Tim Wilson has lived out the fantasy of every wet Liberal by retaking a Teal seat. It is a victory he will no doubt use in years to come if a leadership challenge is issued to Sussan Ley.
Departing Teal Zoe Daniel prematurely celebrated her ‘win’ in Goldstein on election night with a now infamous dance. ‘What we have achieved here is extraordinary!’ Her tone changed as the numbers failed to stack up. ‘It’s a resilience test, that’s for sure,’ she said, a few days later. ‘But no matter what, we will still keep dancing.’
Don’t worry, TikTok dance numbers are an outdated, declining political trend that lost popularity with the demise of Kamala Harris.
Several weeks and a re-count later, Tim Wilson has emerged as the true victor with the thinnest of margins – 124 votes.
It’s not exactly a warm welcome from his former voters, who switched him out for the Teals three years ago, but Tim Wilson still felt able to call it an ‘unprecedented’ victory.
‘Together we just broke three Australian records. First team to retake the same seat lost to an Independent MP, ever! First team to defeat a Teal Independent MP, ever! First Liberal team in 100+ years to win a seat off an Independent MP elected [at] a general election (and it has only been done once before – 1914 in Gippsland.’
Okay, calm down. Your victory was so unsteady it was mistaken as a rounding error.
‘So sayeth the psephology lord!’ he added on Facebook, when viewing the final count.
One comment from a fan worryingly suggested that the Liberals should reinvent the party after being ‘unshackled’ from the Nationals.
Into what? That is left to our imagination.
Before the freshly separated Liberal Party does anything rash with this victory, they should take a moment to think about why Tim Wilson lost the seat of Goldstein to begin with, and what shifted it, very slightly, back into his hands.
If the failure turns out to be self-inflicted by Zoe Daniel and the Teals, the Liberals may learn the wrong lessons.
Let’s return to where it started. In 2022, RMIT wrote that social media ‘helped tip the balance in favour of challenger Zoe Daniel’, describing the Liberals as being ‘outmanoeuvred’ by the Teals. Which wouldn’t be hard, with the Liberals running a social media strategy somewhere between non-existent and prehistoric.
One might even say the Liberals were, and still are, lazy when it comes to campaigning.
Moonlighting on Sky News Australia and winking at newspaper journalists to publish the odd editorial barely dents the electorate’s psyche. Traditional media no longer reaches those under 40, which means the first time young voters sight a Liberal candidate is a cardboard cut-out at the polling booth. By this stage, the Liberals have been demonised by every authority figure in their lives, from professors to influencers. As RMIT points out, one-fifth of Goldstein voters are aged 18-34.
Instead of rational, impartial voters picking a candidate based on policy, they are largely tribal groups cheering on their chief as they go into battle.
In this context, the Liberals have a habit of looking like bankers carrying briefcases into a field where everyone else is mud wrestling with spears. The vibe is all wrong.
The Teal message of climate change, gender equality, and unspecified ‘change’ remained constant across both campaigns, although they suffered a bit of ideological bruising after the Free Palestine movement swept out of universities and crashed straight into the pro-Israel, pro-Jewish perspective preferred by the older, wealthier demographic of the female Teal base. That certainly bit off a corner, and another corner probably went from those annoyed at power bills, and the others who have started to doubt the benefits of mass migration.
Identity politics means that each party has a narrow perspective at a time when the economic, social, and cultural disaster is expansive. The give me free stuff screeching from each group is collapsing the patience of the middle class who have been quietly footing the bill on the understanding it will pay off their colonial guilt debt. Votes are bleeding out from every party and the person with the best mop wins.
At the 2022 election, Tim Wilson made the same mistake that Peter Dutton would repeat in 2025 by releasing underwhelming policies in the final days of the campaign. Sporting clubs, parks, and construction. These things might be practical, but they do not capture the hearts and minds of young voters who have added a spiritual dimension to voting which is entirely overlooked by the clinically minded conservatives who find their faith elsewhere.
This time around, Tim Wilson probably benefited from former Liberal voters annoyed that the Teals vote with the Greens. While it might be obvious to us that the Teals are more green than blue, it wasn’t widely believed in the demographic they went after. Comments left on their social media accounts from locals reveal this awakening…
As the former Assistant Minister to the Minister for Industry, Energy, and Emissions Reduction, Tim Wilson tried to run a small climate change card (and failed) in 2022 with pitches of $560,000 for EV chargers and the slogan, ‘Emissions are down, jobs are up – and that’s what I’m going to keep fighting for!’
Zoe Daniel chose the ‘Same isn’t safe!’ line, one she did not resurrect on her second attempt…
‘GetUp!, Extinction Rebellion, Labor Party, The Greens, all abandoning their traditional camps to back behind a journalist and frankly, the ABC’s given them a dream run as well,’ Tim Wilson complained, at the time. It probably helped his cause in 2025 that noisy activist groups have been publicly humiliated after their stunts went too far.
