Peter Dutton’s telling blow up as final leaders’ debate of election campaign awarded to Albanese
With the polls against him, and time running out, Peter Dutton unleashed in Sunday’s final leaders’ debate. But whether his fury served his purpose is yet to be seen.
Federal Election
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The final debate of the election campaign was certainly feistier than the first three. There were multiple moments of frustration, bordering on outright anger, between the two leaders.
Part of that, presumably, can be ascribed to the Coalition’s fading prospects of victory next Saturday, should the polls prove to be accurate.
A Newspoll released shortly before the debate showed no movement whatsoever. And when you’re chasing, movement is what you need.
So with that in mind, it is hardly surprising that Peter Dutton was usually the instigator during the debate, and repeatedly accused Anthony Albanese of being dishonest in quite strong terms.
He was acting like a man who knows the campaign has drifted, near-inertly, for a month. Now Mr Dutton only has days left to find a catalyst; to do something capable of appreciably shifting people’s support.
The clearest example of his mood on Sunday night came when Mr Albanese repeated one of his more favoured attack lines – his claim that Mr Dutton will scrap the government’s Same Job, Same Pay labour hire laws if he wins power.
As Mr Albanese well knows, Mr Dutton explicitly ruled out doing just that early in the campaign.
”That is just – I mean, that is not true,” a frustrated Mr Dutton said when the Prime Minister brought it up again on Sunday night.
”Honestly. This whole campaign, it is hard to believe anything you say.
”We have a plan before the Australian people, which I believe provides solutions to your problems, the creation of which you should be ashamed of, frankly.”
Mr Albanese responded to this by mocking the Coalition’s record, saying “Australians deserve better than the pretence that everything was hunky dory” under the previous government.
”You can’t stand here telling people they’re much better off after three years,” Mr Dutton shot back at him.
”If you had a good story to tell, Prime Minister, you wouldn’t be running a scare campaign. You’d be talking about your so-called achievements.”
There were several other moments that demonstrated Mr Dutton’s determination – his detractors might call it desperation – to get a jab in.
During a conversation about the failed referendum on an Indigenous Voice to parliament, as moderator Mark Riley was trying to establish whether Mr Albanese “still believes in it”, the Liberal leader interjected: “Can we get a straight answer please?”
A debate about energy policy culminated in Mr Dutton near-shouting: “You will wreck the economy! You’re doing it now!”
I’m not saying it was all aggression, all the time. When Seven’s hosts moved on to a less traditional “quickfire” question-and-answer segment, Mr Dutton outshone the Prime Minister with moments of humour – such as when he labelled Elon Musk an “evil genius”.
(Mr Albanese, by the way, was visibly angry when trolled with photos of the multimillion-dollar beachside mansion he purchased while in office.)
So no, not all aggression. But the tone was noticeably different from their previous meetings. Those all felt like the opening round of a boxing match, with both fighters feeling each other out and mainly seeking to avoid catastrophic mistakes.
This one felt like maybe the tenth round, with one guy throwing flurries of punches, sensing he needed a knockout, and the other absorbing them. The eleventh and twelfth rounds are still to come of course, in these final days of the campaign, but time is running out.
Spinning the debate for Labor afterwards, Treasurer Jim Chalmers drilled in on Mr Dutton’s demeanour, claiming he was at times “unhinged”.
“Volatile times are the worst time for a volatile leader like Peter Dutton. Tonight, we saw Peter Dutton lose his cool,” Dr Chalmers said.
“We saw him drop his bundle. We saw him with a number of unhinged rants which are unbecoming of the alternative prime minister of this country.”
That’s all a bit much. Quite a bit much, actually. At no point was Mr Dutton “unhinged”.
But little we heard from the voters in Seven’s post-debate focus group suggested the more aggressive strategy had worked. Most expressed a degree of annoyance with both leaders for offering too few solutions on the problems that matter.
It’s not that a great groundswell of Australians particularly like Anthony Albanese. That Newspoll I mentioned at the start showed only 39 per cent of respondents think his government deserves another term.
But then you look at the other side of that coin: 62 per cent of voters do not believe Mr Dutton and the Coalition are ready to be in power.
Frustration, even when it might be justified, will never fix that.
Originally published as Peter Dutton’s telling blow up as final leaders’ debate of election campaign awarded to Albanese
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