How did Labor beat us? They simply read our policies aloud

But sometimes, amid the noise, one issue stands out as the tipping point. For the Liberal Party in 2025, that issue was nuclear energy.

I say this as a party member, a former staffer, and someone who wants the Liberal Party to win.

The nuclear policy wasn't just a distraction, it was a political liability that shifted marginal voters, cost public trust, and helped deliver the result we now face.

We must be honest about that if we want to rebuild.

A uComms poll in April, surveying over 5000 voters in 12 marginal electorates, found that 50.6 per cent of undecided voters were less likely to vote for the Coalition because of the nuclear policy.

Just 31.6 per cent said it made them more likely.

Across these 12 seats, the same research showed that if the Coalition dropped its nuclear plan, it would have increased its primary vote by 2.8 per cent.

That's not a rounding error. In a handful of tight contests, it's the difference between forming government and falling short.

A RedBridge poll on the easter weekend found the same. Kos Samaras' analysis is correct: "[Labor have] successfully been able to basically build a narrative that Peter Dutton is going to build these nuclear reactors with money that he's going to harvest via cuts ..."

"When we test that proposition, it rates its socks off."

What senior members of the party need to understand is, voters unequivocally rejected the nuclear policy, and it is what ultimately cost us.

Labor didn't need to run a scare campaign. They simply read our policy aloud. We did the rest.

The lack of clarity turned a hypothetical energy debate into countless localised fear campaigns.

People didn't hear "zero emissions baseload." They heard "reactor in your suburb." And when asked for detail, Coalition spokespeople offered little more than deflections.

The nuclear policy is more than just bad politics, it is fundamentally illiberal policy. Our plan centralised power, required billions in taxpayer subsidies, and handed control to bureaucrats and regulators. This wasn't a market-led solution, and voters noticed the contradiction.

The party of Howard and Costello prided itself on fiscal responsibility.

The nuclear plan obliterated that legacy. We offered no credible costing, no private-sector partners, and no timeline voters could believe. At the very moment we were criticising Labor's spending, we proposed one of the most expensive infrastructure interventions in a generation.

And all of this was while we opposed middle-income tax cuts. It was incoherent and chaotic, and the public punished us for it.

The reality is, we had the high ground and gave it up. Heading into the campaign, the Coalition had real opportunities: inflation, housing, migration, infrastructure pressure.

These are the issues that keep families awake at night. Instead, we centred our message on a long- term, speculative policy with limited popular support; a small, nuclear target.

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Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, no stranger to major energy debates, called the policy "Trump-like" and "a really bad idea." "No private sector energy company would contemplate undertaking nuclear generation in Australia," he said bluntly.

Even Queensland Liberal Premier David Crisafulli has made it clear that nuclear energy had no place in his state's energy future, and Victorian Liberal leader Brad Battin has consistently distanced himself from the policy.

These aren't critics from the left, they were senior Liberals, past and present, warning us that this policy was hurting, not helping, our cause.

These views, whether party members agree or not, are shared by many in the community.

And this election showed clearly that we did not bring voters with us.

Some will now argue we should double down. That's a mistake. We didn't lose because we weren't ideological enough. We lost because we didn't look serious. We presented a big government, multi-decade, unpopular energy plan during a cost-of-living crisis and expected voters to trust us.

The lesson isn't to go harder right. It's to return to the centre. The Liberal Party must look and sound like a credible and centrist party of government. That means offering policies that are grounded, costed, and deliverable, not ones that feel like back-of-the-envelope press releases.

I'm personally not opposed to nuclear power in principle. But the unfortunate reality is that it is politically toxic. It cost us votes. It muddied our message. And it helped Labor change the topic away from their own failings.

We need to own that, publicly and quickly. And we need to shift.