Who will replace Peter Dutton? WA MP Andrew Hastie won’t put hand up for Liberal leadership contention

Andrew Hastie will not run for the Liberal leadership.

Mr Hastie, widely seen as a future Liberal prime minister, has not been making calls to lobby for colleagues’ support.

He was the only only metropolitan Liberal left standing in Perth and was the only Liberal across all of WA who managed to increase his primary vote.

Melissa Price in Durack and Rick Wilson increased their margins on preferences.

He campaigned heavily on his own name and dropped Liberal branding from his blue polo campaign t-shirts and other promotional material which prominently displayed the Australian flag instead.

But he is not considered to be in the running to contest the Liberal leadership, which is vacant following the Coalition’s wipeout in the Federal election and Peter Dutton’s shock loss in the seat of Dickson.

Mr Dutton on Saturday became the first sitting opposition leader in history to lose his seat.

He accepted full responsibility for the Coalition bloodbath and said the party would rebuild in his concession speech.

But that task will fall to the next leader.

Sussan Ley, the deputy is now acting leader and is thought to be considering running, along with shadow treasurer Angus Taylor and shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan, who have been calling the Liberal MPs who remain in the parliament after the weekend rout.

As is customary when candidates are considering a leadership tilt, neither Ms Ley, Mr Taylor or Mr Tehan responded to The Nightly’s calls.

Meanwhile the party is being warned by one of its candidates that it faces the same fate as the West Australian Liberals unless it heeds the lessons of the wipeout result.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said during his back-to-work press conference in Canberra on Monday that he wanted Labor to be the “natural party of government.”

“Our relevance and viability is under threat from the left infiltration of our institutions and we need to address that,” businessman Mic Fels, who ran for the seat of Swan in suburban Perth, said in an exclusive interview by phone.

The Coalition had been hoping that Perth’s suburbs would swing in their favour but Labor is poised to achieve its highest-ever representation in the West, with nine out of 16 seats guaranteed.

While Josh Wilson is facing a fierce threat in his inner-city seat of Fremantle against a teal candidate, Labor remains in the race to win the new seat of Bullwinkel as well as Liberal-held Moore.

In the 2007 Rudd Slide, Kevin Rudd won Labor just four seats in WA by comparison.

At the state level, Labor has governed Western Australia since 2017 and in 2021 forced the opposition to be reduced to just two Liberal and four Nationals seats.

In 2025, they failed to make any meaningful gains, only increasing their representation by five and two seats respectively.

Mr Fels said the party needed to tap into feedback coming from local candidates, rather than relying so heavily on polling and focus groups.

Mike Turner of Freshwater Strategy, who conducted the Liberals’ polling returned research that wildly overstated the Coalition’s support, according to Liberals insiders who had access to the campaign research.

He did not respond to The Nightly’s calls but has written in the Australian Financial Review about how he had missed Labor’s landslide, including wrongly believing that voters who voted No to the Voice referendum would switch to the Coalition.

His errors meant party strategists were left in the dark that they were under threat in their own seats and wrongly believed they were capable of taking out Labor heartland seats such as Werriwa.

Mr Fels said candidates were doorknocking every day — which is the most effective form of polling — and at times there was a mismatch with the party’s internal research and the mood he was sensing on the ground.

He said the opposition got “absolutely slaughtered” from Labor successfully associating the Liberals with Trumpism, including public servant cuts and the aborted plan to ban work from home.

“We were on track until Trump got elected and became politically negative for conservatives globally,” he said.

Mr Trump’s decision to impose huge tariffs on China and other countries, as well as duties of 10 per cent on Australian goods triggered a stockmarket crash, affecting superannuation balances and dominated the start of the election campaign.

The domestic backlash to the US President also burnt Mr Dutton, who Labor effectively painted as a Trump-lite candidate who they falsely claimed would “Americanise” Medicare.

While Mr Dutton defended his plans to cut government waste through a new efficiency department, he denied that it was a copy of Elon Musk’s DOGE in an interview with The Nightly.

But Mr Fels said the damage had been done.

“They managed to construct a narrative that we were going to be Trump-lite,” he said.

He said the party needed to return to its economic roots in order to rebuild.

“I think it’s possible to win the next election but not just by trimming a few barnacles,” he said.

“While we need to stand true to our values, I don’t think culture wars win elections and I don’t think they should be used as tools to try and win elections.

“It’s got to be a whole new manifesto.

“We didn’t dig in enough on our core policies to persuade the informed and engaged members of society, especially on the big issues of nuclear energy and the economy.

“We have to focus on family, free enterprise, small business and taxation reform — the values the Liberal party is built on.

“We had one job — to explain to the Australian people how we would fix the economy. The rest is white noise.

“In matching or countering their profligate spending announcements we were fighting in their territory instead of standing strong on our own good story of superior economic management.”

He said the community was initially open to the discussion on nuclear, but in neither digging in nor abandoning it Labor had managed to build a powerful negative narrative around it.