Freshwater Strategy’s deeply flawed polling has emerged as a central factor in the Liberal Party’s catastrophic election defeat, with an official campaign review recommending the party never again rely on a single pollster.
The review by former Howard government minister Nick Minchin and former NSW minister Pru Goward found that erroneous research from Freshwater Strategy fundamentally misled the campaign, causing the Opposition to squander precious time and resources chasing seats it had no realistic chance of winning.
How Freshwater Strategy got it wrong
Freshwater Strategy has acknowledged a critical methodological error: they weighted their polling results partly based on how people voted in the 2023 Voice referendum rather than the 2022 federal election.
This flawed approach gave Peter Dutton’s campaign false confidence that outer suburban and working-class electorates which had voted against the Voice but traditionally backed Labor were genuinely winnable.
The consequences were severe. In the crucial weeks before polling day, Freshwater was telling Dutton and Liberal campaign headquarters that the party was performing far better in key seats than it actually was.
Cascading failures from bad data
The polling firm’s inaccurate research triggered a damaging misallocation of campaign resources. Based on Freshwater’s optimistic projections, the party pulled staff and advertising from at-risk Liberal seats—including Dutton’s own Brisbane electorate of Dickson, which he ultimately lost.
Simultaneously, the Liberals poured finite resources into Labor-held seats they were never going to capture.
“We were misled that we were in front when we were behind,” one Liberal strategist said.
The problem was compounded by the Nationals using the same pollster, meaning neither Coalition partner had an independent check on Freshwater’s data.
“They have strongly recommended the party in future never rely on just one pollster and not the same one as the Nats,” said a person familiar with the review’s findings. “It did real damage to the campaign.”
The scale of defeat
Labor won the May election in a historic landslide, claiming a record 94 of 150 House of Representatives seats. The Coalition was reduced to just 43 seats between the Liberals and Nationals, with the Liberals decimated in urban electorates.
Beyond the polling failures, the Minchin-Goward review also criticised Dutton’s office, belated policy rollouts, and the decision to oppose Labor’s $536-a-year tax cuts without offering an income tax alternative.
The review did not take a position on gender quotas, currently 80 per cent of Coalition MPs in the House are male, leaving that question to a separate party review led by Queensland senator James McGrath. Both reviews are expected to be released publicly in December.
Looking ahead
The Freshwater Strategy debacle has exposed a critical vulnerability in the Liberal Party’s campaign infrastructure, one that contributed directly to its worst electoral defeat in a generation. Whether the party can rebuild will depend not only on heeding the Minchin-Goward review’s recommendation to diversify its polling sources, but on fundamentally rethinking how it gathers and interprets data in an increasingly volatile electoral landscape. For Freshwater Strategy, the reputational damage may prove equally lasting. A cautionary tale for political pollsters about the dangers of methodological shortcuts when the stakes are highest.
