afforded to me by the people of Goldstein.

“To be given that privilege once again is something that is almost unbelievable.

“And I do so very much with a sense of humility and respect for the electorate.

“It is not my victory, and I need to make this crystal clear; it is all of our victory.”

Not only has Wilson displayed long-needed humility, but he has also demonstrated he is a political fighter who has won back the inner-city voters so many of his colleagues have argued the party should abandon.

That argument, that the metro seats are worth sacrificing focus on Labor voters in the suburbs, has been well and truly been exposed as the delusion it is, following Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s stunning landslide on Saturday, in which he appealed to Labor, Liberal and Greens voters across the country.

Mr Wilson’s victory is a template for how the Liberals can hope to do an Albanese and win back majority government by appealing to the nation, instead of increasingly tinier, fictitious tribes.

“After three years when our brows fell, we started the process by listening, by engaging with the community, when everyone had written us off,” Mr Wilson said.

“What did we need to learn? How did we need to grow to be better?

“Then we focused on what we needed to build, to build out the capacity, not just to build a winning campaign but to bring people together to be part of something that was exciting, that was energetic, that was unique.

“We did exactly that.”

In a swipe at Zoe Daniel’s Climate 200 backer, Simon Holmes à Court, he said his campaign was a grassroots one.

“We did not have massive cheques written to us by entities based in Sydney who tried to treat the community like an acquisition fund,” he said.

“We very much built it from the bottom up, and I think there are a lot of lessons for a recovering Liberal party for how it wants to take on the future of the country.”

Mr Wilson observed: “We had to defy political gravity to get here.”

After climbing back from the depths, he re-enters the party room with enormous authority. But he deserves to fly higher, and should do so, for the sake of the party.

The Liberals are hunting for a new leader.

The Member for Canning and former SAS Captain, Andrew Hastie, has widely ruled himself out. As a father of young children and living in Western Australia, he is one of the few candidates sitting on the opposition benches with prime ministerial potential.

He is sensible to wait while the party rebuilds.

But the Liberals needs more than a renovation, they need some radicalism.

The party must modernise and move on from simplistically pretending that just by existing, they will restore Howard-era governance to a country that younger voters don’t even recall.

And it must do so by diversifying its membership, candidates and rallying around its core mission — economic responsibility.

The last shadow cabinet, including Deputy Leader Sussan Ley and treasury spokesman Angus Taylor were part of the team that agreed to far too much “Me Tooism” when it came to Labor’s spending.

They bring experience, but so much baggage. They are also mediocre figures. And the party is running out of time to arrest its electoral slide. If it was in ICU after 2022, it is now on life support.

Mr Wilson has a unique virtue of not being part of the last leadership team that led the party to its catastrophic wipe-out under Peter Dutton but has runs on the board from his prior terms in parliament between 2016 and 2022, when he was a junior minister.

This mix of experience, as well as separation from the last moribund opposition, makes him uniquely positioned.

On campaigning, he has a ready-to-use formula for how to win back voters who abandoned the Liberals.

Plus, he is credible on the economy, having chaired the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics when he drove the backlash to the franking credit changes that helped thwart Bill Shorten’s run for The Lodge in 2019.

“Some would say that I overused the Economics Committee, but I nonetheless used it very assertively because I look at the challenges this country faces right now, and the scale and the sense of urgency and nothing has changed,” Mr Wilson acknowledged.

“In fact, it’s become more substantial.

“We are at a time in history where a lot of things that we have been able to take for granted as a country now sit on the precipice.

“The current government is throwing sugar on the table to get themselves through an election, but they have not addressed the root cause of the problem.”

Perhaps his best audition was when it came to nuclear, a policy the Liberals introduced into the national debate under Mr Dutton but failed to prosecute.

“In my core sense of belief, I believe in the role of nuclear power not as an end but as a beginning,” he said.

“Nuclear power is about building the future industrial base of our country.

“If we don’t do that, then we are saying either one, we’re going back to coal, or we as a nation are going to deindustrialise.

“That is not a future. I am prepared to accept.”

In a criticism of Mr Dutton’s failure to advocate for nuclear, he said the Coalition must fight for its policies.

“Not just simply put something out there and see whether it’s going to be tested,” he said.

“We must fight vehemently, passionately, with energy with courage.”

Mr Wilson would not say if he was interested in the leadership. But his remarkable fightback shows he has the courage, determination and persistence required for the job.

He may be too late. The race is already underway between the two likely contenders, Angus Taylor and Sussan Ley.

But his presence in the party room provides his colleagues with a third, and wildcard option versus two candidates who risk offering more of the same.

“Go for it,” Tim Wilson was urged by his supporters in Goldstein as he accepted victory in his Melbourne seat.

It is his colleagues who should consider saying the same.