Labor’s central offer was clear. Then the Coalition hit the ground losing

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In this election campaign, the Coalition hit the ground losing. The contrast in positioning by the two major parties in the immediate run-up to the formal campaign will go down in political folklore.

A month before he called the election, Anthony Albanese launched his campaign’s central offering. A revitalisation of Medicare. More doctors would bulk bill. And medicines would be cheaper.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

It wasn’t a covert move. He declared it to be “the beating heart of our election campaign”.

He added a flourish. He’d discovered from the last election campaign the marketing power of a visual prop. In 2022, he held up a $1 coin, again and again, to drive home his policy in support of an increase in the minimum wage by a dollar an hour. The image stuck with voters.

So now he held aloft a Medicare card for the cameras. It became his campaign signature: “Not your credit card – your Medicare card.” It was the defibrillator paddle that jump-started the “beating heart” of the campaign.

The pollster for this masthead, Resolve Strategic’s Jim Reed, observes that “of the policies that stood out in voters’ minds, on the Labor side it was Medicare and bulk billing and cheaper medicines – they did very well to frame it as a cost-of-living measure”.

Peter Dutton immediately matched the Labor offering. It didn’t register. Why not? Because the electorate has a deep-seated impression of Labor as the party of Medicare and the Liberals as the party opposed to it. So, for Labor, the promise was on brand. For the Liberals, it was not trusted and simply overlooked.

About a week later, the Liberals promised to end working from home for federal public servants. It wasn’t a casual throwaway. It was announced in a speech by the Liberals’ finance spokesperson, Jane Hume: “It will be an expectation of a Dutton Liberal government that all members of the APS work from the office five days a week.”

Why was this a stupid move on the cusp of a campaign? Let us count the ways. First, it was gratuitous. Dutton already had announced that he’d sack 36,000 federal public servants to save $6 billion a year. You’ve already appealed to your base, and made a budget saving in the process. Mission accomplished. Why go even harder on the public service?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with Braddon candidate Anne Urquhart (front) and his fiancee Jodie Haydon in Tasmania on Friday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Second, it was not supported by any evidence. Hume referred to one US study showing that working from home impaired productivity. Her evidence that this might apply to the Australian federal public service? A couple of anecdotes implying that public servants were lazy and negligent. The policy didn’t even claim to make any budget savings.

Third, it was a stinking political disaster that would cost the Coalition seats in an election. Although the policy was limited to public servants in Canberra, it sent a signal all across Australia that Dutton was opposed to working from home on principle.

This prospect troubled millions of workers. Worse, it was portrayed as anti-women, reinforcing one of the Coalition’s core problems. Jim Reed is baffled. Why was this policy not tested with focus groups, as the parties do routinely, before Hume announced it? “It would not have passed,” Reed says.

Dutton had to revoke it. The reversal took more than a month. It was in the thick of an election campaign. It was too late. The damage was done.

Labor went into the campaign offering a benefit to the people. The Coalition went into it offering a punishment. You don’t need to be a genius to see who’s winning that competition. If Medicare was the defibrillator that set Labor’s heart pumping, working from home was a heart stoppage that seemed to stop blood flow to the Coalition brain for much of the rest of the campaign.

Labor’s disciplined campaign gained votes as time went on while the Coalition’s ramshackle effort lost votes. Sometimes campaigns don’t matter; they fail to change the parties’ standing. But this was different.

The campaign, and its immediate prelude, produced a “huge turnaround”, says Reed. In his polling, the Coalition started with an advantage of 4 to 5 percentage points in the election-deciding, two-party share of the vote. By this week, it was three points behind, a seven- or eight-point reversal of fortune.

Strikingly, the Coalition didn’t learn from this early disaster. In an election, you already have the support of your party base. That’s why it’s called the “base”, the foundation on which you build. To win, you need to broaden your appeal from the base to the centre. This is where elections are won.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton visited a 7-Eleven in Joondalup in the WA electorate of Moore on Friday. Credit: James Brickwood

But, time and again, Dutton repeated the underlying blunder committed with the “work from home” policy. He appealed to his base when he should have used every opportunity to win over voters from the centre.

