It was different even under Scott Morrison. At the last election, the then Liberal leader was regarded by many as a drag on the vote – but it was nothing like the “absolute fury” voters felt towards Peter Dutton.

“It was far more vicious,” says one Liberal moderate. “In 2022, I didn’t have much of a Morrison problem … But this time round, when we said to volunteers, voters, ‘Oh, well, don’t vote for Peter, he’s not on the ballot box, you know – vote for me’, they couldn’t bring themselves to and they’ve got a right to be furious with us.

“In 2019, they gave us a message, particularly women … but it was all buried under Labor’s bad policies. Also Scott, at that stage, was popular. He ran a presidential-style campaign and we thought, ‘Okay, well, we’re okay.’ ”

Today, the Liberal Party is not okay.

After last weekend’s election, Labor has a super-majority verging on the historic.

The Liberals, meanwhile, have suffered a “catastrophic loss” of leadership and there are now serious questions about the ongoing viability of the Coalition.

Dutton has lost his seat, as have foreign affairs spokesman David Coleman, housing spokesman Michael Sukkar and Nationals deputy leader Perin Davey.

“The Liberal Party is supposed to be a broad church, not an actual church,” RedBridge Group director and former Liberal strategist Tony Barry tells The Saturday Paper.

“In politics, shared values are more important than policies. Policies are an extension and expression of your core values.

“But in recent electoral cycles we’ve become focused on tactical policy responses and as a result we’ve put forward to the electorate a collection of unconnected policies that are not values-based.

“It has also become apparent that we are no longer confident or comfortable talking about the economy and reform. Economic management and reform is a Liberal Party legacy strength, but instead of leveraging that equity we have vacated the conversation.”

The rot started in 2016, when Malcolm Turnbull just got over the line for the Coalition. Several ministers lost seats and the community independent movement began with the election of Cathy McGowan in Indi.

The Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum defeat in 2023 gave the opposition a false sense of confidence. According to party figures, so, too, did the engagement with the Sky News “after dark” section of the media.

The party was misled by internal polling from Freshwater Strategy, which overstated the Coalition’s position. Tasmanian Senator Jonno Duniam called it a “bum steer of the worst order”.

According to Liberal Senator Maria Kovacic, the result on May 3 happened because the policy work had not been done and voters lost faith in the party.

“It is about the electability and the future of the party. So, sorry if some men don’t like it, but unfortunately, we need some measures that are going to make sure that we can one day govern again.”

“They didn’t trust us to lead because we weren’t talking about the things that mattered to them. We were talking about other things,” the New South Wales moderate tells The Saturday Paper.

“It’s a very big signal to us that we must return to the centre. Unless we do that, people in the cities, where most Australians live, won’t vote for us.”

The result, she says, is a solid rejection of culture wars over Welcomes to Country and perceived “woke” elements of the national school curriculum.

“That’s not who we are as a country. We don’t draw into that. We actually don’t like the divisive nature of those kinds of discussions,” Kovacic says.

“We need the sensible voices in our party to be heard. We need to make sure that divisive voices and divisive discussions are tempered, so that they are respectful discussions.

“It’s not about silencing people. It’s changing the manner of that conversation.

“Unless we do that, and unless we change that culture, we’re just going to sleepwalk into irrelevance and oblivion. I think it is very much a watershed moment.”

In the wake of the loss, some Liberals are still holding to the Trump-style politics that cost them the election. One of the party’s key donors, Gina Rinehart, supports the approach.

“If anything, we lost because we didn’t stand tall enough,” Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price said in a statement.

“I think we probably did not capitalise enough on the outcome of the referendum, the success of the Coalition in that regard,” Price told Sky News this week. “The fact we did not pin that to the prime minister effectively enough, a lost opportunity there.”

She later announced she was leaving the Nationals party room to join her “natural home” with the Liberals and help rebuild the party in a “robust” manner.

Price’s comments – following her borrowing of Trump rhetoric during the campaign – illustrate the division in the ranks as the damage is surveyed.

