Jeremy Hanson is running for leadership of the Canberra Liberals once more, aiming to position the party for success in 2028.

“I believe that I’ve got the experience, the temperament, the competence and the leadership to take the party forward,” Mr Hanson said.

Mr Hanson led the Liberals from 2013 to 2016, at which election the Liberals received 36.7 per cent of the vote, and won 11 seats, one fewer than ACT Labor. He was the party’s deputy leader from February 2022 to December 2023, but was moved to the backbench in a shadow cabinet reshuffle last year.

Mr Hanson denied that his decision to “put his hand up for the leader of the parliamentary party” was a reflection on Ms Lee.

“This is about who I think can best lead the party forward to 2028,” Mr Hanson said. “This is about how I feel about the best chance of the Canberra Liberals winning and uniting together as a broad church of the Liberal Party to win in 2028.”

Chief Minister Andrew Barr, however, commented: “Jeremy doesn’t hide his ambition in that regard [to become leader], and it was very clear that the relationship between he and [current opposition leader] Elizabeth Lee had broken down completely over the last year of the parliamentary term.”

Mr Hanson also believes it is strategically important for the leader to come from an electorate that can win a third seat, such as Murrumbidgee (his seat) or Yerrabi.

“The leader gets a bounce in their electorate that helps win the third seat in each electorate,” Mr Hanson said.

Conversely, Ms Lee was the only Liberal MLA elected in her seat of Kurrajong, while Mark Parton’s seat of Brindabella got three Liberals seats without the leader’s vote.

Following Liberal tradition, after the recent election loss, the leader and deputy leader positions (held by Leanne Castley) will be ‘spilled’ – made vacant – and members will vote.

Mr Hanson will talk to his colleagues over coming days to assess their support. “There are certainly a number of people in party room that are encouraging me to stand as leader, but in terms of actually where the numbers fall, that’s not clear.”

No-one else has yet declared that they will stand, Mr Hanson said.

“It may be that there are a number of people putting their hand up for the position.”

Canberra Daily has contacted Ms Lee’s office for comment.

The Canberra Liberals received 33.1 per cent of the primary vote (a 0.7 per cent swing against) at the election, while ACT Labor got 34.5 per cent (a 3.3 per cent swing against).

“We need to make sure we don’t sugarcoat this result,” Mr Hanson said. “We need to be open about where we’ve gone wrong. We need to look at things like, did we do enough polling? Was there enough fundraising? Were the policies that were released the right policies, and did we release them early enough so that we could explain them and sell them out in the constituencies? Were we united, and did we look competent and capable and ready for government. They’re all questions that need to be looked at…

“We’ll need to do a review. We’ll need to look at a whole range of issues. We need to stay united. We need to stay positive, and we need to make sure that we position ourselves as a Liberal Party and explain very clearly to the electorate what we stand for, and we need to present a competent, capable, united front.”

Mr Hanson thinks that independents siphoned votes away from the Liberals; while the opposition highlighted the government’s shortcomings, they failed to convince voters they were the better alternative.

“There was a mood for change away from the government at this election, and we failed to capture enough votes coming to our column,” Mr Hanson said. “In terms of presenting the case that the Labor Party and the Greens are a bad government, we did pretty well, but in terms of saying we were the solution to that, clearly we didn’t do well enough. And there were other choices out there, like the independents and too many people chose them.”

Former Liberal Chief Minister Kate Carnell has said that for the Liberals to be successful in this town, they must move to the political centre / centre-left, while Ms Lee and retired MLA Nicole Lawder have said that the Liberals are too far to the right. Mr Hanson, however, believes that the Liberals should not shift left, but instead focus on their centre-right values, addressing issues like health, education, and cost-of-living.

“No-one’s suggesting that the Liberal Party should move to the far right,” Mr Hanson said. “But the reality is that we are a broad church, and the Liberal Party is a centre-right political party. We are not a centre-left political party, and we’re not going to win in this town by pretending that we’re the Labor Party. We’re going to win by expressing why the Liberal Party and our values are best suited to the people of Canberra.

“That’s things like managing the budget properly. It’s about delivering better services. It’s about fixing our ailing health systems, about keeping rates low, addressing issues like cost of living and fixing our schools so that our kids get better literacy rates. They’re the sort of issues that matter to Canberrans, and I think that the Liberal Party is best positioned to do that.”

Mr Hanson criticised Labor’s handling of these matters, and warned of continued problems under Labor and the Greens.

“You can see it already,” Mr Hanson said. “We’ve got a health system that is in chaos. We’ve got literacy rates in our schools which are appalling. We’ve got neglect across our city. We’ve got a planning system that doesn’t work. We’ve got a budget that is locked down by debt and deficit, and we’ve got cost of living that’s through the roof. We don’t have enough housing. I could go on and on, but what we’re going to see from Labor and the Greens is a continuation of that, and their policies, like decriminalizing heroin and meth, which have, as has been proven overseas, terrible outcomes.”

Mr Barr said: “Jeremy’s run before; he is at the conservative end of the Canberra Liberals. But, look, if that’s the direction they take, they’re probably learning the wrong lesson from the campaign. But for them, ideological purity appears to trump everything else.”

Social media platforms like Reddit Canberra are largely sceptical of the Canberra Liberals. But Mr Hanson believes that Canberrans are more focused on local issues than on “mucking around in those sort of online forums”.

“When you’re out in the community, in the suburbs, talking to families, they’re not interested in the internal machinations of political parties,” Mr Hanson said. “They’re concerned about their cost of living. They’re concerned about getting their kids to good schools. They’re worried about the health system. They are focused on their cost of living.

“We’ve got to focus on the issues that matter to our constituents, not playing a bunch of internal games, or worrying about comments on Reddit or on other online forums, or comments in The Canberra Times or the RiotAct or what someone said on ABC radio.

“If we get sucked into that, we’ll never win. When we’re talking to our constituents out on the ground, having conversations with them about what matters to them, the Liberal party does well. When we get consumed by the internal gossip games, then we’re falling into the Labor Party’s narrative and trap, and we will just not get ahead.”