‘Unity came at an incredible cost’: Inside Labor’s ‘landslide’ and disaster for Dutton

Well, that was quick. About 2½ hours after polls closed, the election was called for the incumbent Labor government.

But as the night went on, Labor increased its majority in parliament and Anthony Albanese’s win turned into a landslide.

For the opposition, it was disastrous. And Liberal leader Peter Dutton lost his seat in parliament to boot. The recriminations will, surely, be savage.

In the latest edition of our election podcast Inside Politics, chief political correspondent David Crowe says the loss may well show that Dutton had shifted the Coalition too far to the right.

“He did keep them united, but he kept them united by not making them too much of a broad church,” Crowe says. “He had a deliberately conservative approach – very conservative, I think – picking fights on culture wars and work agendas and so forth. And maybe that wasn’t the way to succeed.

“We now see what Australians think about it. So unity came at an incredible cost.”

For the latest analysis of the results and what it all means, listen to Inside Politics with Crowe, host Jacqueline Maley and federal political correspondent Paul Sakkal. You can click on the player below, or read on for an edited extract.

Maley: Paul, Peter Dutton took total responsibility for the loss. But what’s your sense of what happened?

Sakkal: It’s clearly deep and structural. To blame any one breakdown of communication or relationship or attitude just seems simplistic. I mean, the party is broken. They’ve had three years in a cost-of-living crisis to develop an economic narrative and have totally failed to do so.

After the 2022 result, the primary vote was really low under Dutton for a period, but the party was galvanised by the Voice referendum. It lifted them off the floor and instilled discipline. I think that, in part, meant there was no period of soul-searching and real examination of what the party stood for, its policy agenda, its recruitment of talent, all those things that make a healthy, vibrant political party.

This result has to force that, and if it doesn’t, it never will. I mean, Labor went through similar periods when Howard kept beating them. And they had another period of reckoning after Bill Shorten lost. So this happens to both sides of politics.

Crowe: The Liberals have always done well when they’re genuinely a broad church, to use that old phrase. The phrase is used so much because it’s such a good phrase. They know that that’s how they succeed, and that’s not really the best description of them right now. Well, after this result, they’re like a rump. But I think Peter Dutton has been given a lot of credit for uniting the team and keeping them all together after the 2022 election outcome, that defeat, and he did keep them united, but he kept them united by not making them too much of a broad church.

He had a deliberately conservative approach – very conservative, I think – picking fights on culture wars and work agendas and so forth. And maybe that wasn’t the way to succeed.

We now see what Australians think about it. So unity came at an incredible cost because they didn’t actually have a deep think about their philosophy and their direction in the last couple of years. And really, we could see that with their policy agenda because it was relatively thin, and it did, you know, they complained about the catastrophe facing Australia, and then they came up with a bit of a damp squib on the policy front as a solution to that catastrophe.

Yeah. I mean, they didn’t seem to have the courage of their convictions on what they were really fighting for because, I think, they hadn’t really worked out what those convictions were.