“If we don’t pick up seats like Kooyong, which are very tight, or Monash – those are seats we should have won,” a Liberal campaigner tells The Saturday Paper. “And if they come down to handfuls of votes, it could be partially attributed to the fact that she said, ‘Make Australia Great Again’. She’s at one press conference, and she made that catastrophic error, and she’s not said that she got that wrong.”

Insiders from the centre-right faction say the Liberal Party succeeded in making the case against Albanese and, early in the campaign, reputable polling showed voters were prepared to move away from him.

The problem, they say, is that when voters looked at the alternative, there wasn’t a plan, there wasn’t policy detail and there wasn’t a reason to vote for Dutton.

“They didn’t particularly like Labor, but it came down to who’s least worse, and then it also came down to, well, our messaging: ‘Get Australia Back on Track,’ ” a Liberal MP says. “I still don’t know what that means. Back on track to what?

“I don’t know – back to the ’70s or the ’50s or what? We didn’t talk to young people at all. It was just a shemozzle.”

The Liberals lost heavily in urban centres. Those that remain inhabit city fringes and rural electorates. The party has been banished from Tasmania, Adelaide and Canberra, while a clutch of Liberal National Party seats also fell in Queensland.

Insiders are downcast about not just the next election but also the one after that.

The last Liberal Party election review, conducted by frontbencher Jane Hume and former federal party director Brian Loughnane, warned: “No party that is seeking to form government has a pathway to a majority solely through rural and regional electorates.”

The Nationals, however, are flexing their muscles after retaining all 15 seats and almost taking Bendigo from Labor. Nationals frontbencher Bridget McKenzie says the party had a “corker” of an election. Queensland Senator Matt Canavan reviews the party’s performance in the last parliament as “too gun-shy”.

The Coalition, he said, is a “business relationship, not a marriage”.

Tim Wilson, a tenacious former assistant minister, bucked the trend to reclaim the inner-Melbourne seat of Goldstein, which he lost to independent Zoe Daniel at the 2022 election.

The forming Liberal team will have a “lot of work ahead of it”, according to Wilson.

“Three years ago, we were written off here. We went back to the ground. We listened, we heard the messages from the community,” Wilson told reporters on Wednesday.

“We were honest with ourselves enough to learn and grow. We looked at what it is we needed to build and to appeal to people’s sense of aspiration and hope for the future of this country. We are an example of what can be done.”

A Liberal source says that a smaller group may be more formidable than a medium-sized group. They argue that it may be a liberating chance to unify under a common interest. The key will be to come back to core economic messages, particularly with Labor forecasting more debt and more spending.

With Dutton losing his seat, the hunt is on for a leadership team.

Deputy opposition leader Sussan Ley, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor and immigration spokesman Dan Tehan are former ministers and the top contenders, while Zoe McKenzie, Julian Leeser and Wilson are also in the mix for leadership group roles.

On paper, Taylor should have the backing of the dominant right elements of the party, but he has been criticised for being behind the Coalition’s poorly received economic position.

The first female leader of the Liberal Party would be historic, and perhaps a salve for the times, but the moderate Ley is attracting criticism by party conservatives over her fundraising ability, her past support for Palestine and the swing against her in her seat.

While Dutton took full responsibility on election night for the Coalition demolition, there will also be an internal review into what went so wrong. Bridget McKenzie says it should be “honest, open and brutal”.

Liberal insiders tell The Saturday Paper the Nationals need to “back off” and be reminded that they have “topped out”. The junior coalition partner is not growing as a political movement.

“We need to look like a modern Liberal Party. We don’t need to look like a city version of the National Party,” one insider says. “Frankly, they can just focus on their own patch and we need to sort out ourselves.”

Following the 2022 election review, there was little work done to reconnect with voters in the inner-city seats lost to teal independents – despite this being a key recommendation. Other recommendations were similarly ignored.

