#morriscum

Why did the teals win?  Many reasons. But at the centre of their campaign was an absolute commitment to the data. There were no games with what the internal polling said. There were no favourites shown, whereby resources are sent into a seat, even though the polling painted a different picture.  Personally it was an amazing experience. Their young team of talented campaign professionals pushed us to utilise new methods of polling, including various ways to weight our samples that we simply did not think were possible.  They also listened. Their culture was totally different to anything I have experienced. No one ignored what you had to say, instead they wanted to hear from two decades of experience, tap into it and use it to win.  As late as Friday night, I was sitting in my Sydney hotel room, on the phone to one of their young national organisers, talking about housing density, planning laws and population clusters in the seat of Wentworth. We knew what was going to happen in certain Wentworth voting booths even before election day.  Their opponents did none of that. They poured resources into one seat, Kooyong, at the expense of others, even though their data was indeed showing a grim picture. That picture of course was never told, as the constant backgrounding into the media was akin to a story telling session, skunk drunk, at a pub.  The Liberals decision making was riddled with bias and subjectivity, fuelled by an internal factional structure that made it impossible for data to be fully utilised correctly. Not something the teal camp suffered from.  The teals were not just using polling correctly but they embraced sophisticated data modelling showing them where to hunt, how to hunt and for how long.  As you can see, it will be a grave mistake to presume the independent movement in this country was a temporary dance. There is a wealth of talent out there in the Australian community and its gravitating to them.

The difference couldn't be more stark to what former prime minister Scott Morrison said almost five years ago. "