Comment

John Hewson
Peter Dutton’s empty leadership

We don’t have a presidential election system in Australia and yet so much of this campaign and its media coverage has focused on the contest between the two major party leaders. It doesn’t need to be this way, nor should it be. The strategists on both the Coalition and the Labor side ought to broaden the frontline, by bringing the ministers and shadow ministers into the contest.

On the campaign trail, the Coalition in particular has been mostly hiding its team, with a visibly struggling Peter Dutton carrying the load. His senior shadow ministers have popped up in scheduled media debates on the economy, energy and housing and health. But Angus Taylor, Ted O’Brien, Michael Sukkar, Anne Ruston, along with Bridget McKenzie, have landed no significant blows. Similarly awkward was Dutton’s attempt to elevate the role of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, whose contributions have only confirmed that she has little of the necessary expertise, and whose use of the slogan “Make Australia Great Again” was conspicuously Trumpian, and a negative. Campaign manager Senator James Paterson has been conscientiously on hand to back up Dutton, but is yet to successfully elaborate on key Coalition policies such as the proposed migration and public service cuts, lacking as they are in any detail.

Looking back on the last Coalition government, you could be forgiven for speculating that Dutton has indeed done a Scott Morrison and appointed himself secretly to all portfolios – he has basically made all the so-called policy announcements himself. This is consistent with some of his more surprising proposals over the past couple of years, including his thought bubble on breaking up the insurers or the big supermarkets – ideas that apparently raised concerns in the party room and suggested a tendency to “shoot from the hip”. Similarly his statements on regional tax zones and eliminating bracket creep. It may be tempting for conspiracy theorists to imagine Dutton has a grand plan, but life has taught us that if the possible scenarios are a conspiracy or a stuff-up, the odds are firmly on the latter.

In a lacklustre campaign, Dutton has dwelt in vagueness and confirmed the suspicion he is still trying to win mostly by running negative fear campaigns, as he did in the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum. The opposition leader has really been hoisted with his own petard, now ducking the detail despite the standard he set in that earlier, successful campaign against the Voice. Who can forget the constant bleating from the cosy media at the time about the “lack of detail”. Now we are expected to believe that this extraordinary haziness on issues central to who should lead the country is somehow exciting and full of promise. It isn’t. It’s simply nothing.

Dutton is not interested in competing on the substance of ideas and alternative visions for our country. And the Coalition clearly hasn’t done enough work in their policy preparation. This has been most conspicuous in their big nuclear policy platform. As former Labor senator Graham Richardson has observed, Dutton bit off “more than he could chew”. Here, once again, a lack of policy development has let the opposition down.

I was personally staggered to hear the repetitive pledges to “fix the economy”, “address the inflation challenge” and “deal with the cost of living”, without any explanation being given as to how it would be done. Like the rest of Australia, I was left hanging. And frankly, I wanted to hear. I wanted to be wowed. Unfortunately, these policy statements are little more than policy objectives and they fool nobody. I believe the electorate will vote accordingly. Nobody likes being played on a break. It adds little for the Coalition to keep resorting to the claim they will “get back to basics”.

The significance of this policy void is most obvious when the candidates in each of their seats find it difficult to handle questions from their local media, fearing the consequences of straying from their cheat sheets from campaign headquarters. There is, of course, the risk that individual candidates attempt to fill the void by themselves. This might explain the curious case of Benjamin Britton, the original Liberal candidate for Whitlam, who was removed by the New South Wales party organisation after failing to back down from his statement prior to his preselection last year that women should not be allowed to serve in combat roles in our armed forces. After weeks of near-silence, Andrew Hastie finally surfaced. The shadow defence minister – more conspicuous by his absence than his authority – confirmed he stood by his 2018 assertion that “the fighting DNA of a close combat unit is best preserved when it’s exclusively male”. This, instead of any detail on a defence policy. It is landing strangely late in a campaign that the opposition believes ought to be dominated by national security concerns.

The secret to successful campaigning is basically to control the narrative. In Donald Trump style, Dutton has based much of what he has said on misrepresentations or, indeed, lies. One example is his claim that the Albanese government has been the biggest spending government since that of Gough Whitlam, when in fact the peak, at more than 31 per cent of GDP, occurred during the Morrison government’s response to the pandemic. That was the source of what Angus Taylor likes to call “homegrown inflation”, and it led to the housing crisis. Moreover, Dutton’s arguments against renewables are not supported by evidence, and nor are many of his claims about the nuclear experience of countries such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The failure to detail the precise nature of the cuts to the public service has also left other cabinet ministers exposed. This week we saw Anne Ruston unable to explain what cuts would be made to the health department, which has been such an important focus of debate in the campaign. The opposition has struggled to establish credibility on the issue, especially against the background of Dutton’s failures as health minister, and the attacks on US public services by Elon Musk and his so-called department of government efficiency.

Although Dutton initially enthusiastically embraced much of the US president’s strategy, including making outrageous claims against his opponent, the opposition leader’s overt confidence has slipped. He has had to quietly distance himself from the Trump playbook as the chaos of its implementation in the US has rocked the global economy and financial markets.

Dutton’s fiddling with the Trump approach seems to have cost him in electoral support. In the latest Newspoll, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese scored a significant win, with 39 per cent of voters ranking him as the leader they’d prefer to deal with the uncertainty caused by Trump. Fewer than a third of respondents wanted Dutton in charge.

Dutton’s bravado also seems to have been subdued by reports that Taylor has been canvassing the support of backbenchers and others for a run against him at some point after the election. I was struck by how the shadow treasurer in recent public comments has referred to the possibility of an Albanese minority government and a potential deal between Labor and the Greens. I wondered if that implied he had decided the Coalition couldn’t win and that the leadership would be up for grabs. Taylor would have little to offer as leader, but for the lack of alternatives. He has milked the fact he was a Rhodes scholar and plays up his 25 years of experience in business and economics. Those credentials contributed little in his match-ups with Treasurer Jim Chalmers over the parliamentary term and during this election campaign, where he has been easily and often bettered.

Sky News has nevertheless been pushing the view that Dutton has led the “most united” opposition. This clearly doesn’t stack up in light of Taylor’s recent activities and the policy tensions from the likes of Matt Canavan and others in the National Party who have called for the abandonment of net zero as a climate target and the persistence of fossil fuels.

As a final comment, while polls tend to concentrate on the national standing of the parties, specifically the overall swing, election outcomes depend on seat-by-seat contests. Although I lost the election in 1993, I achieved a significant increase in my margin in Wentworth. The Coalition strategy in this election, with its focus on Dutton, has left individual candidates to collectively do the job while lumbered with the national campaign’s policy void. The Coalition needs to win 20 seats to govern in their own right. I can’t count that many net on a careful seat-by-seat assessment, especially as they stand to lose more seats to new independent candidates.

The current Coalition must by now recognise that they are no match for the Labor team this time around. Portfolio to portfolio, so many have been found wanting, and person to person, whether they are facing Labor or increasingly committed independents, they must soon accept the judgement of the voters.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 24, 2025 as "This man is an island".

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