The inside story of how the Liberals beat Labor at its own game

From the critical budget reset, to the creation of policy war rooms, watertight WhatsApp groups and Games of Thrones-themed memes, the Liberals outgunned Labor, especially in the left's native online habitat.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have spoken to multiple sources, including those at the highest levels of Coalition Campaign Headquarters, or CCHQ, to learn how the Liberals pulled off last week's unexpected win.

The rejuvenation began with the appointment of 41-year old Andrew Hirst as federal director of the Liberal Party in June 2017.

When he first entered his office, on the second floor of the quaint 1960s red-brick R.G. Menzies house, just a five-minute walk from Parliament in Canberra, the quietly spoken Hirst was staring at a blank canvas.

He set about filling it, hiring Simon Berger, who was then working for cabinet minister Michaelia Cash. The 44-year-old had worked on every campaign since 1993, bar 2010.

Mark Textor, the Liberal's long-time pollster had swapped the political frontline for farming. But the tentacles of the firm he co-founded, the Crosby Textor Group (CT), run deep within the party.

Hirst, who had risen to the position of deputy chief of staff to former prime minister Tony Abbott before returning to CT after his ousting, began calling some old colleagues.

From Washington, he called home CT's Isaac Levido, whom he appointed to work alongside Berger as co-deputy director. "Berge" and Levido, 33, had not seen each other since their Young Liberals days but the trio quickly became a "tight troika", dividing responsibility for stakeholder management, campaign mechanics and messaging.

CT's research would prove critical, accurately showing a pathway to a Coalition victory, in spite of all the major published polls calling the election for Labor.

The fieldwork was carried out by CT's Australian research and campaigns business: C|T RSR. A new company recruit, Michael Turner, led the fieldwork and analysis, while Michael Brooks was brought out from London and embedded in CCHQ to provide strategic advice.

Brooks was working with familiar faces in Brisbane. Sean Topham, a 28-year-old digital whiz from Auckland and co-founder of digital advisory firm Topham Guerin had worked with Brooks on former British prime minister David Cameron's win in 2015.

Finally, Hirst hired Adelaide-based ad agency KWP! He was ready.

Now the question was where to base the team. The decision to send them to Queensland, well out of the "Canberra bubble" at the suggestion of Nationals federal director Ben Hindmarsh, was as deliberate as it was strategic.

"There's benefit being in a capital city where there's a bunch of marginal seats - you're picking up the same newspapers, you're listening to the same radio, you're watching the same TV at night," Hirst says. "You're also closer to key seats so if someone needs to get to a key seat to deal with an issue, it's much easier."

The Liberals held all their seats in Queensland and picked up Herbert and Longman, which they had lost less than 12 months prior in a byelection. Canberra, where headquarters was based in 2016, by comparison has just one marginal seat nearby - Eden-Monaro.

Heading north also made for more frontbench foot traffic through CCHQ, with about 20 ministers, including the Prime Minister, detouring after campaign stops over the five-week election lead-up.

"Even if you just pause for 15 minutes to rev up the troops, it's great to have the ministers come through, talk to key staff and see how things are operating," Hirst says.

The campaign was underway well before the starter's gun fired in April.

With the advantage of knowing the election date months in advance, the Liberals set up policy war rooms comprising MPs and staff. Both offensive and defensive groups were established to war-game the Coalition's perceived "liabilities", including health and education, and others formed to take on Labor's tax changes.

The group that worked on negative gearing began holding forums with real estate agents and mortgage brokers around the country. The gatherings could be small, maybe 20 people, but each person in the room was considered a local "influencer"; not a social media influencer with thousands of bought fake followers, but people working in the industry with word-of-mouth networks.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg spent the summer penning opinion piece after opinion piece, placing the so-called retiree tax and negative gearing on the agenda so by the time of the budget, in which the Coalition promised a return to surplus, the public was ready to judge the government on its economic message.

While the press mocked the idea of a budget bounce in the polls, the Liberals' internal research showed it had given them a boost. Morrison was telling business figures over dinner he was convinced he could win the election he was about to call.

Borrowing from his mentor, former federal Liberal Party director Brian Loughnane, Hirst set in motion the "train tracks" method - identify your message and pursue it relentlessly.

Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen's proposed changes to franking credits and negative gearing were an easy target. What the press gallery praised as "reform", the Liberals painted as a risk to voters' hip pocket, required only because Labor couldn't manage money.

Its message was summed up by the phrase "The Bill You Can't Afford", which Hirst says was work-shopped by the team. It was vintage Crosby Textor. Berger boosted the Liberals' spending on outdoor advertising, pasting the line over an unflattering photograph of Opposition Leader Bill Shorten on trucks, billboards and buses across the country.

By the last two weeks of the campaign, it was popping up unprompted in focus groups.

