After two strong years, Dutton is suddenly wobbling. But there’s a way back

Peter Dutton’s worst month as opposition leader began with a fundraiser and ended with a referendum and a limp wrist.

Dutton’s momentum has been building solidly for more than a year, but March has been unkind, beginning with revelations about his history as a property developer, questions about past share trades and the news of a trip to an expensive fundraiser in Sydney, while his home town of Brisbane was battening down the hatches waiting for Cyclone Alfred.

The revelation in this masthead on Monday night that Dutton wanted to hold a referendum to empower a minister to be able to deport criminal dual nationals threw the leader’s colleagues badly, especially those who read about it here.

The idea that the man who destroyed the Voice referendum wanted to campaign on one of his own caused opposition ministers to fluff their lines about whether it maybe was or really wasn’t official party policy, and prompted questions about why the opposition was not focused on cost-of-living concerns.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton called the prime minister “limp-wristed” during an appearance at the Lowy Institute. Credit: Bloomberg

It didn’t come as a total surprise to everyone in the party – but when the idea of a Coalition-led multimillion-dollar constitutional reform was raised in a meeting of senior MPs last month, several argued that a referendum proposal should be held back as a last resort.

“There was a range of views, a number of people said it should remain only as an option, not official policy. There were varying views around the room for different reasons,” said one MP, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely about a confidential meeting.

But his colleagues’ hand-wringing did not stay Dutton’s hand and when the story was published, he leant into it hard on Seven’s Sunrise program the next day.

“I want to keep our country safe, that’s the first priority and it’s the first responsibility of any prime minister, and at the moment we’ve got people in our country who hate our country, who want to cause terrorist attacks. My argument is that if you betray your allegiance to our country in that way, you should expect to lose your citizenship,” he said.

The opposition leader is pictured with Jewish leaders during a recent visit to Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne.Credit: Justin McManus

The next day, Wednesday, he was full steam ahead, blasting back at the ridicule he’d copped from Prime Minister Albanese, who called the referendum “a thought bubble”.

“The prime minister is suggesting that somebody who has committed multiple offences against children, sexual abuse, paedophilia, that that person deserves to stay here as an Australian citizen if they could be stripped of their citizenship. I won’t tolerate that situation, and I will do whatever it takes to keep women and children in our country safe, and if the prime minister doesn’t have that same position, he should make it clear to the Australian public.”

If it wasn’t Coalition policy, Dutton at least saw it as on brand.

On Thursday, what was supposed to be a sober speech about being tough on national security blew up when he described Albanese as “limp-wristed”, an antiquated homophobic slur Foreign Minister Penny Wong was quick to highlight.

This time, Dutton knew when to back down, retracting the phrase almost the minute it made headlines.

It’s not hopeless, several members of the Coalition’s shadow ministry and backbench told this masthead this week, but they said the scale of the task confronting the opposition – blasting out a first-term government for the first time in close to 100 years by winning 22 seats – was monumental.

Dutton’s office was contacted for comment. This story was informed by extensive conversations with his colleagues. They back him, but some are rattled.

Their collective hopes of the Coalition winning a majority at the next election are fast receding, a notable change from the optimistic assessments of early February when Dutton was telling the News Limited tabloids “we will win”.

A shadow minister, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely, puts it this way: “Everyone was gearing up for April 12 and then all of a sudden, the cyclone happened, Albanese decided rightly not to go ahead with it, and so the momentum we had has been paused.”

Now the opposition is pinning its hopes on Dutton’s budget reply speech next Thursday, his big chance to seize control of the economic narrative.

“We need to sell our message on the economy, that we will have a better bottom line than Labor, that inflation is not ‘mission accomplished’. It’s not sexy but it is sensible,” says a second shadow minister.

Dutton’s frontbench colleagues bristle at the suggestion more detailed economic policies should have been released already.

“Labor has fired a lot of bullets so far and it hasn’t helped them much. We have the wind at our back in an issues sense, for example on high energy costs, and there will be more from us in a policy sense once people have switched on for the campaign,” a third member of the shadow ministry says.

But the backbenchers are cranky.

“Peter has had a lot of unity but he bought that with deferred pain, by avoiding difficult debates internally. Now everyone is waiting for us to release more economic policy and it just hasn’t come forward and some people [in the party room] are hitting the panic button that the cupboard is bare,” says one Liberal backbencher.

“We haven’t talked about nuclear since before Christmas, we haven’t shown economic leadership. People are hopeful that the budget reply will come up with something big but the pressure is huge. People realise we can’t talk about antisemitism every day but that is what we are doing.”

It was Alfred’s arrival that forced Albanese to delay the election call and instead prepare for Tuesday’s budget. While the prime minister is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a polished performer, he provided steady leadership during the cyclone, which may perhaps have contributed to the popularity bump in some polls.

A trio of recent polls from Essential, Freshwater and Newspoll in the last two weeks all suggest two concurrent trends: support for the Coalition has begun to slip, and Dutton’s standing is falling as Albanese’s is rising.

The Freshwater poll showed Dutton’s net approval rating had slipped four percentage points to minus 11.7 per cent, while Albanese had taken back the lead as preferred prime minister for the first time in nearly a year, while in the Essential poll Albanese’s approval rating had risen four percentage points to 46 per cent while Dutton’s had slipped to 41 per cent.

Dutton’s decision to travel from Brisbane to Sydney for an expensive fundraiser in the days before the cyclone hit hurt him badly, with one federal colleague labelling it his “Hawaiian holiday moment”.

The news only emerged this week that Albanese also attended a fundraiser on the same day, but that was too little, too late. Everyone was asking about referendums.

If anything, the delay of the election has left the Coalition looking unprepared. At times, the opposition has looked like it hasn’t known what to talk about, especially given it has released so few concrete policy proposals.

So just as Cyclone Alfred was downgraded from a full-blown cyclone to a tropical low by the time it made landfall, so too are Coalition MPs downgrading their optimistic forecasts for election 2025.

Jill Sheppard, a politics lecturer at the Australian National University, says the polls were always going to tighten as election day approached and that “as we get closer to the election, after flirting, people return to their home party”.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton visits a local disaster co-ordination centre on the Gold Coast.

“Dutton has held the opposition together so well over the last three years that it is sort of shocking to see them disagreeing publicly on something a month out from the election,” she says, adding “the referendum idea feels like a thought bubble that no one asked for.”

Andrew Carswell, a consultant who was formerly Scott Morrison’s communications boss in government, says that while there have been some wobbles, “it isn’t panic stations yet. It’s not that the wheels are off, it’s just a few bolts that need tightening”.

May 10 is now the date most political insiders expect the prime minister to pick for the election, with a six-week campaign to test out an opposition leader who has not given many press conferences this term.

A fifth Liberal MP, also on the backbench, says that Coalition MPs believed a month ago that majority government was a realistic chance, but not any more.

“The way things are going we can’t win the election and a month ago I thought we had a very good shot. But the cyclone delay has hurt us badly, we have looked aimless.”

And another backbencher worries they’ve missed the peak of Dutton’s popularity.

“People are wondering what Peter stands for. If you had to answer, you would say its nuclear power and deporting people, but not much else. There has been a palpable change, there was a strong expectation that Dutton could lead us to minority or even majority government but it feels like the tide has now turned against us. It’s not that Albo is so great, but we are just constantly negative about everything,” the MP says.

But Carswell, the former Morrison adviser, confidently predicts there will be more detailed economic policy coming from the opposition and urges MPs to hold their nerve.

“Dutton has to get the balance right between being a small target and having a vision for the country. That is the piece of the puzzle that needs to come and it will.”

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