Dutton can learn from Trump’s success, but so can Albanese

One of the great vanities of a country is to think its politics is its own. The United States, Britain and Australia are all governed by progressive centrist governments. Each of those governments won after conservatives struggled to lead during the pandemic. The men presiding then shared a central trait: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison were showmen, performance dominating substance. Coincidence?

Donald Trump was the change candidate. Peter Dutton can mimic his tactics in the forthcoming election.Credit: AP, Alex Ellinghausen

Or, a few years back, you could observe the overlap between the modernising Hawke-Keating governments, the triangulation of Bill Clinton and the third way of Tony Blair. You could explain this by saying parties borrow from each other, which is partly true. Blair seemed to learn a lot on a visit to Australia in the mid-80s, hosted by the Australian Labor Party. But the crucial point is not only that each of those leaders pursued similar ideas; it is that those ideas found fertile ground, succeeding in each of those different countries.

And so while it’s possible to outline the ways in which Australia is not the US, this at least risks missing the bigger picture, in which voters across the globe become persuadable by similar arguments at the same time.

There was some outrage in Australia earlier this year when Peter Dutton began blaming immigration for a wide range of problems: in housing, schools, healthcare and childcare. Sadly, this theme was all but inevitable, given Trump was making such arguments five years earlier, blaming illegal immigration for “reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools, hospitals that are so crowded you can’t get in, increased crime and a depleted social safety net”.

Then, last week, as the ABC’s David Speers observed, Dutton stepped into the debate over the rights of trans people, with a formulation similar to one the recent Trump campaign had deployed in ads. Meanwhile, Trump has spent recent months asking Americans whether they are better off than before – a question Dutton began asking early last year. (Albanese asked the same question before the last election).

Kamala Harris greets Anthony Albanese in Washington last October. Is Labor pursuing the same flawed strategy as the Democrats?Credit: AP

If Americans were susceptible to these messages, why should Australians not be? Arguably, we live in different societies, with different electoral systems. But then part of the reason Americans were persuaded was their frustration with their government. A crucial question must then be: is Labor pursuing a similar path to the Democrats?

In many ways, yes. Labor has made much of its new policy to forgive student loans. Three weeks before the election, Joe Biden made another in a series of announcements about student loan forgiveness, bringing the total amount forgiven to $US175 billion. A month before that, Kamala Harris announced a massive expansion of childcare subsidies, to be accompanied by higher wages for childcare workers – again, very similar to Albanese’s policy. Or there are the subsidies for renewable energy under the Future Made in Australia policy, just like Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Did any of these capture the imagination of voters in America? Have they here? It’s too early to be sure. But looking over various collected lists of Biden’s achievements, I have a similar reaction as I do to those lists of Labor’s achievements circulated on social media. Much of it is worthwhile, substantive. But it tends to fade from your mind the moment you stop reading.

This can sound like a superficial critique. But the reason they tend to fade, I suspect, is that they don’t cohere. This is sometimes expressed – again, superficially – as Labor having no “story”. But another way to put this is: there is no story that would make sense of these many medium-sized policies, no clear endpoint towards which they are taking us. And here we come to the real split between Trump and Harris.

Illustration by Joe BenkeCredit:

Put simply, Trump was the candidate offering change: not just in party but to existing
structures. His various plans may have been ideologically inconsistent, even contradictory, but you could not accuse him of not having plans: he wanted to cut immigration, slash taxes and raise tariffs. This substance was matched by his style, which mixed many factors – including bigotry – but above all made it clear he was not the same as other politicians. And perhaps the most surprising fact about Harris, in the end, was how similar to other politicians she seemed: avoiding questions, delivering beige soundbites.

And confused! A criticism made of Harris was that she swerved, late in the day, away from a clear economic message to one focused on Trump’s danger to democracy. So I went looking for that clear early economic message – and couldn’t find it. She railed against billionaires while quoting billionaires. She seemed torn between courting businesses and going after them.

Peter Dutton is not Donald Trump. And yet, it is worth noting how Dutton, like Trump, has been willing to challenge the assumptions that govern politics in his country. He has, however cynically or nonsensically, pursued nuclear power. He has flagged the potential of breaking up the big supermarkets. Albanese, meanwhile, attacks the supermarkets for high prices but opposes Dutton’s policy because it is “anti-capitalist”. He works to deliver higher wages but is perceived as close to union-busting figures like Alan Joyce. All while voters are being
pummelled by inflation.

To put this lack of clarity in a more flattering light, Albanese has essentially delivered on his promise of “safe change”. And he may yet be proved strategically correct. Still, at the very least, any complacency that remains in Labor ranks should now vanish. Incumbents are struggling everywhere. In America, a competent but unexciting centrist government presiding over a decent economy lost power after just one term to an opponent obsessed with immigration – sound familiar? If voters want change, they’ll look to those offering it. Meanwhile, Labor should turn its attention to the long-term substantive question that underlies the urgent political one: what change is it really offering?

Sean Kelly is an author, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.