Article by Matthew Cranston and Geoff Chambers, courtesy of The Australian
05.05.2025
Top Liberal Party donors are pulling their financial support for the party, blaming the combination of a disorganised election campaign and Peter Dutton’s Labor-lite policy platform, saying without early wholesale changes they won’t be giving in three years’ time.
As the federal Liberals’ parliamentary team prepares to vote next week on Mr Dutton’s replacement as Opposition Leader, donors and long-term supporters have raised concerns about the party’s failure to attack Labor and overall direction on tax reform and energy policy.
After the election bloodbath in which the Coalition recorded its worst result in generations, backers of Acting Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and opposition Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor hit the phones on Monday scrambling to secure support from conservatives and moderates.
‘The lack of policies from the Liberal Party was completely hopeless.’
Amid private and public bloodletting in Liberal Party ranks, billionaire Robert Millner, chairman of investment house Washington H. Soul Pattinson, said he would not be donating again until there was major change. Soul Patts has in the past donated more than $1m to the federal Liberal Party.
“It’s been a disaster. I will be seriously thinking about whether I ever donate again,” he said.
“I don’t know where they go to from now. It was a very poor campaign. There were too many mixed messages. They didn’t convince voters that (Labor’s) spending billions on renewables is a bad idea. The Libs have to change their way of thinking and get more of the swing voters.”
Stockbroker Angus Aitken – one of the largest Liberal donors – said leaders simply lacked courage for bolder policies that would have had more impact. Mr Aitken donated $250,000 to the federal Liberal Party this year and has donated hundreds of thousands over previous years.
“I have zero interest in donating further to the Liberals. They need a wholesale clear out and to work out what they want to stand for, instead of these me-too style quasi-Labor policies,” he said.
“To not do well against those poor outcomes Labor has generated is astounding but the lack of policies from the Liberal Party was completely hopeless.
“Their marketing skills were absolutely woeful.
“Multiple major employers and senior business people tried to help and the advice and offers to help were rebuffed as the internal staffers clearly thought they knew better than people that employ tens of thousands of Australians.”
A key gripe for prominent Liberal supporters is centred around the Coalition “abandoning its traditional economic management status” after Mr Dutton ran with a higher tax rate than Labor and failed to present alternative tax reforms such as indexation.
The Australian can reveal the Coalition’s economic team led by Mr Taylor decided to resist pressure from backbenchers to index tax brackets due to cost pressures and the belief it was more important to focus on delivering $13.9bn in lower deficits.
The cost of indexing tax brackets was estimated to have cost between $30bn and $50bn over time.
Capital gains tax, renewable energy
High-profile donors also criticised the Coalition campaign for failing to cut down what they said was Labor’s wasteful renewable energy policy and dangerous plans for unrealised capital gains tax.
Jason Titman, the chief executive of crypto company Swyftx which donated tens of thousands of dollars to both parties pushing for better regulations and resistance to Labor’s unrealised capital gains tax, said the Coalition had tried to please everyone and ended-up pleasing no one.
“A lot of their policies were similar to what was being offered by Labor. I believe an important area for them to campaign on over the next three years is to make voters aware that Labor’s proposal of taxing unrealised capital gains is counter-productive to growing the Australian economy and it will have a negative impact on productivity growth, the health of investment in Australia and the wealth of millions of Australians,” Mr Titman said.
Major companies and prominent business leaders have historically donated similar amounts of money to each of the major parties regardless of whether they are in government or opposition. In recent years, prominent billionaires and millionaires have switched their donations to activist and political groups, including Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 and conservative group Advance, which led the No Indigenous voice vote campaign and executed a successful multimillion-dollar campaign against the Greens.
Mr Millner and Mr Aitken noted the irony that teal voters had now elected people who “have zero power in Canberra” and were going to “see socialism at its worst under Labor, with taxes on unrealised gains and other things that will affect larger numbers of teal voters”.
‘Learn from the loss’
Mining magnate Gina Rinehart – whose company Hancock Prospecting has made donations to state and territory Liberal divisions but is not a major donor to the federal division – said “the loss was devastating for the Liberals”.
Mrs Rinehart said it was “important to not throw away truth and analysing skills, and instead learn from the loss and rebuild”.
A senior Coalition source said their campaign had raised more money than the 2022 election but less than Labor and that donors were free to criticise the results. The source admitted there was a combination of problems for the Coalition, including internal polling that misdirected efforts, and some wrong calls by leaders around policy decisions.
New Liberal leader’s challenge
As Liberal MPs prepare to select a new leader to start rebuilding ahead of the 2028 election, conservatives and moderates on Monday were actively briefing against each other as Ms Ley, Mr Taylor and opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan spoke to colleagues as they weighed leadership runs.
While the conservatives are confident they will retain the majority of numbers in the Liberal partyroom, moderate sources said they were hopeful Tim Wilson and others would fall over the line and bolster their numbers. They believe they can peel off conservative backbenchers considered to be of the soft right who have privately criticised Mr Taylor.
Senior Liberal sources said while some backbenchers were shifting blame on to Mr Taylor, they pointed out that opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume had been the architect of the unpopular crackdown on working from home that was abandoned mid-campaign after Labor weaponised the policy.
Senator Hume’s comments about “Chinese spies” last week damaged Liberal MPs and candidates in electorates with strong Chinese-Australian communities. Senator Hume was late last year endorsed by key figures as the leader of the Liberals’ moderate faction.
