James Campbell: Vic is radioactive for Labor but the Libs must pull a rabbit out of a hat if they want to win
This election is increasingly looking like it’ll end up being a big disappointment for Coalition supporters but if the Liberals lose, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.
James Campbell
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If, as increasingly seems likely, this election ends up being a big disappointment for Coalition supporters, the post-mortems are unlikely to be kind to Peter Dutton and his crew.
Before getting into this however, it should be said that this is still only a likely – not the certain – outcome and while a week into this campaign all the evidence suggests Australians are leaning towards Labor, it isn’t a done deal.
Or as a senior ALP campaigner puts it: “We think people are increasingly open to giving us another go but if the Libs turn up with a rebuttal, they could still get there.”
How did it come to this? Why is everything suddenly going wrong for the opposition, which, despite the scale of the task in front of it, seemed to be heading to victory just three months ago.
In retrospect the seeds of the Coalition’s current predicament were sown after the Dunkley by-election.
Going into that contest the Government was in a post-Voice funk, with voters increasingly asking themselves if this Albo bloke, who had seemed to share their priorities, was really on the same page as them after all.
The question of what to do about Scott Morrison’s Stage 3 tax cuts was always going to be revisited in the first half of 2024 because they were due to come into effect in July, but the by-election caused the decision to be brought forward by several months.
Offering a nice big tax cut wasn’t enough to win it however, Labor also went heavily negative against the Liberal candidate and Dutton himself.
The result was a 3.6 per cent two-party-preferred swing against the government, but Labor’s primary actually went up.
In the aftermath of this disappointment, the Liberals knew three things, all of which are currently playing out in this election campaign.
Firstly, they knew that the voters they were chasing in the outer suburbs were pissed off with the government over cost-of-living pressures.
The second was that when Labor wasn’t off on frolics like the Voice but actually doing something to address those issues, these voters were still prepared to listen to them.
Thirdly, they knew Dutton was vulnerable to attacks from Labor centred on his record as health minister.
They knew all this was because their internal polling went backwards over the course of the Dunkley campaign.
In other words it was clear, if for no other reason than the size of the electoral mountain they had to climb, surfing back into office on a wave of anger over the drop in living standards just wasn’t going to happen.
Now of course what the government did to address cost-of-living was a matter beyond the Liberal Party’s control.
All it could do was to work out how they could inoculate Dutton against the Labor attacks they knew were coming.
To do this they needed to explain who he was and why might be the man we need in these times.
And to borrow the old scriptwriters’ line – “show, don’t tell” – the best way to do that was not just to do some soft-focus ad in which he stared at his cows but to release policies which would have blunted Labor’s picture of their guy as a heartless bastard who would cut everything voters hold dear.
A “meet Peter Dutton” campaign might make a bit of a difference but after voters had absorbed he was not the monster Labor was painting him as, their question was going to be “but what are you actually going do to make things better?”
Instead they did nothing.
Fast forward to this January and the Liberals finally release the “Pete’s-not-such-a-bad-guy-when-you-get-to-know-him” ad featuring the Opposition Leader listening to voters and looking wholesome under the slogan “Let’s Get Australia Back On Track”.
Labor tested it and unsurprisingly it worked quite well.
But the problem was it was untethered to anything and the response of the punters was “OK, but what are you going to do?”
Fast forward again to today and what have we seen from the Opposition?
Well aside from longstanding commitment to nuclear power and taxpayer-funded lunch there’s lately been added gas reservation, the cut to petrol excise and now a hard cap on migration.
All fine policies in their way.
But into the 2022 campaign – the one which history remembers as just being about kicking out Scott Morrison – Labor had released policies on child care, modernising the electrical grid, IR, a National Reconstruction Fund, climate change and energy, the expansion of the aged-care workforce, free TAFE and higher education.
In the first week of the campaign it announced its promise to create urgent care clinics.
It was not, as far as I can tell, dicking around debating internally whether it should be offering further tax cuts or a complicated housing policy.
As I said this isn’t over yet, the Liberals could still pull a rabbit out the hat, if for no other reason than Victoria is radioactive for Labor.
But if things go badly, they will have no one to blame but themselves.
Dutton looked nervous but was saved by Albo’s waffle
Given he’d just received upsetting personal news, Dutton understandably had a tough start to the debate before Albanese channelled his inner game show host, writes James Campbell.
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Peter Dutton’s job in Victoria these next few weeks is to tie Anthony Albanese to Jacinta Allan as closely as he can. For that reason, his move to torpedo the SRL could be a winner.