As one Labor MP put it: "It was lethal in casting Bill Shorten as our Mark Latham."

Upwards of 15 WhatsApp groups were formed to coordinate campaign messaging and tactics.

The "Tactics and Media" group would begin pinging with messages at 5.30 in the morning, which continued until 11.30 at night.

The PM and CCHQ leadership would have an initial phone hook-up at 6am and the bulk of staff would arrive around 7am, in time for the first of the twice-daily meetings at 7.20am. Hirst would already have been hitting the phones for hours.

Staff were encouraged to propose ideas and raise any complaints but not second-guess each other's jobs. Hirst prided himself on making quick decisions and delegated when he could.

One insider who worked on Coalition's 2016 campaign says Hirst's approach was in stark contrast to the "14 layers of bureaucracy" approach adopted by former campaign director Tony Nutt, who wanted to approve everything, often holding things up for crucial hours.

The state directors' hook-up was at 7.30am. While each was given plenty of latitude to localise their communications, their daily check-ins meant the overall campaign stayed on message.

Labor had bested the Liberals online at every previous election. Under Nutt, the Liberals had barely experimented with social media and digital campaigning.

"If Nutt didn't know about it, it didn't need to be known," one CCHQ veteran says. "But with Hirsty, he doesn't think he knows it all and he knows he's not tech savvy, so he was happy to defer."

Topham and Ben Guerin had worked on campaigns for Britain's Cameron, Malcolm Turnbull and New Zealand's John Key before founding Topham Guerin. Since then, they'd worked on Bill English's unsuccessful NZ campaign in 2017 but helped the Liberals to victory in NSW and South Australia.

The friendly, personal video they produced about NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian went on to be her highest-performing Facebook post of the state campaign, with more than 115,000 views and 762 shares.

Trent Hasson, a 32-year-old government staffer, led the Coalition's social team with the support of Topham, who'd been embedded with the party since 2018. At the core of their strategy was video, coinciding with a change to Facebook's algorithm to favour video posts.

"My Vision", the Morrison version of the Berejiklian video, which ends with shots of him surrounded by his two girls and wife Jenny, has had 1.5 million views since its April release.

But it wasn't all slick. CCHQ deliberately turned out tacky content it dubbed Boomer Memes. These would often riff off a well-known movie or television show but always contain a serious message about Shorten being an economic risk.

Every Monday night, for instance, they would release a new Game of Thrones meme to coincide with the airing of the cult show's final season.

"We'd make them really basic and deliberately lame because they'd get shares and lift our reach - that made our reach for the harder political messages higher," one campaign staffer says.

Between Hasson and Topham, the Liberals were leaving Labor in their wake on social media and Shorten knew it. Early in the campaign, the Labor leader was demanding to know from Hirst's opposite number - Noah Carroll - where on earth the Opposition's video content was.

The metrics confirmed Shorten's concerns.

Morrison and Shorten's Facebook pages shared a similar number of videos throughout the campaign but Morrison's attracted more than double the views. His page attracted 25 per cent more engagements than Shorten's and the Liberals' own Facebook page outperformed Labor's 2:1.

On Instagram, Morrison received 112,000 likes and comments compared with Shorten's 71,000 throughout the campaign.

One senior CCHQ figure says re-engaging the base was also key to the Coalition's success on social media.

At the end of 2018, Liberal supporters had been fighting each other online about the state of the party. Warning them of the economic risks posed by Shorten was the tonic the Coalition used to soothe its angry base.

By the end of the election, the Liberals' volunteer and membership base had recovered. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. Unlike the left-wing parties, which have the unions and activist group GetUp at their disposal, the Coalition relies mostly on volunteers with day jobs.

Also critical was the sense of urgency. This election, the Liberals were producing content exploiting any Labor mistakes within hours.

When Labor announced its electric cars policy, flyers denouncing "Labor's Car Tax" that had been produced at CCHQ in Brisbane were being handed out in shopping centre car parks and railway stations the next morning across the country. Using micro-targeting, the Liberals were able to push the same message to car-loving Facebook groups.

But the widespread view across CCHQ is that their good campaign would have gone nowhere without their leading man - Scott Morrison. The footy-loving, plain-speaking evangelical churchgoer turned out to be a formidable campaigner who genuinely drew energy from being out on the road and sharing beers with punters.

A former NSW Liberal Party director himself, Morrison resisted the temptation to micro-manage and instead trusted Hirst and his team to execute the campaign, something many leaders struggle with. Morrison was also happy to let others front his campaign if the research showed they were more popular. Often this was his wife, or the Liberal premiers in NSW and Tasmania.

Morrison's win has not only buoyed a party that was not long ago on the brink of splitting, but has demonstrated that the Liberal Party's machine, once creaking under the demands of modern campaigning, is now a well-oiled, winning operation.