Former prime minister John Howard has weighed in on what went wrong for the Liberal Party in its 2022 Federal Election campaign that ended with the Coalition losing power after nine years.
In his first interview since the May 21 defeat, Mr Howard – who led the Liberals to four election victories – told The Australian the party was badly hurt by its failure to properly outline its vision for the nation.
“The absence of a program for the future… the absence of some kind of manifesto, hurt us very badly,” Mr Howard told the publication.
“There’s a shelf-life to argue that we can manage things better… you have got to keep arguing for something.”
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The Liberals under Scott Morrison lost 18 seats at the election, reducing the Coalition to 58 seats overall. The Nationals held all their seats.
Labor took 10 seats from the Liberals, the Greens picked up two and Teal Independents won the remaining six seats.
Mr Howard, whose latest book A Sense of Balance is out on August 17, revealed another one of the mistakes the Liberals made was “to take its natural constituency for granted”.
“One of the reasons we suffered more is the Teals did offer, as it happened, something that was attractive to people who were unenthusiastic about the Liberal Party but really couldn’t bring themselves to vote Labor,” he said.
Mr Howard’s remarks come as the Liberal Party undertakes a review into its Federal Election defeat.
The review – led by former Liberal Party director Brian Loughnane and opposition frontbencher Jane Hume – will include responses to the success of teal independents as well as the Coalition’s climate change policies.
Also under microscope will be how the Liberals lost six out of nine seats across the top 15 Chinese-Australian electorates.
The Australian reported this week Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has been advised to scale back the Coalition’s attacks on Beijing and adopt a more subtle approach in a bid to win back Chinese-Australian voters.
The revelation came as recent Australian Bureau of Statistics census data overlaid with election results found the party suffered above average swings against it in electorates with high numbers of Chinese-Australian voters.
Post-polling suggested the Morrison government’s anti-China rhetoric alienated Chinese-Australian voters who would otherwise prefer the Coalition on economic matters.
Former treasurer Josh Frydenberg lost his seat of Kooyong – which has Chinese-Australian voter base of 19 per cent- to teal independent Monique Ryan following his crackdown on Chinese foreign investment in response to Beijing’s sanctions on Australian imports.
In the seat of Bennelong, a 13 per cent swing against the Liberal Party was recorded in polling booths in Eastwood, where 38 per cent of residents have Chinese heritage.
The Coalition also lost the Victorian seat of Chisholm, which boasts a Chinese-Australian voter base of 28.9 per cent, while it narrowly retained the seat of Menzies – where 26.7 per cent of voters are of Chinese heritage – by just 1,377 votes.
Mr Dutton said his criticisms of China were not about its people – it was about the country’s government.
“If you look back at my transcripts, I’ve been at pains to talk about China under President Xi. President Xi has appointed himself leader for life,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
“It’s like our criticism about Russia under President Putin – our criticism is not of the Russian people. When we talk about problems that we have with other countries, our comments aren’t an attack on those people, it’s on that dictatorship.
“I mean, our attacks on the North Korean dictator, when you talk about that, it’s not an attack on the North Korean people and talk of that is just absurd.”
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