Pro-Voice Liberal says referendum defeat gave the party ‘a false sense of confidence'
The Coalition's success in defeating the Voice to parliament referendum gave the Liberal party 'a false sense of confidence' about its chances of victory, says former shadow attorney general Julian Leeser, who resigned from his opposition portfolio in 2023 in order to campaign for the referendum.
Noting that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese 'seemed to lose his way' after the Voice referendum was defeated in all states in October 2023, Leeser told ABC's Afternoon Briefing that this, combined with Albanese's poor handling of the local antisemitism crisis, 'gave so many in our party a false sense of confidence'.
Leeser says he was 'shocked' that the internal polling conducted for the Coalition by Freshwater's Mike Turner used the number of Labor voters who voted no in the referendum in his calculations of a swing against the government, which was instead returned in a landslide and is likely to end up with 94 seats, equalling John Howard's record in 1996.
'On one level, there is nothing wrong with trying to target those Labor voters who voted no in the referendum campaign,' he said, saying Howard targeted those who rejected the republic proposal in 1999, but only to remind them of other issues such as border security.
'I thought it was very strange there was such a focus even on the campaign itself,' Leeser said.
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'Part of the reason my colleagues were successfully defeating the referendum was in 2023 the issue did not seem to be one of top priority for Australian voters. Certainly, in 2025, it was completely irrelevant and I had no idea why the issue kept reappearing in our campaign.'
While former opposition leader Peter Dutton regularly raised the Voice as one of several examples to demonstrate that Labor was out of touch, he campaigned in the final days of the campaign on the claim that the government had a 'secret plan to legislate the Voice' after Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong told the Betoota Talks podcast that she thought 'we'll look back on it in 10 years' time and it'll be a bit like marriage equality'.
Albanese ruled out bringing back the Voice and accused Dutton of 'verballing' Wong.
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We must know who we stand with. That is the standard Australia has upheld in the past. And it is the standard we must uphold again now Scott Morrison was Australia's 30th Prime Minister.
