Dutton’s grim picture is close to reality, but his migration schtick isn’t the solution

An interesting feature of watching Peter Dutton’s budget-in-reply last Thursday night was the gentleness of his delivery. He fumbled a few phrases, seemed slightly – though not overly – nervous. This was no bad thing for the opposition leader because the danger with Dutton, always, is that he simply plays to type: comes across as strident, nasty, narrow.

And the difficulty with that, apart from exhausting his listeners, is that it undermines the things he says. On Thursday, if he had bellowed, it would have spoiled his speech’s major strength, which was that the grim picture of Australia he presented felt close to reality. It is difficult to see a doctor. Prices are too high. Buying a house is too hard, renting is worse, small businesses are struggling, the public atmosphere is febrile and people feel less safe. When Dutton says the country needs to get “back on track”, he is speaking to a country that does not need to be persuaded.

The restraint in Dutton’s manner was then the right approach because it provided balance in two ways. First, it offered counterpoint to the dark content of his speech. Second, more importantly, it offered counterpoint to his public image. Here, it could seem at times, was a reasonable man, saying reasonable things.

The accuracy of Dutton’s picture of Australia, however, doesn’t get the Coalition where it needs to go. Frustration with the state of things is a precondition for opposition victory, but three other elements are needed. First, there needs to be a sense that the government is to blame. Second, there needs to be belief that Dutton is the man for the job. Third, he needs to convince voters he has at least some of the solutions.

The difficulty for Dutton is that his answer on all three of these elements rests, to an excessive degree, on one thing: migration. And this is a bigger problem for Dutton than it seems because it does nothing to enlarge the sense of his leadership. Instead, it returns you to the unreasonable part of Dutton’s character. That is, his apparent need, on every issue – what can often feel like an obsessive need – to return to the politics of race.

Which isn’t to say you can’t talk about migration – you can. This has recently become more acceptable, owing to the extreme volatility of numbers in the pandemic and post-pandemic years. The government has talked about its plans to bring down numbers, and to cut the number of foreign students. So, fair enough.

Illustration: Joe Benke. Credit:

The problem comes in expecting migration to do too much. Dutton did refer to other government failings. But as Dennis Shanahan wrote in The Australian, Dutton’s plan to cut immigration was the “golden thread” connecting his arguments on spending, housing and students. In fact, Dutton went further. Migration was causing “congestion on our roads” and “pressure on existing services”, even making it harder to see a GP.

There is a developing theme in commentary right now: that the times will come to suit Dutton. As times get cold and mean and insecure, the country will want a strongman. Cometh the man, etc. This is possible; Labor would be wrong to scoff.

But it is at least equally likely that Dutton is making one of those classic political mistakes, which is to identify your strength and then over-emphasise it. Dutton’s public persona is more or less fixed. His attitudes towards migration are well-known. He doesn’t need to burnish them. The great risk Dutton runs is that he comes across as a man with a one-track mind: somebody who thinks all problems stem from migration, that he can fix them all by cutting migration, and that this understanding qualifies him to be prime minister.

Perhaps nuclear policy was supposed to offer something different. It has now become orthodoxy that Dutton promised to specify nuclear sites before the budget. In fact, as I wrote at the time, he promised to reveal them far earlier: within a couple of weeks, he said mid-March. This is nitpicking, but his confidence followed by delay suggests something significant shifted – leaving Dutton with just one main theme. There is no counterpoint. Which leaves us only with Migration Man.

There are problems with the migration focus beyond Dutton’s fortunes. At a time when social cohesion is genuinely in question, it is inflammatory. It’s also unlikely to be the fix he suggests. The consensus is that migration has some impact on housing, but not much. GP access has a few problems, including the fact too few bulk-bill because rebates were frozen by both Labor and the Coalition. In other words, the problems in our society are large, and require significant shifts in the way we do things. Increasing GP rebates seems simple, until you recall it needs money, which brings us back to the thing neither major party wants to talk about, which is revenue, i.e. tax.

The kicker is that Dutton is not actually suggesting that large a change: his cuts to migration are modest, the detail sparse. And this is in keeping with his entire budget reply. It was broad – but thin. It covered a lot of ground, offering just a little in each area.

This is standard from opposition. What is interesting is that it is not so far from the approach of Labor’s budget. Lots of problems, lots of solutions, most bitsy. The stand-out promises of both sides still seem vague.

Budget week seemed to offer confirmation of the status quo: a risk-averse government, unwilling to fight on policy, against an opposition with its own risk-aversion, largely unwilling even to have policies. Meanwhile, the problems in our country mount.

But it is also possible that the budget merely marked the end of the first phase of this term, and that the final year of three will look quite different. Right now, it is hard to see what either side would campaign on. Surely, by May next year, there will be something?

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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