Zoe Daniel may be suffering from a side effect of her earlier success. Having run the line, ‘The next Parliament is critical to the future of our children, our environment, our economy, and our planet now, and for generations to come … as my 14-year-old son powerfully puts it: You have a chance to do something for all of us, Mum…’ people are starting to wonder if that saviour complex was a bit performative. We should call it the Thunberg Effect. If the world doesn’t end and you don’t do anything, maybe it’s time to get back to worrying about real things?
We can’t rule out the possibility that the electorate was bored of the Liberals in 2022 and caught up in a global Climate Change narrative. It was giving the same energy as Live Aid in 1985 when the stadium cheered and swayed, riding Queen’s music as if their attendance at the concert could solve famine in Ethiopia. It was a hell of a concert, but Left-wing media now chides those involved for starting a ‘patronising save Africa’ industry. If you told the 1.5 billion people who watched the concert live how they’d be talked about 40 years on, they wouldn’t believe you.
To guess at what the ‘unshackled’ Liberal Party has in store, Tim Wilson is a useful figure. He listed his core values for the party as individual responsibility, freedom, choice, aspiration, tolerance and mutual respect, mutual obligation, and a helping hand for each other. He also described his relationship with the Liberal Party as ‘complicated’. ‘I have never been a conservative, nor a moderate, I’ve always been a Liberal with a very liberal conviction.’ Which makes him sound more like an American Democrat than an Australian Liberal given that, at a bare minimum, Liberals must be conservatives.
‘I’m a Liberal in the Menzies tradition who seeks to unite rather than divide, to build rather than tear down. A liberal who believes you win by embracing, building, and leading middle Australia, understanding Menzies’ dictum that invitations to divide Australians ultimately weaken Australia.’
Which makes me suspect he hasn’t read much of Menzies. I remain confident Menzies would have objected to the rise of Islam across Australia, the demise of Christianity, and the infiltration of socialist ideology into the Liberal Party broad church. Would he embrace mass migration? The growing welfare state? The regression of the education system? The inability of certain Liberal Party members to define a woman?
Too often Menzies is invoked as conservative legend rather than a political creature of his time who would have scorned plenty of things described by new Leader Sussan Ley as ‘modern’.
Returning to his Forgotten People weekly broadcasts, may I draw your attention to one titled, The Opposition’s Duty (during war).
Reading his work today, it struck me that our Parliament has taken on a war-like footing, with Climate Change pitched as the existential threat that severely impedes the ability of the Opposition to function. This is because of an additional level of ‘moral duty’ that requires the Opposition to act against its principles (and often better judgement) to support activities deemed necessary to fight the ‘war’ of carbon-driven extinction. If the Opposition criticises or refuses a climate policy, instead of being a topic of healthy debate, they are accused of endangering the war effort. In this case, Net Zero targets. Debate is no longer healthy, it is reckless.
‘Is an Opposition bound to be silent if it honestly believes that blunders are being made?’ Further, Menzies writes, ‘Who is to determine whether the Opposition is right or wrong?’ He finishes, ‘I notice that certain correspondents, writing to the newspapers, are disposed to dismiss all this argument as if it were irresponsible wrangling in the face of the enemy. But we must think calmly and clearly about this matter.’
My point is not to open a discussion about what level of conversation is permissible during a genuine war, but rather to note that these war-time restrictions have been placed over Parliament without being challenged thanks to the Liberals and Nationals allowing, and in some cases supporting, the classification of ‘climate change’ as an existential threat to do battle with. Even now, as the Nationals separate from the Liberals down the line of Net Zero, you will find plenty of commentators who label the debate itself as dangerous.
In this case, the Opposition should challenge the government to prove the enemy exists and isn’t a figment of the Treasury’s imagination, conjured to justify the rivers of gold flowing out into the sea of foreign interest.
To finish, I will let the Liberal Party in on a secret. It’s not that the Left are better at campaign messaging or slogans. It’s all cringe. It’s all bad. It is only that their messaging is better received because several generations have been primed by the education system to respond positively, not to the words, but to the brands Green, Teal, and Labor. When a movie star smiles at the crowd, people cheer. When a stranger does it, those same people cross the road to get away from them. The smile remains constant.
The failure of the Liberal Party was to allow the education system to brainwash people from infancy through to their early 20s. Even the children of blue ribbon Liberals are birthed from university as card-carrying Greens. This is not a mistake, it is a catastrophe. One that the Liberals, at state and federal level, were warned about but merely shrugged their shoulders in reply. They thought they held eternal power with the money men in the back rooms, so why trouble themselves with the kids?
Those kids are now adults who must be convinced to vote for something they don’t believe in (capitalism), to restore a nostalgic version of Australia they never knew, from within a tide of new arrivals who hate the West and want to see this country turned into a socialist dictatorship with strong Eastern religious cultural laws suffocating the dreams of the Enlightenment.
This is the world built for us by those old power brokers who thought they knew best and now sit around in their party rooms wondering what went wrong.
Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
