Alistair Coe opens up about Liberals' ACT election defeat, political future

Mr Coe has maintained a relative silence since conceding defeat on October 17, fronting the media three days after the defeat and speaking briefly on radio after Elizabeth Lee was confirmed as his replacement early last week.

But in a candid interview with The Canberra Times, a still emotional Mr Coe has revealed the personal pain of the election defeat, defended the Liberals' policies and stunt-filled campaign, challenged criticisms of the party's conservatism and clarified his future in politics.

Mr Coe, who is still only 36, said he had no ambition of returning to the leadership, declaring his full support for Ms Lee and her deputy Giulia Jones.

The former leader has retained the treasury portfolio in Ms Lee's new shadow ministry, while also taking on responsibility for planning, land management and building quality.

"I am hoping to be a significant part of the team going forward," Mr Coe said earlier this week.

"No [I won't return to the leadership]. I said the greatest honour of my career has been to be the leader of the Liberals. I am grateful for that opportunity, but it's time for change."

In the immediate aftermath of the election loss, Chief Minister Andrew Barr whipped up speculation that Mr Coe would seek to challenge for Zed Seselja for Senate seat.

Mr Coe has explicitly ruled himself out, saying Mr Seselja should be re-endorsed at a preselection vote which been brought forward to the end of this month.

"I think Zed is doing a good job and he should be endorsed by the party and he is doing a good job advocating for Canberra," he said.

"Commonwealth funding to the ACT has been increasing significantly. Investment in public service, especially when you consider contractors, is very, very significant. I think Canberra is doing well by having a minister."

Mr Coe, who didn't contest the leadership ballot won by Ms Lee on October 27, said the pain of the election defeat had yet to subside.

There is a feeling of guilt, a sense of culpability, for the seats the Liberals lost on election night, which cost colleagues Candice Burch, James Milligan and Andrew Wall their political careers.

"Obviously it's unbelievably disheartening," Coe said of the final result, in which the Liberals' suffered a near 3 per cent swing against them across the territory.

"There is a responsibility that you feel for all of the candidates and MLAs who were not successful and you certainly do ponder 'what if', a lot, subsequently.

"It is very raw. I imagine in time the perspective changes, but we are in it to win it.

"Obviously we didn't get enough votes. We're a party of government, we're in it to win it and it didn't happen."

Mr Coe said he genuinely believed the Liberals could win the election, and so end Labor's 19-year reign in office, right up until counting started on October 17.

He said the party research, and his own gauge of public sentiment, suggested that there was enough concern in the community about Canberra's high cost of living to deliver the Liberals the 13 seats needed to form a majority in the ACT Legislative Assembly.

It was a narrow path to victory - it always is for the Liberals in Canberra - but one Mr Coe thought could be navigated.

But he said the task was made more difficult by the summer fires and then the COVID-19 pandemic, a pair of large-scale crises which focused the public's attention on the Barr government and, as a consequence, rendered the Canberra Liberals almost irrelevant.

Opposition parties across the country have endured the same struggle.

Incumbent Labor governments in the NT, Queensland, the ACT and New Zealand have all been comfortably returned in elections held during the pandemic.

"There is always benefits of incumbency and I think that was magnified in 2020," he said.

"The path to victory for the Liberals was, according to our research and I think sentiment, was about cost of living. I'm still confident that for enough Canberrans that it is a big enough issue. For enough Canberrans it is close to being their number one issue.

"The challenge is whether enough people were in the market to change the government.

"We were confident that we could get there based on the policies and issues that we were running on, but there was still a massive X-factor the entire time. Whether there was actually a willingness or a propensity for change."

In the hypothetical world in which the fires and pandemic never happened, does Mr Coe believe he would be chief minister?

"Who knows," he said.

In a campaign which lacked major flashpoints, Mr Coe's attempts to explain how a Liberal government would pay for its expensive policies became arguably its defining issue.

Mr Coe argued the policies could be funded through population growth, which could be achieved, in large part, by stopping Canberra families from moving over the border to NSW.

Despite suggesting such research existed, Mr Coe never produced modelling to support his "growing the pie" theory. He stubbornly stuck to rehearsed lines when asked about the policy, repeatedly refusing to directly answer questions from the media.

He has defended his approach this week, arguing that without the resources and "credibility" of government, oppositions had to be careful about disclosing too much information.

Doing so, he said, could "dilute" their main message or expose them to "additional scrutiny or distraction".

Mr Barr seized on his opponent's failure to back up his argument, saying the educated Canberra electorate would see through the apparent gaps in the policy.

While Mr Coe acknowledges Canberra is a highly educated city, he doesn't think that necessarily translates to interest in ACT politics or an appetite for detailed policies or debate.

He argued that campaigns were not about communicating with those who are engaged, but with those who weren't.

"Obviously it didn't work," he said of the Liberals' policy offerings.

"But what we need to do is make the right changes, rather than making the wrong changes."

In the final fortnight of the campaign, Mr Coe used a series of Boris Johnson-inspired stunts to draw attention to the Liberals' key campaign messages.

The usually reserved Mr Coe donned an apron to bake pies, threw punches in the boxing ring, "froze" rates bills and swung a hammer to "smash the cost of living" in a Hume warehouse.

Three weeks on, he has no regrets.

"It's about communicating a message," he said.

"These are trade-offs that are made all the time. Would sitting in a boardroom with a PowerPoint presentation look more professional? Quite possibly. Would it be memorable for people in the room, let alone those people not in the room? Probably not."

The stunts were widely ridiculed when videos and images were shared on social media. Labor quietly reveled in Mr Coe's antics, believing they both undermined its opponent's credibility and reinforced Mr Barr as the sensible and respectable option.

Mr Coe said people who held such views were not the target market.

"People who were concerned about that, I think they were already inclined to do one thing or another. The reason you do things differently is to connect with people who are otherwise disconnected," he said.

Amid the public post-mortem of the Liberals' sixth consecutive election defeat, former Liberal chief minister and senator Gary Humphries launched a withering attack on the Liberals' campaign and the conservative forces he claimed ruled the party.

Mr Humphries believed the Liberals' conservatism had "paralysed" the branch, robbing of it an ability to speak to mainstream Canberrans. He warned that without radical reform, the party would remain in opposition for the next 20 years.

Mr Coe said the former leaders comments "weren't helpful".

He challenged the fundamental premise of Mr Humphries' argument, one which is also pushed by Labor, that Canberrans were concerned about the Liberals' conservatism.

"Put it this way, nobody raises it when you're door knocking in Gungahlin," he said.

"Our candidates didn't get that feedback from their door knocks. Of all the issues - bushfires, pandemic, cost of living and everything else - for those issues [ideology] to take primacy would be unusual.

"People care about the policy. I'm not sure a critical mass of Canberrans, just like a critical mass of Australians, really care about whether the leader of the Labor party leader comes from the Left or Right faction. It is the policies that matter."

Asked if he considered quitting in the wake of the election defeat, Mr Coe said "obviously you have a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions about your future".

But he's committed to the four-year term in the Legislative Assembly, buoyed by his strong personal vote and the swing to the Liberals in his Gungahlin-based electorate of Yerrabi.

Mr Coe said he would do everything he could to support the new leadership team of Ms Lee and Mrs Jones, who he described as "great friends and "great people".

As for advice for his successor, Mr Coe said Ms Lee should be mindful that time moves slowly in opposition.

"It is a long game, four years is a long time. Four years in opposition is an eternity. It is a marathon not a sprint," he said.

So can the Liberals win in 2024?

"Yes. absolutely," he said.