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June 10, 2025
Tuesday 10 June 2025
Latika Bourke
The Nightly
Coalition campaign spokesman casts doubt on Libs' future use of Freshwater Strategy as he blames pollster for shock scale of Opposition's election loss
The Coalition's campaign spokesman James Paterson has cast doubt on the Liberals' in-house pollster Mike Turner and his firm Freshwater Strategy continuing in the job, and said their "very bullish" and ultimately faulty predictions contributed to the scale of the Opposition's election loss.
Senator Paterson, now shadow finance minister, said "Dr Mike", as the British pollster is known, should have told campaign figures that he was factoring in Labor voters who rejected the Voice as Coalition supporters an assumption which wrongly inflated support for then opposition leader Peter Dutton. Privately, the opposition leader's aides were boasting of being on course for majority government as late as the Thursday before the election, despite this requiring the Coalition to defy history to stage a landslide and reduce Labor to a one-term government.
Instead the opposite happened, and Labor won a stunning landslide, increasing its majority from 78 to 94, as they turfed the Liberals out of seats Labor had never held before, such as Menzies in Melbourne.
In his most candid comments yet about what went wrong in the campaign, Senator Paterson, who had a front-row seat in his role as official spokesman and as a close ally of the former leader Mr Dutton, said no one saw the wipe-out coming because they had trusted Dr Mike's "extremely bullish" polling.
"The reason why we remained confident, even when the public polls turned south is that our private internal polling remained very bullish ... it did not enter my mind as a possibility that we would be losing a dozen or more seats on election day," he told the Latika Takes podcast.
"We still thought ... as late as the night before the election, that we were in a strong position in those key seats around the country to get a good swing to us and pick up a number of seats because that's what the polling was telling us."
But the opposite happened. Mr Dutton lost his seat of Dickson and the Coalition lost a swag of seats across Brisbane. This included Petrie where Labor only preselected their candidate Emma Comer as the election was called.
He said it was a shock to everyone in campaign headquarters to learn after the election via an opinion piece that Dr Mike penned for the Financial Review, which runs Freshwater polling, that he had missed the landslide, partly because he had assumed No Voice voters could be Coalition supporters.
"What I did not know, and I only learned after the campaign when reading the Financial Review on the Monday after the campaign, is that our polling also had at the heart of it an assumption about how someone who voted No in the Voice referendum, but was a Labor voter, would behave in this election," Senator Paterson said.
He said while some on his own side had "over-interpreted the consequences of the result" for the Coalition electorally, this thinking should never have seeped into the way the polling was calculated.
"The idea that they were somehow guaranteed to walk over the line and vote for us was a heroic assumption," he said.
"That should have never been in the polling, that's for sure."
He said he and others should have been told and that if they had, they would have put a stop to the practice.
"As the Coalition's campaign spokesman and the shadow minister in residence at campaign headquarters, who participated in those 5.30am phone calls where we were presented with the polling, I was never told," he said.
"And other people that I've spoken to after the campaign who were in similarly senior positions also did not know.
"So yes, I think we should have been told, and we would've been able to interrogate that, and we would have been able to maybe take some steps to make sure that the polling was reliable."
Asked if Dr Mike and his firm would be returning to campaign headquarters for the next election, Senator Paterson said as a senator, he would not be making that decision, but: "I'd be surprised if we use Freshwater in our next campaign."
It is unclear if Freshwater Strategy will bid again to run the Liberal Party's polling. Their performance at the Federal level has not affected their work for the Liberal party's State divisions. And while even their most bullish research showed a majority government was within a range of potential election outcomes, this was never briefed to the leader as being a likely outcome.
Dr Mike polled for the Liberals during the Voice referendum, the Queensland and Western Australian elections and accurately predicted all those results.
In his AFR piece, he said he had "overestimated Labor 'defectors' to the Coalition" and in particular, "those who voted No at the Voice referendum".
In his extended interview with The Nightly in the latter half of the campaign, Mr Dutton pointed to the "big disparity" between the public and private polling and said the Liberals' research was more extensive as it was based on phone calls rather than online surveys of voters.
He said his party's data was more granular as it concentrated on target seats and showed the campaign was performing well in Labor electorates, meaning the election was in play.
"In some of these seats, they've been traditional Labor strongholds, but the Labor party's taken it for granted for too long," Mr Dutton said at the time.
"And as the demographic shift has taken place for us in inner metropolitan seats, the outer metropolitan seats are now families with big mortgages, car repayments, and they are moving away from the Labor party to the Liberal party.
"So I think there is an enormous opportunity for us to come home with the wind at our back ... what I'm seeing ... in our own numbers, it's game on."
The Coalition's campaign review is expected to address if phoning voters remains a viable model given it is extremely difficult to reach younger voters this way.
It will also examine whether billionaire Clive Palmer's constant text messages sent to millions of Australians may have contributed to Freshwater's inability to read the mood correctly, as many voters, annoyed with being politically spammed, stopped answering their phones. The 2025 Federal election was the first time this method and model of calculating polling failed in this way.
Senator Paterson said they did ask questions of Dr Mike about why the party's research was so different to everyone else's but were provided with "seemingly very convincing explanations".
"Lots of discussion happened at campaign headquarters where I was based about the reasons for that gap in the polls," Senator Paterson said.
"And whenever we asked questions about that, we were given seemingly very convincing explanations as to why the kind of polling that was being done for the campaign by Freshwater was far superior to the public polls.
"The media can't spend anywhere near as much money on polling as a political party can, their polling relies on online panels, a sample from online panels that are then re-weighted, to try and match the demographics of Australia.
"Whereas our polling through Freshwater was based primarily on phone canvassing not only, but primarily and that built the demographic model, as we were told, from the ground up to exactly match the Australian population demographics rather than just a weighting of an online panel of people.
"And so we were told for that reason it should be far more accurate."
He said the implications of using faulty data were huge electorally and "subtly" at the policy level.
"The disastrous thing about relying on bad polling is it not only leads you to misallocate resources that could be spent defending seats that ... we lost that we never knew were at risk," he said.
"We don't set policy solely according to polling but if polling tells you that working class Labor voters are about to depart the Labor party en masse and you want to make sure that's happened, well then you construct a policy agenda which appeals to people like that.
"And it turns out that was the wrong thing to do."
However, Tony Barry, a former Liberal State director and head of the apolitical polling firm Redbridge, one of the pollsters whose research was closest to the election result, said while "bad pollsters were like bad brain surgeons", politicians should never use polling to set policy.
"Campaigns are mostly about resource allocation so you really need to fish where the fish are and good polling informs those decisions and which messages and opportunities you can leverage and where your threats are and if they can be neutralised," he said.
"But political parties should never use polling to inform their policies.
"When used properly, focus groups and quantitative polling helps political parties sell their sometimes unpopular policies by eliciting what are the most persuasive messages and how to neutralise opposition messaging.
"When John Howard and Peter Costello announced the GST and income tax cuts it wasn't because focus groups told them it was popular.
"In fact it was unpopular. But the research showed that despite voter hesitations, they thought it was better for the country which then became the key message in the Coalition's 1998 election campaign."
Senator Paterson said the polling was just one component of what had gone wrong in the campaign and was not the sole reason for the devastating loss.
The idea that they were somehow guaranteed to walk over the line and vote for us was a heroic assumption. James Paterson.