Party insiders say there was meaningful work to reconnect with Chinese Australians and there was good engagement with women’s groups across the nation. Still, they say policy work was deficient and the leader’s office did not engage.

“I can’t see anything to suggest that they actually were like, ‘Okay, yep, we’ve got a weak spot with women,’ ” one insider says.

Kovacic, a former president of the NSW branch of the Liberal Party, says tax reform was a “massive missed opportunity” and the offering of nuclear power with a huge cost to taxpayers was too far outside the Liberals’ “core value system”.

The Nationals, in particular, are still keen on pursuing nuclear, but there is significant doubt about the electoral benefits in this.

“I’ll put it to you this way,” Kovacic says. “Imagine if we put the $300 billion slated for nuclear power stations towards tax reform. Yeah, what kind of message would have that sent to Australians about who we were and how we intended to lead?”

She scores down her party for not having anything meaningful to address childcare challenges, “one of the biggest costs for women in the workforce and for families”.

In the previous parliament, the Coalition had 11 women among 57 MPs in the House of Representatives. In the 48th parliament, it will be either seven or eight. Labor will have at least 47.

Former Liberal frontbencher Simon Birmingham said the lessons of the 2022 defeat had “not been learned and acted upon” and the broad-church model of the party was “clearly broken”.

He said the Liberals needed to finally adopt gender quotas to connect the party with the “modern Australian community”.

“I struggle to think of any alternatives if there is to be a new direction that truly demonstrates change and truly guarantees that the party will better reflect the composition of modern society,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

Birmingham wants quotas to be “hard, fast and ambitious”.

Other Liberals agree. “Absolutely. Yep, absolutely. Because nothing else has worked,” one says.

“I hadn’t been keen on them up until 2022, and then I was quietly keen. The reality is it’s worked for Labor, and I know that, but with the mentality of what we’ve got left in the Liberal Party, I still don’t think they’re going to see it, because they’ll still be screaming about meritocracy.”

Retiring former minister Linda Reynolds was part of a disregarded party review into gender 10 years ago and raised the idea of temporary quotas after the 2022 election loss.

On ABC Radio this week, there was a text message read out from a listener who described the Liberals as an “ocean of males”. The response from Reynolds was, “I totally agree.”

The Labor Party introduced quotas for women in winnable seats in the mid-1990s. The first target was 35 per cent and it was lifted over the years to 50 per cent, which was met for the ALP in the last term of parliament.

The Liberals have had a firm position against quotas, preferring to champion what it calls merit-based appointments and non-accountable targets.

Quotas won’t fly with the likes of former Liberal speaker Andrew Wallace.

“I am uncomfortable with quotas as I think the best person for the job should get the job,” he told Sky News this week. “I believe very firmly, if you want to win elections, you have got to have your best people on the park.”

That view has to change, according to Charlotte Mortlock, the founder of Hilma’s Network, which aims to encourage young women to join the Liberal movement.

“What options do we have left?” she tells The Saturday Paper. “We’ve tried targets twice before and we didn’t live up to it. At what point do we decide it’s time to do something with more force than a kind of soft target?

“It’s not about what men are comfortable with. It is about the electability and the future of the party. So, sorry if some men don’t like it, but unfortunately, we need some measures that are going to make sure that we can one day govern again.”

Mortlock points to the average Liberal Party member being a male in his 70s, while the average Australian is a woman aged about 35.

“I think it’s time that a lot of MPs acknowledge that appeasing the party members is repellent to the rest of society, and doing both simultaneously is having really negative consequences,” she says. “We’re placating members in their 70s and forgoing the votes of people in our workforce, and we actually need to be focusing on getting back in government, not sucking up to people who are party members.

“I think it’s really important that we have fresh faces in our party room.

“Don’t you think that that’s what Australia wants at the moment from the Liberal Party? They want something fresh that they haven’t seen before. They want new people. They are sick of seeing what we’ve been giving them for the past 10 years.

“We can’t keep offering more of the same.” 

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