Joe Hildebrand: Peter Dutton’s WFH catastrophe a gargantuan WTF moment

It’s hard to convey the catastrophe of Peter Dutton’s WFH backflip nor find enough adjectives to describe how gargantuan it is, writes Joe Hildebrand.

Wow. This election has just gone from WFH to WTF.

Peter Dutton’s sudden public reversal of the Coalition’s plan to ban public servants working from home is … just wow.

It is honestly hard to know where to start in conveying the genesis of this catastrophe nor find enough adjectives to describe how gargantuan it is.

One senior Labor figure said the only possible headline to apply to it was “CLUSTERF*CK”.

When rumours and later news of the Olympic-level backflip broke last night both Labor and Liberal backers were agog.

The polling and voter feedback on the move to force bureaucrats back to the office was so ferocious, so brutal, that Coalition campaign strategists — a job description that can now only be used in the loosest of terms — decided that a wholesale, public, 180 degree about face in the middle of an election campaign was less damaging than actually going through with it.

And this of course raises the obvious question: Why on earth wasn’t the policy properly tested in the first place? How did something the Coalition thought was a vote-winner turn into something as appealing as a pair of greased-up electrodes?

Which in turn produces the obvious answer: It wasn’t. Whether or not the idea was floated in carefully curated focus groups or merely bounced around an echo chamber, as soon as it entered the real world the Coalition had completely lost control of the narrative.

Firstly, it immediately became clear that it was perceived as an attack on all people working from home, not just public servants, and all women in particular.

The Coalition’s failure to communicate clear, specific details about who this would affect and how — or respond immediately to the initial disquiet with carve outs for parents — is perhaps the ultimate example of the campaign’s sloppiness and lack of agility.

Likewise the plan to get rid of more than 40,000 public servants, which it has now also back-pedalled on, was bedevilled by a lack of clarity.

Which public servants? What jobs did they do?

This effectively forced almost 200,000 commonwealth employees to vote against the Coalition — which admittedly 90 per cent of them were probably going to do anyway.

Far more damaging was that almost instantly the term “public servant” became swept up in the media and public debate to include anyone employed by the government sector in Australia: Nurses, teachers, soldiers, cops, aged care workers, the list goes on.

Peter Dutton has a small window to put the mess created by his WFH backflip behind him. Picture: Thomas Lisson

Was Dutton coming after them too? No, but it felt like it.

Normally I would do a cheerful around-the-grounds at this point, detailing where each leader was and what they did and said, but none of it matters. Everything will be drowned out by this and its ramifications all day and all week.

After that NSW, WA, SA, Tas and the ACT all go on school holidays, which the other states started today, as well as the Easter and Anzac Day long weekends. Then it’s polling day.

This gives Dutton an incredibly small and crowded window in which to put this mess behind him and reboot the Coalition rebrand.

Of course the trick with all backflips is how you stick the landing. Dutton’s will have to be better than Sully Sullenberger’s if he’s going to finish this with all his passengers alive and well.

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Peter Dutton’s WFH catastrophe a gargantuan WTF moment