Peta Credlin: Peter Dutton has a commonsense determination to address Australia’s challenges

The coming election is not just between two very different parties with two very different approaches to policy but also between two very different men, writes Peta Credlin.

The coming election is not just between two very different parties with two very different approaches to policy but also between two very different men. Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are about as poles apart as any two long-serving parliamentarians can be: In personal attitudes, lives before politics, experiences in parliament and hopes for our country.

If you think that most human beings are victims and that we need bigger and more intrusive government, Albanese is your man. He grew up in public housing with a single mother in the inner city; was a leftist activist at university; quickly became a Labor staffer; then assistant secretary of the NSW ALP; and then went into parliament aged just 33. No experience in a small business, or the real world other than six months as a bank teller. A bloke created inside the Labor left faction machine if ever there was one. Once in Canberra, the main portfolios he’s had are transport and infrastructure and, given the federal government doesn’t operate trains or buses or even build roads, it’s just a job where you hand out billions in taxpayer dollars.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has always been a political animal who’s never really changed from undergraduate Trotskyism. Picture: Evan Morgan

In the Rudd-Gillard era, in a press conference where he cried about the rolling of Rudd, he claimed his main purpose in life was not serving his electorate but “fighting Tories”. Eventually, after losing an earlier attempt, he ended up opposition leader after Bill Shorten lost the unlosable election; and finally won against a tired and disappointing Morrison government by promising to be “safe change”. It’s worth remembering he beat the Coalition with a primary vote of just 32 per cent.

Since then, he’s sponsored the Voice referendum that aimed to divide Australians on the basis of race; elevated climate concerns and in the process accelerated the deindustrialisation of Australia; empowered unions while productivity went backwards; boosted the size of government by about three percentage points of GDP (or $60 billion a year); emasculated the defence force; and presided over two years of declining GDP per person, a household recession, and the largest drop in real living standards since the Great Depression.

It’s exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s always been a political animal and who’s never really changed from undergraduate Trotskyism. But without ever being in business, he’s acquired a string of investment properties plus a new $4.3m retirement home that reports say he’s renting out for $100,000 a year.

Peter Dutton has his eye on the ball when it comes to policy. Picture: NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

Now consider Peter Dutton. He grew up in outer-metro Brisbane, with a brickie father and a secretary mother and four siblings; spent nine years as a Queensland cop before going into business with his dad and doing a business degree part time; before entering parliament at 30 by winning a seat off Labor. He became, successively, workplace participation minister in the Howard government, assistant treasurer to Peter Costello; and then health minister, border protection minister and defence minister in the last Coalition government, before becoming Opposition Leader.

Since then, he’s successfully kept together a defeated and demoralised party, successfully beaten a referendum proposal that initially had 60 per cent-plus support, and steadily articulated a series of distinct policy positions: such as ending the ban on nuclear power, cutting immigration by at least 25 per cent, giving young homebuyers access to their super for a deposit, ending the divisive practice of flying three flags and welcoming people to their own country, and restoring a strong military and strong border protection; plus cracking down hard on the anti-Semitism that’s flourished under the current government.

In a special, hour-long conversation with me on Sky last Thursday (and yes, I tried to make it a conversation rather than a typical media interview), I tried to bring out the man I’ve got to know well over more than 20 years, since my time as a staffer in the Howard government. The Peter Dutton I’ve come to know is strong, thoughtful, decent and has dry sense of humour. He’s nothing like the brutal plodder as Labor initially tried to paint him; nor the savage cutter that’s the latest line of attack from a government with no record of success to run on and no plans for the future other than more wasteful spending and woke regulating.

Apart from his obvious love of family, what really struck me from our discussion was his commonsense determination to address the challenges facing Australia.

Here’s what he said about a power system that’s now all about reducing emissions rather than producing affordable and reliable electricity: “manufacturing is done if we’re having smelters and heavy energy-user industries relying on intermittent power. It won’t work”. He pointed out that we’re paying three times the electricity price of places like Ontario and Tennessee with nuclear power, and that Labor’s renewables-only policy is driven by “emotion not reality” with “no regard for cost”.

On biological males competing against women in sport, Dutton was a model of common sense: “young girls want to be able to compete on a fair basis”. “Not to be able to achieve their dream” he said, “because someone has a physiological advantage over them … is not in the spirit of sport”. On gender fluidity, he said: “if parents are being excluded from a discussion about the health needs of their children something is seriously broken in the model … We know there are two sexes …(and) this is a very confronting debate … but we have to have a society which is respecting of parental rights and the rights of … innocent children”.

Right now, if Labor loses just three seats, it will fall into minority government. And almost every poll for the last 18 months has that pegged as a certainty now.

For the Coalition, the polls suggest it’s on track for a minority government too but, in recent weeks, that’s started to shift and suggest a majority is possible. If it comes down a negotiation to form minority government (so government with the support of the crossbench Greens, Teals and independents) as we saw in the 2010 scenario, you’ve got to assume that Labor will prevail since the Greens and the Teals are political bedfellows.

Most commentators are still inclined to write-off Dutton’s prospects of winning because it’s almost a century since a one-term government was defeated. On the other hand, not since John Howard in 2004, six elections back, has a PM lasted a whole term and then won an election (and Albanese is definitely no Howard).

The precedents work both ways here and this is why the campaign will be critical. Given his shocker of a campaign last time, I think the PM is in real trouble.

THUMBS UP

Huge reaction to my hour-long sit-down interview with Peter Dutton. You can watch it again via skynews.com.au.

THUMBS DOWN

The Teals voting with the Greens last week to oppose mandatory sentences for terrorism offences.

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Peter Dutton has a commonsense determination to address Australia’s challenges