Examples? Dutton called the ABC and The Guardian “hate media”. He said that Welcome to Country remarks were “overdone” and said they shouldn’t occur on Qantas flights or Anzac Day events. He did this deliberately and purposefully. Why? Because he thought it would stir public memory of the Voice referendum, his great triumph.

But, again, he already had the votes of the ABC-haters and the people who think it’s important to dismiss concessions to “woke” Indigenous concerns. But he doesn’t have the votes of most of the people who live in most of the seats that have turned “teal”. People in these areas voted Liberal for almost three-quarters of a century.

While the Coalition stands a good prospect of winning back one or two teal seats today, they also risk the loss of another traditional Liberal seat to a teal. And most of the teal seats are not going back. With some of Dutton’s messaging, it seems he’s given up on them.

In trying to explain his rhetoric, some have suggested that he’s pitching to win One Nation votes, or at least their second-preference votes. This makes some sense. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has been polling around 7 to 10 per cent in recent weeks. That’s higher than the 5 per cent it fetched at the last election.

But the Coalition won about two-thirds of One Nation preferences last time. And, with Dutton’s policy of cutting immigration and his position on the Voice, he’s sure to get at least as big a share this time around. Is it really a smart trade-off to surrender votes from the centre in pursuit of preferences at the fringe, preferences he’s mostly set to win anyway?

The Coalition campaign has been rife with blunders large and small. A small one? Dutton’s expressed intention to move into Kirribilli House may have been honest, but it was an unforced error. Labor used it to declare him arrogant. People in his home city of Brisbane thought his enthusiasm to live in Sydney unfaithful.

And a large one. Labor promised two small tax cuts. The Coalition opposed it. For a modest cost to the budget, Labor won an enormous political victory over the Liberals. Who’s the party of lower taxes now?

The Coalition compounded this error with its policy costings on Thursday; the Coalition promises a bigger federal deficit than the Labor Party in its first two years in office.

Finally, a fundamental blunder. An election campaign chiefly is about the future. The Coalition’s campaign chiefly has been about the past. Dutton says that this election is a referendum on Labor’s three years in office. Are you better off than you were three years ago? Even its slogan about getting “back on track” was a look to the past, to a track most would rather forget.

It was important for Dutton to remind everyone of Labor’s failings, but an election is a referendum on the future. Scott Morrison forgot this basic truth in 2022, and Dutton forgot it in 2025. Labor’s campaign overwhelmingly has been about the future.

Besides, Labor had managed to give voters a faint glimpse of hope that things are turning around in the real world and not just the rhetorical – inflation is falling, the government is offering extra cost-of-living relief and the Reserve Bank has started to cut interest rates.

The Liberals, of course, have announced some winning policies. The one that cut through to voters is the promise to cut petrol excise by 25¢ a litre. It’d help with the cost of living, and it looks to the future. The problem is that Labor can say its tax cuts are permanent; the Coalition excise cut is only temporary.

The moment Albanese announced the formal campaign, he campaigned aggressively. On day one, he went straight to Dutton’s seat of Dickson. Dutton, by contrast, went to lunch with the Chinese business community in Melbourne. Albanese was seeking to win fresh advantage while Dutton was looking to recover from the past mistake of alienating the Chinese-Australian vote.

Luck also happened to be on Labor’s side. Donald Trump’s tariffs unsettled the entire world. This changed the atmosphere. “Everyone is seeking the solace of the status quo,” as Jim Reed puts it. Australian voters were more inclined to look for reassurance rather than risk change.

And Labor finished the campaign as it had started, with Albanese flashing a Medicare card and returning to Dickson to hunt Dutton. The Coalition threw the election away. Labor took it away. And Trump helped them.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.

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