The budget will reveal Labor’s level of confidence. Dutton’s already shown us his

As you near an election, there is a simple tell worth watching for. Which side sticks to what it’s doing? And which side changes strategy? The former hints at confidence. The latter suggests suspicion that the party’s current path is leading to defeat: a swerve is needed. This coming week should give us strong hints.

Take Labor’s eleventh-hour removal of Julia Gillard in 2013: changing prime ministers is the largest swerve possible. Or 2007, when John Howard made his concern obvious by committing to an emissions trading scheme he had previously opposed, followed by a dramatic intervention in Indigenous affairs.

Anthony Albanese’s defensive stance contrasts with Peter Dutton’s approach.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

At the beginning of this year, Labor seemed the party most likely to shake things up. In a sense, it did. Anthony Albanese came back to work sharper. Labor announced large policy, in the form of its Medicare investment. This seemed significant. But I suspect it was more like 2019, when a week before the vote, Scott Morrison announced what seemed like significant policy. In truth, the policy – helping first-home buyers – only seemed large against his small-target campaign. It was in fact confirmation of his strategy and should have acted as confirmation of something most of us worked out only afterwards: that the Coalition was on its way back and just needed to hold its nerve.

After mounting a small but steady comeback in recent polling, Labor ever more strongly gives the impression of playing defence: maintaining a winning position rather than risking it by trying something new. This week’s budget looks set to confirm that impression. If Tuesday night surprises on the bold side, then Labor is more worried than we think. More likely, we will get a continuation of its approach, which we also saw in its health announcement: policy tweaks backed up by tons of money.

In the Coalition, there are mounting signs of change. On Tuesday, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton confirmed a report in this masthead that he was considering a referendum allowing the deportation of dual nationals who commit certain crimes. That night, two reports appeared in separate newspapers: one suggesting the Coalition might increase defence spending, the other that caps to foreign student numbers were being considered. A few hours later, this masthead reported that the Coalition would add a section on antisemitism to the citizenship exam. The reports did not all seem to be deliberate leaks. They are perhaps best taken as an indication of directions and strategies the Coalition is strongly considering.

Credit: Illustration: Joe Benke

There were two things suggested by this subterranean frenzy. The first was the hint we may be about to see a shift towards larger policies, the type Dutton has mostly avoided (with the exception of nuclear, a policy the Coalition now seems largely to ignore).

The second is more telling. At the start of the year, there was a sense Dutton was trying to soften his image through more personal interviews and social media. To match this, the policy directions he aired – cutting public servants, tax deductions for small business lunches, following the late 2024 release of nuclear modelling – were departures from his earlier approach, when opposing the Indigenous Voice and cutting migration were his best-known policies. It seemed the Coalition sensed it had made as much ground as it could out of such topics and now was focused on making its leader more rounded and palatable.

The Coalition topics now surfacing mark a return to earlier ground. Has the “softening” effort worked, leaving Dutton free to return to his major strategy? Or – as the polls suggest – has that softening failed, and he is now reverting to what he thinks worked before? Which raises a crucial question: was Dutton doing better back then because of the strategy he was pursuing or was inflation simply doing his work for him?

There is a political logic to reverting to type: you don’t have to start from scratch, convincing voters of something new. But it has inherent danger, too: that you become cartoonish.

This is a political problem – but with ramifications for substantive, complex issues. “Israel will be able to count on our support again in the United Nations,” pledged Dutton last week. This in the same week as Israel ended the Gaza ceasefire and in one day killed 400 people, 130 of them children. Quite soon, probably, the number of dead in Gaza will reach 50,000. It is one thing to express broad support for a nation, quite another to offer its government a blank cheque. It should be remembered that thousands of Israelis last week protested against Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent actions.

The nuanced question underlying this – how to treat a long-term relationship with a nation, as distinct from a relationship with the temporary leader of a nation – is raised too by Donald Trump. Last week, Chris Barrie, a former chief of our defence force, amplified concerns he had previously expressed, saying the “vandals in the White House” meant he no longer considered America a reliable ally. It was too early to give up on AUKUS, but our priorities should be “reconsidered”. Which should remind us of the simplistic politics – America good and stable, China not – that drove both Morrison’s AUKUS decision and Labor’s embarrassingly hasty embrace of it. No side is immune from cartoonish thinking.

The other theme in all this is the difficulty of separating what is temporary from what is longer-lasting. If Labor wins, the story of this term will be told through the prism of external events: a global inflation crisis that drove voters away from incumbents and a maniacal US president who drove them back again, perhaps especially if those incumbents were on the left. Shifting strategies might tell us a little about what political parties are thinking, but the reality is that strategy itself often doesn’t matter, outweighed by circumstance. That’s a good reason for governments and oppositions alike to focus less on cartoonish policies and more on complex ones. Let’s see how many of those we get this week.

Sean Kelly is the author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.