Is the Coalition ready to lead Australia? All evidence suggests not

It’s just three days since Peter Dutton made one of the most humiliating campaign U-turns I’ve seen in more than 40 years of covering federal elections, and in these fast-moving times, it’s already almost out of range in the rearview mirror.

Dutton and his campaign people would, understandably, like us all to move on from his decision to drop the policy to end working from home for federal public servants.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

It’s a bit too soon for that. Let’s stop the clock for a moment and try to understand what happened in this bizarre episode. The motivation isn’t to exploit the opposition leader’s discomfort; it’s to take a look at how the alternative government has been going about its business on the way to the election.

The crunch on working from home was accompanied by a pledge to get 41,000 public servants off the books pronto. It was robust, assertive stuff that was warmly embraced by the Coalition’s media friends, protectors and boosters. But Dutton confessed on Monday when interring the policy that it had been a blunder. “We’ve made a mistake with the policy. We apologise for that. And we’ve dealt with it,” he told a television interviewer.

What was the mistake? Either you believe in a policy because it’s right for the country or you don’t. In this case, the policy lasted a mere five weeks. It was an economic and workplace relations policy, announced by the finance spokeswoman, Jane Hume, in a speech delivered at the Menzies Research Institute in early March. The title of the speech was “A Lack of Respect Leads to Waste”. Hume went in hard on working from home in the federal public service – how wasteful and occasionally ridiculous it was.

“In one instance, a stakeholder travelled to Canberra only to be shown into a meeting room where they were greeted by all departmental participants dialling in from home,” she said. “One public servant told my office that one of their colleagues worked from home five days a week. They were frequently uncontactable and thus unreliable. Why? Because while they were working, they were also travelling around Australia with their family in a campervan.”

It was clear in Hume’s speech and in a subsequent Q&A session that the Liberals were sceptical of working from home beyond just the federal public service. She said it was harmful for productivity across many workplaces and praised big Australian companies including Coles, Flight Centre and the Commonwealth and National Australia banks for telling their employees to return to the office. This was all supposedly argued from a point of conviction and yet it’s now dead. The 41,000 surplus public servants it was vital to get rid of would now gradually leave and not be replaced.

Turns out the “mistake” was political because that’s where the policy came from: a political calculation. The Coalition wrongly believed it would be popular to act like the big, tough boss and single out public servants as lazy good-for-nothings – basically pitting one group of Australians against others, which sadly is often part of Dutton’s MO.

Did his nuclear energy idea not come from a similar divisive source, offering comfort to climate change deniers against believers? The same goes for foreign students and migrants who are, we are told, robbing young Aussies of the chance to buy property.

Dutton blamed a Labor “scare campaign” for the reversal, which is not convincing. More likely, this was another WorkChoices: a policy that looked like an inequitable stinker to too many workers. Voters working in the private sector knew Dutton couldn’t force them back to the office. But they saw it as an anti-worker policy tied in with the intention to sack Commonwealth employees in big numbers that could send a green light to their own bosses.

In politics, if you make decisions for the wrong reasons, bad luck tends to follow you around. The Coalition’s economic policy team is not in good order. Hume has suffered a series of humiliations. Not only is she taking the hit over the working-from-home fiasco, but she has to share her role with Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, appointed to a newly created portfolio of government efficiency days after Donald Trump was sworn in, just as Elon Musk and his little bunch of tech nerds were getting to work with DOGE.

Price, the great retail-politician find of the Voice referendum campaign, was expected to take a larger role in this campaign, but comparisons with the malodorous Musk and Trump have led to a rethink. Meanwhile, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor continues on, to little effect so far. All this in a cost-of-living election.

Anthony Albanese is dismissed by opposition supporters as “Each-Way Albo”. Is Dutton all that different? Trump is a serious problem for him. When Trump said he wanted to turn Gaza into a holiday resort without Palestinians, Dutton described him as “a big thinker” and “shrewd”. At Tuesday night’s debate with Albanese, in reply to a question about dealing with Trump, he said that as prime minister he would have what it takes to stand up to the “bullies” who “seek to do us harm”.

All too often as the election approaches, it’s difficult not to look at what the opposition is doing and wonder if the leader and his brains trust really believe that this is the way to demonstrate they’re ready for office. The biggest objective of any opposition, especially one in its first term away from the Treasury benches, is to show that it’s more skilful and professional than the mob in charge – that it regards formulating a full, soundly tested policy agenda as its most important task.

Sure, tenderising your opponents with vigorous critiques is satisfying. It can alert voters to the indelible shortcomings of the other crowd. But as Dutton is finding out, it ultimately makes for empty calories. An opposition has to show that it’s better. Forming a policy that’s apparently central to your principles and budget costings and then abandoning it in little more than a month inevitably leads to the question: is that how you plan to govern?

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

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