Comment

Paul Bongiorno
How to blow up a campaign in two easy steps

All elections turn on competence in political and economic management. Undermine voters’ confidence in either – or, worse, both – and the chances of success are seriously diminished. That is the situation Peter Dutton finds himself in at the end of the second week of the campaign.

It is hard to recall an opposition leader in the past three decades so unceremoniously abandoning a key policy just one week into an election campaign. It is not as if it is a shock early poll, either: it comes at the end of the term, giving all parties plenty of time to shape their policies and strategies.

Liberal candidates were finding Dutton’s restrictive work-from-home policy so toxic, especially with women voters in must-win seats, that party strategists decided the only course was to cut and run. Dutton and senior Coalition colleagues fanned out in the media on Monday morning.

No one was more abject in their apologies than Dutton himself, telling the Nine Network, “We made a mistake in relation to the work-from-home policy and Labor turned that into a scare campaign.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b9S2JL-XZY&ab_channel=TheSaturdayPaper

The blaming of Labor blunts the force of the repentance and Labor research is finding voters don’t believe it is genuine.

Labor’s “scare” was mightily assisted by the way in which the opposition framed the policy from the outset. In outlining the requirement for public servants to work five days a week in their departments, shadow finance minister Jane Hume linked it to the private sector.

At the beginning of March, Hume told a supportive audience at a Menzies Research Centre think-tank event an anecdote about her shock that her son, an intern, was allowed to work from home by his private company. She hoped the company would instil the same sense of discipline “that we want to instil in the public service”.

Nationals frontbencher Barnaby Joyce revealed his wife, Vikki, was none too happy with the direction of the policy. “Vikki was pretty upset because she works from home,” he said.

The Coalition began walking back the policy almost immediately over the next five weeks, from all public servants to only Canberra-based ones, then finally, this week, to no one.

There can be no doubt Dutton is strongly attached to the measure. On March 17, in a podcast with Neil Mitchell, he bemoaned the fact that six out of 10 public service staff worked from home and refused to go back. Before Covid-19, he said, it was two out of 10. Dutton said he was not going to tolerate seeing taxpayer dollars wasted on an inefficient public service.

The normally enthusiastically supportive The Daily Telegraph reported four Liberal MPs were critical of the failure to stress test the policy more before it was released – noting they regretted there was no proper debate in the party room.

“There was a misunderstanding about how much the community values flexible working,” one was quoted as saying.

This is particularly the case on the fringes of the capital cities, a point missed by the same Peter Dutton who is purposefully targeting these very-long-commuting voters with his temporary fuel tax cut. Working from home facilitates family juggling and saves tanks of petrol.

One Labor MP from a marginal seat says in their doorknocking they have found the two things are very clearly connected – and there’s much more negative reaction to suggestions that working from home could be curbed than there is enthusiasm for the interim petrol relief.

Dutton’s apparent ditching of a policy to fire 41,000 public servants and to force those remaining to abandon working from home is an own goal of significant proportions. It was, after all, the highest profile revenue measure unveiled by Dutton in his budget reply speech just over two weeks ago.

That night, the opposition leader claimed the swoop on the public service and the efficiencies gained by a return to the office would deliver $7 billion in savings over five years. He is still claiming that bottom-line outcome, which in itself casts real doubt over the seriousness of the commitment not to revisit the plan should he win government.

Hiring freezes and attrition are apparently the new route, even though voluntary resignations from the Australian Public Service in recent years would not come close to achieving his target.

Not to be underestimated is the damage done to Dutton’s image as a decisive and strong leader. Newspoll found the opposition leader outranked Albanese on this measure by five points. That was before Monday’s retreat from a policy he had strongly argued for in the context of tough decisions to deliver desirable outcomes for taxpayers.

It enabled Albanese to run politically killer lines in their Sky News town hall debate. The prime minister said: “Peter hasn’t been able to stand up for his own policy, so I don’t know how he can stand up for Australia.” This was a strong counterpoint to Dutton’s charge that Albanese is weak and would not “have the strength of character” to stand up to Donald Trump.

With his ditched assault on the public service and the need to begin raiding the till to pay for the vision of a nuclear-powered Australia, Dutton gave Albanese a basis for his final statement of the debate.

The prime minister said that with so much global uncertainty, now is not the time for spending cuts or the sort of policies the Liberals have proposed, “where they chopped and changed even before the election”. The cut-through line: “So how can you believe what they do after the election?”

Dutton went into the debate with the Coalition continuing its downward trend in the polls. According to analyst Kevin Bonham, the aggregate of the latest polls is 51.4 per cent to Labor. In five weeks Labor has made up 2.5 points. This is the partty’s biggest aggregate lead since May last year.

The audience of 100 “swinging voters” – a description Bonham finds hard to accept, given the difficulty of finding such a beast – gave the night to Albanese. He scored 44 votes to Dutton’s 35, with 21 undecided.

Albanese may not have won a majority of the room, but he denied Dutton a much more desperately needed win to reboot the opposition’s stalling campaign. Such a win helped the Labor leader in 2022, when he comprehensively beat Scott Morrison in their first debate after a horror week at the start of that campaign.

Dutton finally released some modelling of his gas policy as the debate began, with an embargo until it was over. The Australian ran the story the next morning with claims not supported in the document as to the timing and the extent of the relief on offer. There will be a lag, with some relief in the order of 3 per cent, or $60 for a $2100 annual power bill, maybe by the end of next year.

In a departure from the Liberals’ normal world view, the gas “reservation” will require a new tax on exporters to force them to supply the targeted 20 per cent for domestic purposes. The industry is already foreshadowing legal challenges, with one of the Coalition’s biggest donors, Gina Rinehart, reportedly very unhappy with Peter Dutton.

Labor’s research has found the gas talk is not cutting through and there is evidence from focus groups that Dutton may have left his run too late to sell this complicated and half-baked prescription.

What is irking the critics on Dutton’s right in the Coalition is his failure to emulate the style of Donald Trump. They want him to more fearlessly sell policies that shake up the status quo. The shelving of the public service cuts and the invisibility of shadow minister for government efficiency Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is rumbling beneath the surface.

The dumping of the Liberal candidate for the Illawarra seat of Whitlam has the conservatives fuming, too. Benjamin Britton was disendorsed after his opposition to women in military combat roles surfaced. According to one disgruntled party member, however, “going woke will not save Dutton”.

Dutton is now clinging to the Liberals’ mythology that they are better economic managers. It was his go-to final moment in the debate. “It means that we can deal with the cost-of-living crisis more effectively,” he said.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers will have none of it and compares the excesses of the Morrison government’s pandemic spending and about $24 billion in payouts to ineligible businesses to Labor’s world-leading response to the global financial crisis.

Chalmers was a senior staffer to then treasurer Wayne Swan when Swan was awarded Euromoney’s finance minister of the year in 2011 for his handling of the crisis. Australia avoided a recession then, unlike New Zealand’s conservative government, which followed much more restrictive fiscal responses that drove up unemployment and led to a deep recession.

Dutton threw caution to the wind ahead of this week’s debate, warning that Australia, under Labor, is heading for a recession as the turbulence created by Trump’s tariffs drives a world economic slowdown.

Chalmers rejects this talk as reckless and has on his side the eminent economic modeller Warwick McKibbin, who from Washington said Australia is well placed to avoid a recession.

Dutton says the work-from-home mess is now behind him. In truth, getting out of it will take more than wishful thinking.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 11, 2025 as "How to blow up a campaign in two easy steps".

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