Dutton’s last-minute pivot on Welcome to Country reveals his One Nation problem

Having spent a good chunk of this past term successfully lambasting the Albanese government for focusing on the Voice to parliament instead of the cost of living, Peter Dutton now finds himself closing out a cost-of-living election campaign focusing on Welcome to Country. That fact, as clearly as anything, reveals how savagely the political winds have swung these past few months.

A cost-of-living crisis is among the surest recipes for a change of government. Around the time this very thing swept Donald Trump to power in the US, a poll in The Australian showed voters backed the Coalition narrowly ahead of Labor to manage the cost of living. This week, that same poll has Labor ahead on this issue 42 per cent to 24.

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Thus do we find this campaign veering into culture-war territory in its final throes. It is not that the Coalition is placing such things on the agenda so much as maximising the opportunity once it arises. No one in the Coalition knew some neo-Nazis would boo the Welcome to Country at an Anzac Day dawn service in Melbourne. But once the issue was in the air, it took a curious flight path.

On the day, Peter Dutton condemned the booing and defended the role of welcomes to country as “an important part of official ceremonies”. That, it seemed, included Anzac Day. “We have a proud Indigenous heritage … and we should be proud to celebrate it as part of today,” he declared. Then, as if to remove all doubt, he added “we should always remember to do that, and remind ourselves … that Indigenous Australians played a very significant part and still do today in the Australian Defence Force”.

By Monday, he was declaring that Anzac Day was an inappropriate day for such welcomes, citing “I think, the majority view” of veterans. Then he offered more broadly that Welcome to Country ceremonies were “overdone”, especially “for the start of every meeting at work or the start of a football game”. Soon, shadow finance minister Jane Hume repeated that criticism almost verbatim, revealing it to be a carefully crafted line. By the time Barnaby Joyce declared that war veterans “don’t believe they need to be welcomed” to a country for which they’ve fought, the rhetorical transition was complete. What began as an important part of a day of remembrance was now an affront of sorts, questioning the loyalty of Diggers.

Now we have Labor running what used to be the Coalition’s line. Here, for instance, is the prime minister talking to the ABC: “This is a complete distraction by Peter Dutton, who wants to talk about anything but cost of living.” Hereabouts things take the shape of a conventional election campaign, with each side competing to get the public conversation onto terrain that suits it. Labor is apparently confident of victory on the cost of living. The Coalition is not, but it recognises its position on Welcome to Country – which it quite conveniently conflates with acknowledgments of country – is probably closer to public sentiment and wants to fight on that turf.

If, as conventional wisdom has held thus far, the cost of living is far and away the most important issue in this election, that all adds up to Labor forming government. And indeed, the polls suggest that is most likely. But the polls also show something else that tell us why the Coalition might be doing this.

It is true that, if the polls are accurate, the Coalition has been losing votes throughout this campaign. But it is not true that these votes have flowed to Labor. The real beneficiaries seem to have been what the polls group as “other”. These could be independents. They are far less likely to be Trumpet of Patriots candidates. Most often it will be One Nation, which polls currently have sitting somewhere between seven and 10.5 per cent. For context, in 2022 the One Nation vote was below five. It’s a significant increase that could prove telling in seats such as, say, Hunter, which Labor has held for more than a century, but where One Nation gave them a mighty scare in 2019.

Here, we see Dutton’s predicament. Once the Australian mainstream soured on Donald Trump, the Coalition had to distance itself from MAGA-style politics. But there’s a good chance that in that process, the Coalition’s more MAGA-minded voters shuffled off to One Nation, where Trump is still celebrated. That’s a problem for the Coalition because One Nation voters have not historically given their preferences to the Coalition with anything like the kind of reliability that Greens voters preference Labor. A lost vote to One Nation may well not come back.

The Coalition seems to be fighting this in two ways. First, it has abandoned its decades-long policy of locking out One Nation and decided to preference that party ahead of Labor in 57 seats. Meanwhile, One Nation has returned the favour in about a dozen crucial battles including Dutton’s own seat of Dickson; seats that, according to Pauline Hanson’s chief of staff, “we feel could be the make or break of a Coalition government versus Labor”.

Second, the Coalition is now sending out messages that might win back those currently parking their vote with One Nation. So, when the Welcome to Country debate arose, the Coalition pounced. The calculation here must be that those voters put off by Dutton’s perceived echoing of Trump are already lost, so there is only political gain to be made in striking this kind of pose.

That makes this debate more or less impervious to clarification. It doesn’t matter that, despite the Coalition’s protestations, the RSL at both national and state levels seems comfortable enough with welcomes to country to recommend them for Anzac services on its websites. It doesn’t matter that Diggers are not being welcomed to Australia in these ceremonies, but to the ancestral lands of the relevant Indigenous tribe: not as an act of division, but as a way of allowing the Anzac story to overlap with Indigenous ones. Apparently, that story went from important to divisive in the space of a weekend. Not because it changed, but because the Coalition settled on a different audience for it.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author and academic. He is a lecturer in politics at Monash University and co-host of Channel Ten’s The Project.

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