Sink or swim: Why victory is a huge leap for leaden Albanese and Dutton

As Anthony Albanese ushered in the new year on the sloping lawns of Kirribilli House, he might have reflected on how the foreshore of Sydney Harbour could determine whether he will still be resident in 12 months’ time. It is hard to picture a Liberal prime minister winning a parliamentary majority without a seat overlooking this beautiful expanse of water – something the party can no longer boast following the teal wave in 2022.

Illustration: Joe Benke Credit:

Three Liberal prime ministers this century have occupied harbourside seats: Tony Abbott in Warringah, Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth and John Howard in harbour-adjacent Bennelong. None are now in Liberal hands. If that remains true after the 2025 federal election, Albanese stands a good chance of remaining prime minister, albeit most probably as the head of a minority government. Given the teals arose in response to Scott Morrison’s toxicity on climate change, and the party’s rightward turn, it would come as a surprise if they threw their support behind an opposition leader more conservative than his predecessor and for whom nuclear power is the radioactive centrepiece of energy policy.

Dutton has not entirely turned his back on the harbour. His pro-Israel stance, he hopes, will be rewarded in Wentworth, which has the highest proportion of Jewish voters of any parliamentary division. That might also help him in another teal-held seat, Goldstein in Melbourne. But the Liberal leader has gone hunting elsewhere, reorienting his party away from the country’s most affluent suburbs, and even the top end of town where so many Liberal voters earn their crust. Kooyong, Robert Menzies’ old seat, which is now held by the teal Monique Ryan, is no longer the spiritual home of the Liberal Party.

I suspect the effect of Trump’s victory in November has been emboldening rather than shape-shifting for Dutton. It has encouraged him to reveal himself more fully.

For Dutton, blue collar is the new blue ribbon. “The Liberal Party is the party of the worker,” he declared in September, pursuing the populist version of class warfare so voguish on the global right.

In Duttonland, the sausage sizzle at Bunnings takes precedence over the food hall at David Jones. Woolies, meanwhile, is portrayed as a wellspring of wokeism. Dutton began last year, remember, by calling for a boycott of the supermarket giant over its decision not to stock Australia Day-themed merchandise. Here he plundered the populist playbook, blending anti-big business sentiment with nostalgic nationalism. Only this week, Woolies announced a retreat on that policy. It will sell flags and other paraphernalia for the January 26 celebrations. Either way, in attacking Woolworths, Dutton did not appear to be worried about offending the demographic most troubled by Australia Day, the vast majority of First Nations people.

By year’s end, Dutton stood accused of being more blatant in his wedge-work, after pledging to remove the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags from official government press conferences. For the former Queensland cop, Indigenous affairs appears to be becoming something of a culture war go-to. Under the guise of national unity, Dutton seems intent on pursuing a splintering brand of politics, near-jackhammering the political terrain.

The temptation is to label him a Donald Trump impersonator. However, long before the New York tycoon descended the golden escalator, Dutton had boycotted the 2008 national apology delivered by Kevin Rudd to members of the Stolen Generation and positioned himself as a watchman of Australia’s borders. So I suspect the effect of Trump’s victory in November has been emboldening rather than shape-shifting for Dutton. It has encouraged him to reveal himself more fully.

Evidently, the success of Trumpism has bolstered his belief that hardline conservatism offers a speedy route back to power after just one term in opposition – a hardline conservatism, moreover, no longer diluted by liberal-minded Liberals, such as Simon Birmingham and Paul Fletcher, who have retired from frontline politics.

A speech in October to a state Liberal Party conference in Perth gave a preview of Dutton’s election stump speech. “Today’s Labor Party has abandoned its working-class roots,” he claimed. Instead, it was dominated by activists waging “environmental and social crusades”. Dutton championed nuclear energy, lambasted Labor’s “renewables-only energy policy train wreck” and assailed the government for opening “the migration floodgates”.

His warning that “the green-teals or the extreme-Greens” would hold the balance of power in a hung parliament will be a recurring theme. And expect to hear this question almost on a loop: “Are you better off today than you were two years ago?” Given that 12 out of 13 of the RBA’s rate rises have come since Labor took office, the answer from many Australians will be no.

Those hikes in interest rates, and the spike in inflation that has driven up the cost of borrowing, explain the mutinous mood of anti-incumbency that has plagued governments the world over. In 2024, every government in a developed nation facing re-election suffered setbacks. And though its present strain is especially virulent, anti-incumbency has long afflicted first-term Australian governments. As George Megalogenis reminds us in his brilliant piece in Quarterly Essay, titled Minority Report: The New Shape of Australian Politics: “Every incoming federal government of the postwar era went backwards on seeking re-election”. For John Howard in 1998, that meant losing 19 Coalition seats. In 2010, the Gillard government suffered a net loss of 11 seats. Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition lost 14.

The prime minister needs to tell an evocative story about his government, but he does not sound entirely sure what that narrative should be.

If Albanese suffers a net loss of just three seats, he will not be able to form a majority government. That said, the arithmetic of elections past also speaks of the challenge facing Dutton, who needs a net gain of 21 seats to win a majority.

It would take an unusually talented prime minister to defy electoral history, and to buck the prevailing trend of anti-incumbency. Even a friendly biographer would struggle to describe Albanese in those terms. Indeed, he begins 2025 as he started 2024: recovering from the shellacking of the Voice referendum in October 2023. His deficiencies as a communicator, which the Voice campaign highlighted, continue to plague him. His delivery is often disjointed – syncopated even. Words seem to trip over each other. This verbal tic tends to become more pronounced when he is on the defensive, which he was throughout 2024. On the cost-of-living crisis. On the rise in antisemitism. On his new cliff-top home. On those Qantas upgrades.

During the 2022 election, Albanese was at his most fluent when describing his “Australian Dream” rise, from public housing in Sydney, where he was raised by a single mother, to the threshold of The Lodge. But he cannot sing that aria again. Nor is Morrison around to help him. Indeed, Albanese’s decline in the polls tracks closely with his predecessor’s fading from public view. The prime minister needs to tell an evocative story about his government, but he does not sound entirely sure what that narrative should be.

Often it is said that Albanese has not yet found his prime ministerial voice. But arguably it is more a case of this one-time tribune of the Labor Left losing a sense of self. Conducting a small-target campaign in 2022 had a shrinking effect. The Labor man who once defined his politics with the phrase “I like fighting Tories. That’s what I do” appears disorientated by the end of the major party duopoly. Maybe a reason why Albanese so often sounds tongue-tied is because his eyes keep flitting between the threat posed by Dutton and the threat on his left flank from the Greens.

For Albanese, Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris also offers cautionary lessons. First, that he cannot rely solely on demonising Dutton. Second, that the Liberal leader’s rightward lurch is not automatically disqualifying. Dutton is as much a product of Australia as Trump is of America. Across large swaths of the country, he is seen as more mainstream than Albanese.

My hunch has long been that the extended honeymoon Albanese enjoyed for the entirety of his first year in office fuelled a sense of hubris, and with it an inflated assessment of his political gifts. It encouraged him to believe he could win the Voice referendum without bipartisan support, emulate Bob Hawke as a beloved unifying leader and dominate Dutton.

An irony is that 2025 could bring to the fore what may be his true superpower: his skill as a negotiator, numbers man and builder of fragile parliamentary coalitions. As he demonstrated as leader of the House when Julia Gillard headed a minority government, Albanese is a better backroom deal-maker than front-of-house prime minister. In this age of angry anti-incumbency, will that be enough to save his beleaguered government?

Nick Bryant is a former BBC correspondent and author of The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost Its Way.

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