Comment

Paul Bongiorno
Voters poised to hit the eject Dutton

On Saturday, we will find out if it is possible for a major party to run a very poor campaign and still win an election. The likelihood of Peter Dutton pulling off this feat seems remote. He would need a bigger miracle than his predecessor Scott Morrison managed in 2019.

That election result still haunts the Labor Party, consoles the Liberals and makes pundits nervous. There are, however, significant differences between that campaign and what is happening now.

For one thing, the pollsters have adjusted their methodologies and their final survey results, so in 2022 the actual outcome was much closer to the published polls. The four major pollsters who were in the field for both elections were all out by less than one point last time. In 2019, their error margins ranged from three to four points.

Midweek the aggregate of the seven published polls was 52.6-47.4 Labor’s way. This represents a slight improvement on Labor’s actual 2022 result of 52.1 per cent, an outcome that saw it scrape across the line for a majority.

The final Resolve poll, published midweek in The Sydney Morning Herald, was 53-47 Labor’s way, with pollster Jim Reed saying he doesn’t expect to see a significant shift ahead of the voting. Labor insiders are encouraged by the fact Resolve underestimated the party’s result by just under one point last time. A similar miscalculation this time could see Labor increase its majority, a prospect the past two YouGov polls have more strongly indicated.

Complicating any predictions this election is the continuing decline in primary support for the two major parties. The Coalition and Labor have seen their share of the national vote steadily erode in recent elections, the last one being a more dramatic development with the arrival of more independents and minor party MPs in the parliament.

The fate of the independents who snatched hitherto safe Liberal seats will be keenly watched after a bitter and concerted campaign by the Liberals to remove unwelcome occupants from electorates they regard as theirs by birthright.

Yet apart from bullying tactics at pre-polling locations and crowding out those places with their corflutes and other paraphernalia, the Liberals and Dutton have done nothing to appeal to voters who deserted the party, particularly over climate change action and women’s issues.

Not only is the nuclear energy policy oversold and underdone in terms of its cost and delivery timetable, it is seen clearly as a delaying tactic for the phasing out of coal and gas. It is accompanied by policies to stop preparing the grid for the transition to renewables, with Dutton promising to cease funding the Rewiring the Nation project.

Emissions reduction has been put on the long finger and even Labor’s modest advances are to be reversed under Coalition policy. Vehicle emissions standards are attacked as a tax on popular utes such as the Ford Ranger, despite the fact these standards apply in Trump’s America.

Electric vehicles would lose their preferential tax treatment under Dutton, although the Liberals and Nationals are contradicting themselves over the imposition of a road-user tax.

Judging by the Coalition’s reluctance to make nuclear energy a high-profile element of their campaign, the opposition knew it was a negative in the near term, well beyond the teal independent electorates. Over the past five weeks it has been left to Labor to raise the prospect.

Labor seized on Dutton’s admission in the last leaders’ debate that he would be happy to have a nuclear power plant in his suburb, only to have the Coalition campaign “emphatically” deny that is the plan beyond the seven identified communities.

Their sensitivity was amplified by the fact Dutton himself avoided visiting any of these sites in the campaign. Such visits of course would have meant a more convincing argument to bolster his claim he could deliver functioning nuclear plants in 12 years, despite the real-world cost and experience overseas.

It was a clear example that the opposition and its leader were ill-prepared for the blowtorch of an election campaign. How Dutton imagined such a key element of his energy policy could escape scrutiny and that it was okay not to have a strategy to sell it more effectively points to either hubris or incompetence.

A cursory overview of the past five weeks suggests both. All of the major pollsters have tracked a plunge in Dutton’s standing since the campaign began. The most dramatic was in Newspoll, which saw his disapproval soar 12 points to 59 for a net approval of minus 24, a record low for him.

As former Labor prime ministerial adviser Sean Kelly remarked this week, the list of campaign mistakes is “truly impressive”. This will surely have an impact on what happens as millions cast their ballots.

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Last weekend, Dutton blamed the “hate media” at the ABC, Guardian Australia and others for the Coalition’s poor showing. The echoes of Donald Trump’s “fake news” and his treatment of journalists as enemies of the people were unmissable.

Dutton’s ambition now is clearly to see government driven into minority, but even here his own fate as leader will depend on how many seats he can take from Labor. To realise this severely trimmed expectation, he has spent the past week returning to his more comfortable culture war terrain. There is no more talk of victory over the “worst government” since the first-term Labor government in 1931.

Responding to the outrageous booing during the Welcome to Country at Melbourne’s main Anzac Day dawn service, Dutton condemned the behaviour but also added that these ceremonies were “overdone”. Next day he doubled down and said the Welcomes were inappropriate for Anzac Day, claiming many veterans thought the same. He proffered no evidence for this and the New South Wales RSL disagreed immediately.

Dutton tried to goad the prime minister into agreeing with him. When Anthony Albanese would not, Dutton tried to link this to what he claims was the divisiveness of holding the $450 million Voice referendum. Indigenous academic Marcia Langton said the Liberal leader was again exploiting “the racism in our community”.

Albanese responded on ABC TV, saying Dutton had “made a career of promoting division, punching down on vulnerable people, seeking to divide the community, engaging in culture wars”.

To most it is clear what Dutton is doing: trying to appeal to voters who have deserted the party for One Nation, Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots and others, hoping they will at least preference the Liberals, if not return home.

The Essential Poll this week would suggest this return to culture wars is not what voters are most concerned about. Cost of living came in as the first, second and third most important issue, followed by housing, Medicare and then crime and immigration. These last two, pushed strongly by Dutton, had only 12 per cent support between them.

The audience of 60 uncommitted voters assembled by the Seven Network for the last leaders’ debate overwhelmingly scored Albanese the winner on cost of living, 65 per cent to 16 per cent. The prime minister also convincingly won the debate, 50 per cent to 25 per cent, with 25 per cent undecided.

Labor’s economic credentials received a welcome boost on Wednesday, with the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ quarterly consumer price index. The headline rate was steady on 2.4 per cent in the bottom half of the Reserve Bank’s target range. The most encouraging news was trimmed mean underlying inflation at 2.9 per cent, which was within the bank’s target and at its lowest level in three years.

The markets immediately factored in a 97.6 per cent chance of the Reserve Bank cutting interest rates by a further 25 basis points at its meeting in two weeks’ time. Treasurer Jim Chalmers was quick to claim the result was “a powerful demonstration of the progress Australians have made together under Labor on inflation and the economy”.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions said the results show “working Australians are starting to get ahead with confirmation that inflation is growing at a slower rate than wages have grown over the past year”.

According to the polls, Labor has won the argument about which party is better for prospects in the next three years rather than what has happened in the past three. Saturday will be the acid test on just how convincing that win has been.

When one thing is going well for a party, others tend to start going well also. Even the argument about who can best deal with Donald Trump fell Labor’s way midweek when the United States president revealed he was well aware that the Albanese government had been knocking on his door over the issue of tariffs. He told reporters at the White House, “They are calling and I will be talking to him.”

Analysis of the Newspoll in The Australian said every government that has held a two-party preferred lead one week before polling day has gone on to win the election. The four successful oppositions all held an eight-point lead at that point of the campaign.

Precedents are always there to be overturned, but we don’t have long to wait before we find out whether Peter Dutton is about to pull off a breathtaking recovery or add to the history of fails.

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