Peter Dutton’s election disaster is worse than anyone thought possible | David Penberthy

Election night was never going to be a breeze for Peter Dutton but it’s been a disaster and could still get even worse, writes David Penberthy.

To borrow a harsh line from another former Liberal Leader, life wasn’t meant to be easy for Peter Dutton at the 2025 election campaign.

But wow. No-one thought it was going to be this hard.

The Liberal Party had a mountain to climb after the structural disaster it suffered in 2022 when its entire moderate flank was wiped out by a wave of Teal candidates.

That mountain was too big for the Liberals to climb in the space of just one term.

Not only did they not win back all those Teal seats, at the same time, the Trumpian blue collar surge the party needed to win rusted-on Labor voters in blue collar seats failed to materialise, meaning there was nothing to fill the void of middle class voters who have drifted away from the conservatives.

It looks like pretty much everything that could have gone wrong will have gone wrong for the Liberals.

Australian Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton talks to the media after voting in his electorate in Brisbane. Picture: AP Photo/Pat Hoelscher

Possibly including the added humiliation of Peter Dutton losing his own seat.

The scale of the devastation for the Liberals may yet prove to be massive.

There can be no doubt that the Liberals have run a mediocre campaign.

Not all of that was their fault.

The first problem they had was timing in the face of international events, none bigger than the chaos brought by Donald Trump.

Timing is everything in politics and if this election had been held in December of January Peter Dutton would probably have won.

In January this year amid an outpouring of national pride over Australia Day, one Labor figure told me he feared Dutton was set to ride “an anti-woke wave” all the way to The Lodge.

But this last month has demonstrated that the idea of Trump governing was more appealing to Australian voters than the reality of Trump governing as he went to war with his friends with tariffs and cuddled up to Putin over Ukraine.

Labor suddenly had a tactical advantage in painting Dutton as a Trump wannabe.

As happened in Canada last week, Trump has demonstrated again that for an anti-woke warrior, he’s doing a surprisingly good job injecting new life into left-leaning governments elsewhere that seemed destined for defeat.

The other problem the Libs had was in underestimating Anthony Albanese as a campaigner.

Perhaps Albo lulled them into a false sense of security with his shambles of a campaign at the last federal poll, where he forgot every key bit of national economic data and then vanished to recover from the coronavirus.

This time around Albanese has campaigned like a man possessed; in contrast, it’s been Dutts who committed all the major clangers.

His work from home backflip was in hindsight an irretrievable catastrophe. In the 30-odd years I’ve been covering politics, I can’t remember a leader of a major party actually killing off such a major policy in the midst of a campaign proper. It was worsened by the fact that it involved a policy which mattered much to female voters in those middle class seats which the Liberals now struggle to win.

Beyond that - and you can blame shadow treasurer Angus Taylor for much of this - the Liberals didn’t give themselves enough to sell.

Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor . Picture: NewsWire / Monique Harmer

There was no real point of difference, it felt like a bidding war, Labor’s modest tax cuts versus the Liberals cheaper petrol (for 12 months). None of this inspired excitement or imagination.

With that paltry policy offering from either side, and a set of international circumstances which tended towards inertia, that sense of “why change now?”, it is no surprise that there will be no change.

And the biggest tactical failing of all was the Liberals’ baffling inability to predict and respond to Labor’s ferocious negative campaign painting Peter Dutton as the prince of darkness.

It is bizarre that the Liberals did not go after Albanese big time over his own detachment from normal Australian lives during a cost of living squeeze. Crafting those attack ads would have been the easiest thing in the world, with photos of Alan Joyce standing in front of Qantas planes spruiking the Voice as Aussies lumbered through rate hikes, spiralling power bills, pain at the checkout.

They played too nice, they had nothing of note to sell, and they forgot that Albanese is a political junkyard dog who, as he once famously said, is at his happiest when he’s fighting Tories. He has fought them, and appears to have won.

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