Peter Dutton's platform infuriated women — and it likely lost him the election

In an election that turned out to be a cracker-box of explosive developments, one of the most ironic — surely — is the degree of work-life balance suddenly opening up to a large number of middle-aged Liberal men.

From Liberal leader Peter Dutton to shadow ministers like Michael Sukkar and David Coleman, through backbench stalwarts like Ross Vasta and Bert van Manen, an entire cohort of busy parliamentarians woke this morning to the immensely flexible prospect of not having to go to work anymore, at all.

The ranks of Liberal MPs collecting pink slips from their electorates skewed heavily male last night. That's not an expression of voter misandry. It's mainly because there are — or were — just so many more Liberal men than women in the people's chamber; before yesterday's rout, just one in every five Liberal MPs in the House of Representatives was female.

That proportion should now improve, though for the grimmest of reasons.

Liberals didn't listen to their own review

The 2022 post-election review conducted by frontbencher Jane Hume and former federal director Brian Loughnane — currently returning a 404 search fail on the Liberal Party website — found that the party had failed to appeal to female voters and should work to preselect women in 50 per cent of seats, noting that the 2022 "teal wave" in its heartland had been driven significantly by the annoyance of professional women.

This analysis could not have been clearer, or more comprehensible.

What is less comprehensible is the party's decision to initiate a policy reform in the 2025 campaign that could not — even with a lab full of high-grade behavioural economists — have been better designed to infuriate women further.

Oddly enough, the policy of ending work from home for federal public servants was announced by Hume, the author of the 2022 review.

It was backed in by Dutton, whose primary target was the Canberra-based public service.

But the Liberal leader's freelance observations about affected women being welcome to "job-share" opened up — among the frazzled domestic multitasking demographic — what the WWE superstar "Stone Cold" Steve Austin used to term "a can of Whup-Ass".

Work-from-home attack backfired

Last night's figures tell the story.

In a scan of ABS data on areas where people were most likely to work from home during COVID, my colleague Tom Crowley identified 25 seats with above-average numbers of flexible workers.

Seven of them were Liberal seats. Seven of them were "teal" seats. And all 25 of them were lost by the Coalition last night, including Dutton's own seat of Dickson, where — according to the ABS — 51 per cent of people worked from home to some extent during the pandemic.

Flexible work has always been — and continues to be — a work-life balance technique employed more by women than men.

Dutton's language around the policy — equating working from home with "refusing to go to work" — conveyed a set of values that was clearly heard by Australian women.

The blowback was violent and immediate.

The truly unfortunate thing — campaign-wise — about enraging people who work from home is that when you're out doorknocking, guess who's most likely to answer the door?

And Dutton clearly felt this heat, as was apparent from his repentant about-face on the matter mid-campaign.

It is — as Tony Abbott once hopefully hypothesised — "better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission".

But women were not very forgiving.

Nuclear split the genders

The research company RedBridge compiled six survey waves of voters in 20 key marginal seats over the course of this year.

The first wave — conducted in February — found that Peter Dutton had a net approval rating of minus 11 among women.

By last week, the sixth and final survey identified a slump of 17 points in that approval rating; Dutton was down to minus 28.

His approval rating among men decreased too — from minus 13 to minus 18. But there is no mistaking the "ick" factor among female voters here.

Once again — as it did in 2022 — the Y chromosome wafted pungently through the campaign imagery planned out by the Dutton campaign. Plenty of hi-vis and factories, and not so many visits to aged care, child care or the other workplaces where women are over-represented. Small business, as construed by the Coalition, tends to mean "auto shop" rather than "Etsy shop".

Women were also more sceptical than men about nuclear energy, the core policy differentiation between the two major parties at this election.

One year ago, RedBridge's polling on Dutton's proposal to lift prohibitions on nuclear power exposed a wild difference of opinion between the genders.

The idea earned a net minus 29 per cent approval rating among women, and a net positive 26 per cent rating among men.

Safety was one concern, plus women were just generally more sceptical about the idea that nuclear energy would ease any of their financial pressures any time soon

The existential question facing the Libs

Did Peter Dutton nuke himself with female voters?

More detail will emerge on specific demographic voting patterns, but at this stage, it looks very much as though he did.

The party's earnest ambition to preselect women in 50 per cent of seats fizzled this year, as it has every election year. Only 34 per cent of Liberal candidates were female.

Of the Dame Mary Guilfoyle Network — soft-launched a year ago to develop a pipeline of female talent — very little has since been heard.

It's been 30 years now since the Labor Party put itself through the process — painful at the time — of opening its representative ranks to women, when it installed quotas.

In the last parliament, 47 per cent of Labor House of Representatives seats were held by women, nearly two and a half times the proportion clocked up by the Liberals.

And now, as the Liberal survivors of Election 2025 straggle out into the daylight, dust themselves off and wonder tiredly who among their depleted ranks will take up the leadership baton, the real question is a deeper one.

Does this party — formed in 1944 partially through the efforts of highly organised and powerful women's groups, and directed by its birth father Robert Menzies to reserve specific executive leadership roles for women — care enough about women to do the hard work of including them?

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