The politics of grievance was a winner for Trump. It’s not working for Dutton

Two weeks into an election campaign, the Liberal Party is still spending money on ads to introduce its leader to the voter.

Peter Dutton speaks of his time as a Queensland police officer, as a small business owner, as a minister in the Howard government. The ad has been described as an effort to “humanise” him.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton visits Vibe petrol station in Canning Vale in the West Australian seat of Tangney on Friday.Credit: James Brickwood

This tells us two things. One, the party’s research has found that Dutton has an image problem. Second, that they’ve failed to address it adequately. They’ve had three years to prepare. They now have three weeks. What have they been doing?

By contrast, Labor is not spending money or wasting opportunity in introducing its leader. Labor is promoting its policies as a solution and smashing Dutton as the danger.

It’s way too late to be trying to assert your candidate’s character or, harder yet, to change it in the electorate’s mind. And almost impossible to achieve under enemy fire.

“They didn’t do enough to define Dutton before the starter’s gun was fired,” says former Labor campaigner and now Redbridge director Kos Samaras. “They should have started a year ago. They’ve allowed their opponent to define him.”

Illustration by Simon Letch

This is emblematic of the Coalition’s unreadiness. Its ads could be better if it had more policy to advertise. But which policy? Last week’s policy against letting public servants work from home or this week’s policy of allowing it?

And which policy of cutting government spending? Last year’s one to sack 41,000 public servants immediately, or last week’s one to allow the 41,000 to leave more gradually through natural attrition and redundancies? Or the last hour’s one, which appears to leave room for all three options?

How could a major party fumble basic policy decisions like this? It’s too late to make major policy changes once the campaign is under way. And it’s almost too late to make big, new policy announcements.

We’ll see one or two at this weekend’s formal campaign launches by the two main parties, but then they’ll be just about out of time. Early voting starts in just over a week, on April 22. And, with Easter and Anzac Day between now and election day, there’ll be scant opportunity to get public attention.

What has the Coalition been doing for the past three years? I think we know. It’s been coasting on public grievances. Public grievances are a stock-in-trade for any opposition, of course.

Dutton did a fine job of fanning the embers of disgruntlement. The Voice referendum gave him an opportunity for relevance and he seized it. By successfully opposing the Voice and portraying it as sign of Anthony Albanese’s preoccupation with fringe causes, he generated the first real heat that the prime minister had felt.

Albanese didn’t really recover. He soon felt the hot breath of the inflation dragon. Dutton did an expert job of channelling the heat politically so that it was concentrated on the prime minister.

After watching Albanese getting scorched for a year, without any hint of recovery in the opinion polls, the Coalition made a fatal error.

Most commentators were caught up in the moment and, in their excitement, forgot the first rule about opinion polls taken in between elections: they measure the absolute of people’s sentiment, which is “how do you think the government is going?” In the middle of a major blast of inflation, the answer was “not very bloody well”.

But elections are not won or lost on this absolute, they are predicated on a choice, which is: “do you think the government or the opposition would do a better job over the next three years?”

Many years ago, I asked John Howard whether a particular politician, held in public disdain at the time, was unelectable? His answer: “No one is unelectable.”

Because it’s not a question of the absolute: “Do you think he’d be a good prime minister?” It’s always relative. It always depends on who he or she is up against.

The commentariat, on a short memory cycle, can get away with forgetting this reality. But the Coalition shouldn’t have been swept up in it. But it was. “They thought, ‘We’re doing really well, we don’t need to do much’,” Samaras remarks. “They forgot that the other side would be doing something about it. The Coalition’s campaign is probably one of the worst I’ve seen.”

Scenes from the campaign trail on Friday, April 11.Credit: James Brickwood, Alex Ellinghausen

The Coalition also was entranced by the remarkable return of Donald Trump. He demonstrated the full force of the politics of grievance. From March last year, when he became the presumptive Republican nominee, he stormed back into power by fomenting and channelling Americans’ resentments and anger.

Trump’s return seemed to validate the idea that a challenger could ride the wave of popular grievance to power. And that would be enough.

Grievance and anger are perennials in politics. Anger is the original political emotion. As the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk pointed out: “At the beginning of the first sentence of the European tradition, in the first verse of The Iliad, the word ‘rage’ occurs.”

It’s powerful and it’s dangerous. It’s powerful because it moves people to action. It’s dangerous because when grievance is allowed to overtake rationality, it becomes obsessive. Trump showcased its power and its danger.

Anyone in any sane country who’s identified with Trump is in reputational danger, as Peter Dutton is finding out.Credit:

In the US, resentment and rage are much more politically useful than in Australia. Because, in a system of voluntary voting, people have to be coaxed or outraged into action. Kamala Harris drew on some outrage but mostly relied on coaxing, while Trump was heavy on outrage. It was all about carnage and corruption, remember, spiced with occasional invocations of possible violence.

It worked for Trump, at least for long enough to win the election. And, in Australia, it contributed to the Coalition’s rising excitement that an unhappy electorate would be enough to deliver victory.

But Trump’s campaign was misleading to an Australian political mimic, and Trump’s presidency now is positively harmful to it. No one appears to have told Clive “Trumpet of Parrots” Palmer, but Australia is not America.

In a system of mandatory voting, a candidate for the prime ministership has to persuade the electorate that he or she will be a better choice than the opponent. And a candidate doesn’t achieve that by merely fanning public grievance and proposing grudge-based solutions.

Trump’s campaign was misleading to an Australian political mimic, and Trump’s presidency now is positively harmful to it.

That’s why Peter Dutton has a persistent image problem. He highlights real problems but lacks credible solutions to them. We, so far, see no evidence that the policy work has been done.

You can’t solve a cost-of-living crisis with a 12-month cut to fuel excise and a fingers-crossed 3 per cent cut in electricity prices.

And why oppose working from home for public servants? It looks like a policy motivated by a grudge against the public sector in particular, women more widely and workers in general. The only people who’d love that policy are already planning to vote for the Coalition.

This is not America. It might be necessary to fire up the base, but it’s insufficient. In Australia, you need to appeal to the sensible centre, people who recoil from anger and grudge-based politics. Labor learnt that the hard way when Bill Shorten talked darkly of “the big end of town”, allowing the Liberals to paint him as a resentful socialist plying “the politics of envy”.

Neither are the politics of anger the way to victory. It’s certainly not the way to win back the six traditional rock-ribbed Liberal seats that turned teal three years ago. These former “heartland” seats turned against the Liberals at the 2022 election chiefly because of frustration with their climate change policies and attitudes to women.

Do the Liberals today really think they can win them back with fantasy nuclear reactors, cheaper petrol and a boorish refusal to make any progress towards their own 2022 election review’s recommendation that they preselect 50 per cent women for parliament?

Trump’s example was misleading to Australian mimics, and his presidency is damaging to them. For reasons of political habit or intellectual atrophy, Australian conservatives persist in thinking of US Republicans as like-minded conservatives. That era is gone. Donald Trump is a radical, certainly not a conservative. And his first three months in power are so wantonly destructive that anyone in any sane country who’s identified with him is in reputational danger, as Dutton is discovering to his cost.

Excited by their dominance of meaningless midterm polls, misled by the false analogy of Trump’s political success, the Coalition allowed itself to think it could win without doing the work required. And it still might. If three weeks was once a long time in politics, it’s now an eternity. It’d have to be lucky. And, as the adage runs; the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.

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