The leaked review shows how chaotic campaign management and policy announcements ignoring key demographics cost the Coalition the election.

In 2022, the Liberal Party’s post-election review referred to ‘a sense that the Liberal Party is failing to adequately represent the values and priorities of women in modern Australia’. In 2025 nothing had changed. Women, together with Gen Z and Millennials, and significant multicultural communities were a ‘demographic loss’ to the Liberal Party.

The recently leaked 2025 review, conducted by Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, pinpoints key defects in the Liberal Party campaign – shortage of policy development and lack of coherent campaign strategy due to the rupture between Peter Dutton and the party’s federal director, Andrew Hirst. The first recommendation is that ‘The Party must never again allow the Parliamentary Leader and Office to effectively run the campaign’.

The working from home policy is cited as a prime example of campaign mistakes due to lack of oversight by the federal secretariat (which already permitted working from home). The review noted the lack of senior women or anyone in the secretariat with responsibility to apply a ‘female lens’ to campaign strategy and to develop partnerships with bodies such as Hilma’s Network.

The 2022 Liberal Party review had recommended a network to promote female representation in the party; Senator Jane Hume as co-author of that review said such a network was so fundamental to the future success of the party that it should be financed by a levy on parliamentarians.

The Dame Margaret Guilfoyle Network (MGN) was........

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