Dutton ‘had written me off’: How Tim Wilson won back Goldstein, despite Liberal baggage

Asked if he wanted that role, Wilson said: “Well, we’ll see on all of those things.”

“Last time I was there I fought on the front lines about the pathway the country should take, and I obviously have a keen interest in economics. And none of those things are going to change.”

Wilson says his defeat in 2022 was a “deeply humiliating experience to go through”.

“I went through a psychologist to manage with the reality of dealing with that,” he said. “No one quite knows what you got. But it’s common with footballers and ex-servicemen and women, where your identity and your profession is very closely intertwined.

“I didn’t have an identity crisis. I knew who I was because I knew who I was before. I knew who it was after. But it doesn’t change the fact that you know you’re living out something very public. And you know, and some people really, unfortunately, you know, so many people are incredibly generous in such a circumstance like that, but some people really make no bones about the fact that they’re enjoying every single bit of it.”

Loading

Wilson’s campaign to win back Goldstein began two years ago, and he had to start by acknowledging what his campaign had got wrong.

Wilson looked at the psychology behind why people had voted for Daniel and says he had to openly acknowledge that they made the right decision.

“It’s very important to acknowledge all of those things because then it gave a permission pathway for us to come back,” he says.

Wilson then asked himself whether he could win and looked at what he describes as “the institutional barriers against me”, including “dealing with party processes”.

He says the way the Liberal Party approaches election campaigns assumes certain things, and the teals defy a lot of those assumptions so they had to campaign differently, setting it up as a personal contest between Daniel and Wilson.

In March 2023, he mapped out his strategy to the Liberal Party membership in an hour-long presentation.

“I asked their permission to do certain things because I was basically saying, ‘I’m going to overturn the entire way the party approaches elections to have a chance’,” he said.

Wilson’s strategy was approved unanimously.

Two months later, in May 2023, Wilson hosted a dinner for major donors at the Elwood Bathers restaurant overlooking the bay.

“I got all of our former donors, many of whom donated healthy, but not substantial sums of money,” he said. “I said to them, ‘I am prepared to give two years of my life to execute a strategy that I think will win’. They all walked in thinking it was a thank-you dinner, and they all walked out with much lighter pockets … That just gave us the cash balance and confidence to go through from that.”

The next step was to do research, including focus groups and polls asking whether gender was going to be a problem, was Wilson a problem and what the community thought of both Daniel and Wilson.

“The view was very strongly that she made a lot of big promises,” he said. “She hadn’t delivered on many of them, and people were increasingly going, ‘Actually, we’re not sure we’ve got much for this’.”

Wilson says one catalysing moment of the campaign was Anzac Day in 2023, when he clashed with one of Daniel’s representatives after he jointly laid a wreath that the representative was laying on Daniel’s behalf.

“Your newspaper kicked the bejesus out of me for daring to do something as outrageous as turn up to an Anzac service just because I genuinely wanted to attend,” he said.

Loading

Wilson says he hosted dozens of house meetings, community town halls in cafes and slowly gained supporters to build “an army of people”.

“The first round of those meetings, half the people who turned up, turned up because they want to yell at me and tell me why I was an f—wit for losing,” he says. “But once we got past that, we said, ‘Yeah, but I’m the only one who’s staying and fighting’.”

Wilson’s strategy was to get going early and to focus on the local contest.

“We always based our campaign strategy on two things. One, that we had to be ahead of the start of the campaign because all the national campaign was going to do was drag us back,” he said. “I hoped that wouldn’t be the case, but unfortunately, it was validated. Two, unfortunately the same, with the leader [Peter Dutton] we have to assume that, unfortunately, the leader is likely to be less helpful than more helpful.”

Wilson says Daniel’s campaign suffered from hubris and “assumed that I was just going to be flogged again”.

Wilson says in 2016 he was elected as the Liberal candidate but this time he was the community’s candidate. A key to regaining power was countering the powerful perception that he was out of touch or elitist.

“They had … this archetypal view that I went to Melbourne Grammar, I came up from an affluent family, blah, blah, blah, everything’s been gifted,” he said.

“When you articulated what you’re prepared to sacrifice, why you want to do it … people just went, OK, this isn’t what I expected.”