Loading

Hughes argued that Treasurer Jim Chalmers skated through with no scrutiny from Taylor over the government’s big spending pledges and ballooning deficit.

Hughes told Radio National and Sky that, as the former shadow assistant minister for mental health, she had submitted “seven fully costed policies” to the shadow expenditure review committee and never heard back from anyone.

“Policies that had been developed, had been costed, just seemed to disappear into a vortex,” she said, adding that she had heard similar stories from colleagues.

“To be the opposition leader, you need to be very capable in the media. You need to be able to sell a message. You need to be able to put the narrative together, and you need to be able to bring the team together,” she said.

Loading

“I have concerns about his capabilities, but that is shared by a huge number of my colleagues, and [there’s a] frustration that they didn’t have economic narratives that they could push and sell during the election.

“Going from shadow treasurer to opposition leader, I’m not quite sure that’s going to change.”

Moderate Liberal senators Andrew Bragg and Dave Sharma were not as scathing in their radio interviews, but argued the party had to be less conservative if it wanted to win a future election.

Bragg agreed the Coalition did not push an economic narrative during the campaign, and said the decision to preference One Nation was wrong

“Ultimately, you’ve got to give people something to vote for. And I think traditionally, people have voted for the Liberal Party for a better life, a better economy, and I don’t think [there were] enough strong economic policies to win the day,” he said on Radio National.

“I don’t think preferencing One Nation is a good idea for the Liberal Party. I think John Howard was absolutely right about that. It’s a very bad optical position for our party, and I think it looks as if we were not learning the lesson that we need to recapture the centre.

“Elections in Australia are won in the centre. It’s very clear that the pathway for the Liberal Party going forward is to ensure that we have clear and differentiated, ambitious economic policy and that we have an inclusive social agenda.”

The party needed to win the big cities over again, former Liberal member for Wentworth Dave Sharma also told Radio National, as he said there was no chance of winning if the party was not moderate.

“There is no way we can ever hope to be the party of government unless we rebuild our appeal and our offering to those populations in the big cities, and then that will have to be our mission and will have to be, I think, probably our overwhelming focus as a party,” he said.

Liberal backbencher Jason Wood said Trump was a “total disaster” for the party.

“We would never have thought we would have had the fallout with Trump on Australia, with the tariffs, and we should have called it out … and then we had the work-from-home policy, and by that stage, momentum had completely gone away from us,” he said.

Deakin and Menzies, both in Melbourne, were among the Victorian seats that slipped from Liberal hands on Saturday, while the party was unable to recapture the seat of Aston, which has been held by Labor since a byelection following Alan Tudge’s retirement in 2023 and was heavily targeted by the Coalition.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.