Where were Peter Dutton’s quiet Australians? 

Even in the days before his party’s devastating election loss, the opposition leader maintained the public polls didn’t gel with what he was seeing from the private researchers contracted by the Liberal Party.

Confronted with dire public surveys, Dutton hinted on the campaign trail that he had seen internal numbers that were far more promising for the Coalition. 

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“Well, if you have a look at conversations we’re having and what we’re seeing in seats around the country at the moment, including outer-metropolitan electorates, there’s a very different conversation going on,” he said on April 26. “There are a lot of quiet Australians out there.” 

With such a decisive swing away from the Liberals — so far they’ve only picked up 39 seats against Labor’s 85 — it begs the question: was Dutton being dishonest about the internal polling, or was he being misled? 

Liberal sources told Crikey they believed it was the latter. 

“Changing from CT to Freshwater was disastrous, it seems,” one insider said. 

Another said the party’s internal polling was held extremely tightly during the campaign, with Dutton, his chief of staff, and the federal director of the Liberal Party among the few people who would have been privy to it. 

But news.com.au reported this morning some insiders claimed Dutton’s political adviser Jamie Briggs had cautioned Freshwater Strategy’s pollster Michael Turner “about research in the seat of Dickson because it might spook the leader”.

The research was considered a critical piece of intelligence that needed to be kept out of the media so that the party’s opponents wouldn’t be able to take advantage of it. 

“Even I don’t get to see them, and it’s because they know I talk to people like you,” a Coalition senator told Crikey earlier in the campaign. 

It’s unknown what the contract would have cost, but some Liberals have said it’s in the “millions of dollars”. It’s understood the contract was paid for by donations to the federal campaign. 

The Liberal Party parted ways with its usual research firm CT Group, led by Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor, about a year ago. Rumours from inside the Liberal Party suggested that the break came after CT led polling for the Yes campaign in the Voice to Parliament referendum. 

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Freshwater Strategy, which also does polling for The Australian Financial Review, is directed by Turner, a former CT pollster. Turner acknowledged in a column for the AFR on Sunday that his firm had “underestimated” Labor’s strength, owing to three factors. 

The polling overestimated how many Labor voters would “defect” to the Coalition, “particularly those who voted No at the Voice referendum”, he wrote. 

“Second, for all the noise about the preference flows being different in a way that would substantially benefit Coalition performance, it appears that the outcome simply did not materialise. The primary vote collapse for the Coalition was too much for any benefit from additional preference flows,” Turner continued.

“Third, the late swing. Given that all pollsters seem to have underestimated the swing to Labor, and everyone’s fieldwork would have been over the earlier days in that week, it strongly suggests that there was a late swing among ‘soft’ or undecided voters in the final days that was very hard for pollsters to pick up.”

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Sunday the Coalition’s own polling indicated it would get 37% of the national primary vote, in numbers presented three days out from election day. The actual result was closer to 32%. “It was definitely wrong,” a Liberal frontbencher told the SMH. “We spent millions of dollars on it and will be keen to know what went wrong.”

Which, if any, polls can be trusted?

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