Dutton the wrecker risks self-demolition

Ask Labor people to nominate Peter Dutton’s greatest political asset, and they will mention the thickness of his skin. The leader of the opposition genuinely doesn’t care what the media write or say about him, as one government minister explained. That’s why, the minister said, Labor can’t afford to underestimate him. He is ruthless in his pursuit of political advantage, and won’t be shamed by calls for civility.

Dutton had become increasingly brazen in the three months since the Liberals suffered their historic byelection loss in Aston in Melbourne’s outer east. He responded to that defeat by declaring his opposition to the Voice to parliament – a double-or-nothing bet on obstruction. And he concluded the final fortnight of parliament with a series of orchestrated pile-ons, targeting prominent Labor ministers Katy Gallagher, Penny Wong and Linda Burney.

Illustration: Dionne GainCredit:

Dutton and his colleagues must understand the fire they are playing with. Creating division as an end in itself undermines trust in democracy. It is true that obstruction delivered a shortcut back to power for the Coalition in 2013 under Tony Abbott’s leadership. But it also gave Australians their least effective government of the postwar era, on the measure of policy achievement – and the most divided, based on the number of leadership changes. The only reform that delivered material change to people’s lives was marriage equality in 2017. But the permission for that change had to be secured outside the parliament, via a postal survey, because the Coalition was split on the issue.

Dutton is testing the political system’s ability to problem-solve at a time of multiple policy challenges, from inflation and climate change to housing affordability and population ageing.

He has no interest in the old-school value of strategic bipartisanship, whereby the opposition allows the government to fix a wicked problem. Otherwise, he would have given Labor the votes its needs to implement its public housing policies. What possible benefit is there, beyond the sugar hit of gridlock, for a future Coalition government to inherit an even deeper housing crisis?

Recall the positions that John Howard and John Hewson took as opposition leaders to support the Hawke-Keating tariff reforms in the late 1980s and again in the early 1990s. The option to wedge Labor by blocking the cuts was not even considered because both sides agreed that the reform, however painful, was in the national interest. Howard’s longevity in office was predicated, in part, on allowing Labor to rebuild the economy for him to manage in recovery.

The key question here is whether Dutton can yell down more than just the Voice? The answer will turn on two factors: first, whether the Greens are prepared to join him in a mission to wreck Labor policy, and second, how Labor itself approaches the remainder of this term.

The experience of the Rudd-Gillard years has taught Labor that a mandate for reform can be overturned by a cost-of-living scare. But the lessons cut both ways. Australia’s political demography has shifted leftward in the 10 years since Abbott hailed the start of his “grown-up government”. The backlash to that empty decade of Coalition rule has created a constituency for change that poses a danger for Labor’s majority if it governs with too much caution.

Anthony Albanese would remember that Kevin Rudd’s two-year honeymoon as prime minister ended, abruptly, when he walked away from the “great moral challenge” of climate change in 2010. Labor’s primary vote never recovered from that own goal.

The electorate is now divided into thirds between the Coalition, Labor and minor parties. But among younger voters in the capitals, where the last federal election was decided, the Liberals trail both Labor and Greens on the primary vote.

As the Liberal-leaning Centre for Independent Studies reported this week, the Coalition faces a decade or more out of office if it continues to alienate Millennials (born between 1981-1995) and Generation Z (1996-2009) voters.

Matthew Taylor, the paper’s author, used modelling to show Millennials have not converted from Labor to the Coalition at the same rate as they became older when compared with Baby Boomers (1946 to 1964) and Generation X (1965 to 1980).

“If Gen Z support for the Coalition stays where it is and the generation that comes after has similarly low support then even if Boomers, Gen X and Millennials keep shifting towards the Coalition at the rates we have seen in the past, that still isn’t enough for the Coalition to return to government in the next six elections,” Taylor said.

Six terms in the wilderness might be a stretch. It is unlikely the Coalition will survive in its present form if Labor, heeding the lessons of the Rudd-Gillard implosion, governs effectively for the remainder of this decade and well into the next.

Dutton isn’t thinking that far ahead. He sees chaos as the only viable path to a contest at the next election, and is unlikely to be diverted from his present course unless voters in Fadden, on the Gold Coast, deliver another by-election shock on July 15. The Liberal National Party vote in Fadden has been above 60 per cent after the distribution of preferences in every election since 2010. Labor has never won a Gold Coast-based seat.

Dutton has already demonstrated an Abbott-like fixation for making Australia ungovernable. But he is punching from a position of unprecedented weakness for the Coalition. It has the lowest share of seats in House of Representatives since Robert Menzies contested the first election under the Liberal Party banner in 1946.

At the fall of his government in 2007, John Howard left the Coalition with a primary vote of 42.1 per cent and the Liberals held 24 of the then 75 electorates in the capital cities. That gave Abbott a base from which to launch his assault. Labor did the rest for him by imploding in office.

Scott Morrison’s defeat in May 2022 came with a primary vote of 35.7 per cent – a postwar low for the Coalition – and just 15 of the 81 electorates in the capital cities. Dutton’s loss of Aston reduced that to 14 – just one more than the 13-strong urban crossbench of teals, Greens, and independents.

Although Dutton’s anti-Voice campaign is yielding its bitter fruit in the steady rise in the No vote, it has yet to translate into a noticeable drop in support for Albanese and his Labor government. And Dutton’s friends and rivals continue to point out that he might suffer more politically than the prime minister if the referendum fails. “If Yes wins, he loses. If No wins, he loses anyway,” is how a senior Liberal put it.

George Megalogenis is a journalist, political commentator and author.

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