Tony Abbott says he stands behind the deeply unpopular 2014 budget despite criticisms in the Robb review that the exercise was launched without any research to inform the government of the likely public reaction.



Abbott defended his first budget on Friday as the Liberal executive met in Sydney to consider the 2016 election campaign stocktake conducted by Andrew Robb, a former party director and Liberal cabinet minister.

The Robb review makes the point that the Liberals were flying blind for key periods after Abbott assumed power right through to the 2016 federal election, because the research and data analytics functions were severely under-resourced.

Sources have told Guardian Australia the review says no significant research was done before the 2014 budget, which proved the beginning of the end for Abbott as prime minister.

The point of the observation is the Liberals were underdone, in policy development as well as in fine-tuning political messaging, since taking power in 2013 – a weakness that ultimately culminated in a poor campaign in 2016.

According to people familiar with the campaign review, the assessment is critical of the lack of concrete policy sitting behind the Coalition’s 2016 “jobs and growth” campaign slogan, noting that a campaign for re-election needs to be formulated during the whole parliamentary term of government, and not just in an election contest.

But Abbott declared on Friday that the budget, which cost him the prime ministership because it precipitated a plunge in popularity for the Coalition, was the right way to go, and had been prepared according to normal procedures.

“I’m happy to stand behind the 2014 budget,” Abbott told 2GB. “It was obviously a budget that was sabotaged in the Senate but it was a budget of sustained structural reform.

“Had those measures passed through the Senate, our budgetary position would be vastly better, our future I think would be much more secure because we would be living within our means.”

He had warned before the discussion by the Liberal party executive that the Robb review needed to be candid about the party’s problems, rather than “mealy mouthed”, and on Friday he said it was good if the campaign stocktake was a “blunt and frank assessment”.

The former prime minister indicated he had not read the review, which has been tightly held.

According to people familiar with the review, Robb finds, among other things, that the Liberals were outgunned on the ground in 2016 by Labor and progressive activist groups, and failed to develop a strategy to neutralise or rebut key attack themes, such as the “Mediscare” campaign.

It emphasises on the importance of the party creating new regional campaign capabilities to enhance the effect of localised messaging – and putting a greater focus on targeting pre-poll voting.

The review also notes that the departure of highly experienced personnel, such as the Liberal party’s long-serving federal director Brian Loughnane, created a loss of corporate knowledge.

Earlier in the day, Malcolm Turnbull said he was ultimately responsible for the election campaign, as well as the Coalition’s victory, which he said was against the trend of voting out incumbents during 2016.

Asked where the buck stopped, Turnbull said: “Look, firstly obviously lots of decisions are taken in an election campaign by lots of people, number one.

“But the buck stops with the boss. So I am responsible for the election campaign. I’m responsible for the conduct of it.

“I’m responsible for the victory. Remember we won.”

Turnbull also attempted to argue that bad pollswere not a relevant metric for a political party changing leaders, even though he had cited a succession of poor Newspolls when he unseated Abbott.

On Thursday, Peter Dutton accepted that the government’s continued poor performance in the polls would affect Turnbull’s hold on the leadership.

Dutton, the immigration minister, senior conservative and potential leadership contender, said in a radio interview the government had to take tough decisions to turn the polls around, “as the Howard government did, as the Abbott government did”.

Turnbull told 3AW on Friday that poor polls weren’t the only consideration, and they were “not the only basis of my mounting that challenge”.

The prime minister acknowledged he had explicitly referenced the poor results of 30 Newspolls in a row as one of the factors requiring a change of leader, but said he had made several other points.

“I don’t want to go through it all, it’s part of political history,” Turnbull said, adding that he had been “discreet, as discreet as I could be in the circumstances”.