Dutton captained a ship of fools – and they let him sink it

In the same way that it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a supine political party to enable a leader to lead it over a cliff. Yes, Peter Dutton must shoulder much of the blame for the Liberals’ electoral disaster. But he was given free rein as leader from the moment he was elevated unopposed to the position following the Morrison government’s defeat in 2022.

That loss was, until this election, the worst in the party’s history. But as leader Dutton did not take steps to decisively interrogate the party’s condition beyond a vague aspiration to attract outer suburbanites who hitherto had never voted Liberal. Nor was there any momentum within the organisational or parliamentary wings to confront reality and fashion a comprehensive new mission statement – a modern version of Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People speech.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Instead, they let Dutton be Dutton and followed him wherever he wanted to take them. This was an incredible decision, with profound consequences. In 2018, when Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership was fatally undermined over his final attempt to reconcile the party’s position on climate change, Liberal MPs had been presented with the opportunity to make Dutton their leader. They recoiled, concluding that he was too much of a one-note player, a reactionary rather than a liberal or a conservative. He would be too frightening to the electorate to be the man to take them to the 2019 election. They went with the shapeshifting Scott Morrison instead, which paid off in the short term; under him, they won in 2019.

In 2022, a much-reduced party room installed Dutton. In an indictment of the party’s past subpar efforts to preselect potential future leaders, MPs concluded there was nobody else. As leader, Dutton told his MPs exactly what they wanted to hear: there was no need for a serious internal reappraisal, Anthony Albanese was no good, Labor didn’t know how to govern, and while the Liberal Party had been hit hard, the ALP’s mandate was barely even there. Dutton’s prescription, which every one of his MPs signed on to, was that three years of rough treatment of a government that was finding its feet could be enough to get the world back on its axis and reinstall the Coalition to power.

The problems that manifested themselves in the nightmarish vote count that’s still proceeding began right then. The Liberals were shorn of internal dynamism. Fake and half-formed policy stances attached to overblown rhetoric undergirded the Coalition’s approach. The assumption was that voters would realise they had made a shocking mistake in 2022. The problem for the Liberals was that as election day 2025 approached, the party room’s previous judgment of Dutton’s leadership qualities had been astute; he was exactly what they feared he would be.

He was divisive and relentlessly negative. He was not inclusive. He tried to win on a platform of being unsympathetic to the concerns of women and younger voters. He derided migrants and First Nations flags. He blamed the Albanese government for a housing crisis that had, in fact, been decades in the making. Most Australians understood that it was not an instantaneous problem, that an intergenerational wealth gap develops over a long time.

He blamed the government entirely for inflation, when inflation had been unacceptably high when he was a minister and was trending down under Labor. He blamed Labor for a High Court decision that ordered the government to release illegal arrivals from detention. He blamed Labor for the decisions of the Reserve Bank. He demanded that Albanese apologise for following his convictions and giving Australians a chance to vote on an Indigenous Voice to parliament. The Liberal campaign snapped in two when Dutton summarily dropped his plan to sack 41,000 federal public servants and order the remainder of the government’s workforce back to the office five days a week. It was a sign that this was not a serious outfit.

He spent most of the parliamentary term damning Albanese as an antisemitic weakling. And yet in the campaign he complained about Labor’s “lies”, and Liberals who remain sympathetic to Dutton characterise Labor’s negative messaging about him as “character assassination”, as if Dutton were Little Bo-Peep.

The consequence of Dutton’s refusal to listen to what voters had told his party in 2022 and then act on it in a methodical way is a living nightmare for the Liberals. Because they put off their time of reckoning, they will be largely irrelevant to the national political discussion for the next three years. The three possible leadership candidates will surely only serve as placeholders.

Worse, the party is bereft of enduring key policies, and this void is all the party’s own work. Its proposal of nuclear energy instead of renewables is neither workable nor saleable. Its long-standing pretence on climate change, in which it pays lip service to the phenomenon while deriding it in policy terms, cannot remain sustainable. What does it do on climate change now? The bulk of its rank and file doesn’t believe it is real, along with most of its MPs.

It went to the election with an economic policy of tax rises and two years of bigger budget deficits, built on a guarantee that the economy would instantly improve merely because it would be in charge – a flimsy assertion that Dutton presented as holy writ and most voters treated as a joke. It offered nothing positive and forward-looking on workplace relations and improving productivity. On defence, it pledged to spend more but could not nominate what. The emptiness of it all is astonishing.

Twelve years ago, the Coalition secured a landslide victory similar to that notched up by the Labor Party last Saturday. It governed for nine years, during which politics habitually took priority over policy. It has just wasted the past three years and made its bad predicament vastly worse. Unless it focuses on what it wants to do for all Australians rather than what it can do to get itself back into government as quickly as possible, there will be more electoral routs like this to come.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

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