‘We don’t need more vanilla’: Liberals are asking whether Peter Dutton can still win

Peter Dutton began the 2025 election campaign needing everything to go right to claim majority government.

It would be a mighty task. The last one-term government in Australia was that of James Scullin, who lost office in January 1932. But when parliament returned in February, some of Dutton’s less discreet and more optimistic colleagues thought they were in with a chance.

Coalition leader Peter Dutton campaigning in Perth on Friday.Credit: James Brickwood

Instead, in the first fortnight of the campaign, reality has hit and no one is talking about a majority now. In quiet corners of the Coalition, discussion has turned instead to whether tension between the leader’s office and campaign headquarters has contributed to Dutton’s haphazard start to the campaign.

In week one, Dutton suggested he’d prefer to live in Kirribilli rather than The Lodge, surprised Liberal campaign headquarters and senior Coalition ministers with his short-lived concept of holding various referenda, and struggled to explain his plan to slash public servants’ jobs.

Not to mention US President Donald Trump imposing global economy-roiling tariffs.

Many of Dutton’s colleagues think week two went better. That’s despite Dutton dumping a candidate on Sunday, backing down from his work from home edict for public servants on Monday, and losing his first debate against Anthony Albanese on Tuesday, according to the audience.

And at least six Coalition candidates – including three in must-win seats – have faced questions over their background, associations and qualifications for office.

So at the two-week mark, does Dutton have any chance of saving his campaign and perhaps claiming at least minority government?

Some in Labor believe the steady transfer of control for the campaign from the prime minister’s office to party headquarters, led by national secretary Paul Erickson, has helped with discipline in the government’s ranks.

In contrast, several Coalition sources, including senior MPs, say there has been friction between the key personnel in Dutton’s team, who have worked with him for years, and the campaign unit led by federal director Andrew Hirst.

During the first week of the campaign, a shadow minister told this masthead there was frustration with Dutton’s personal staff for allowing the leader to continue to appear on late-night Sky News shows where he has talked about “woke” school syllabuses and other non-mainstream issues.

Such tussles for influence over messaging, policy and control of the leader’s diary have happened before. In 2013, for example, Kevin Rudd’s travelling party was in open warfare with Labor headquarters staff who remained loyal to Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan.

Former Morrison government media chief Andrew Carswell pointed to the rumblings about tension within the campaign in an opinion piece on Tuesday, referring to splits over early campaign decisions caused by “advisers who think they know better than accomplished party bosses, or detachment between the travelling and campaign teams”.

Just before the election was called, the national campaign team based in Parramatta was bemused when a story appeared in this masthead suggesting the Coalition was thinking about a referendum on deporting dual citizens, an idea some campaign staff had never heard about.

But Dutton has no one like Rudd haunting his campaign, and time to turn things around, with pollsters cautioning that about half of voters are still open to persuasion by either side.

One Liberal insider, who asked not to be named, said most voters had not yet tuned into the election, and predicted a majority of Australians would start paying attention only after Anzac Day.

“Dutts has hit his stride, week one was like preseason, he is more disciplined now,” they said. “Good campaigning is about repetition, and we are now hearing complaints from journos about visiting so many petrol stations. But to the ordinary voter, they just think ‘he talks a lot about cutting petrol taxes’.”

After a first week spent visiting everything from mosques to vineyards, and eating yum cha, Dutton homed in on key images during the second week: he visited six petrol stations and three factories in seven days, with fuel tankers and high-vis reminding voters of a more disciplined message on fuel excise cuts and energy prices.

But that discipline has extended to other areas it sometimes does not during a campaign.

Peter Dutton on a campaign stop in Perth on Friday.Credit: James Brickwood

On the campaign trail, Dutton, unlike Albanese, has spent little time with travelling journalists, giving the impression of a candidate in the bunker. Coalition staff in Canberra do not walk through press gallery offices as they did in past elections. As he frequents private businesses, there have barely been any filmed interactions between Dutton and members of the public. Aside from a footy kick that went awry last weekend, the opportunity for unscripted moments has been kept to a minimum.

Despite an alleged terror plot targeting Dutton, the opposition leader said his movements hadn’t been curtailed for security reasons.

“I’ve never felt unsafe one day in this job, particularly with the protection from the AFP,” he told reporters in Perth on Friday. “It hasn’t stopped me from doing anything, and it won’t on this campaign.”

Liberal MP Warren Entsch, who has won his far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt at every election he has contested going back to 1996 (he did not contest in 2007), is retiring at this election and says it has been a “tough campaign for the Coalition”.

“I watched the first debate, it was cordial. I don’t think either side could say they smashed it,” he says. “And given we are closer to the end [of the campaign] now, we don’t need more vanilla.

“I think he [Dutton] has stepped up, in the last week, he has looked a lot better. There are always stumbles, you learn by it, and Dutts has significantly improved.”

Entsch says Albanese is playing gutter politics, after the prime minister criticised the Liberals’ candidate to succeed Entsch as a “shocker” for his controversial social media posts.

Another Liberal MP, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely, said Dutton had handled difficult issues such as the volte-face on the working-from-home policy well and “we can still come back”.

“There is still a pathway to minority government, but we have to win some of those teal seats now,” the MP says, echoing the view of many of their colleagues. “I can see us winning eight seats on a bad night and 15 on a good night.”

Either way, that would not be enough for majority.

A member of Dutton’s shadow cabinet says the party still has a handful of big announcements to make, starting at the formal campaign launch on Sunday, and that after having to eat the “shit sandwich” of dumping the party’s work-from-home policy – not to mention his father, Bruce, having a heart attack – Dutton has steadied the ship.

“There are some big things we haven’t put out yet, there is no question Labor had a better first week, but we will reframe the debate in positive terms and on our terms,” the MP said.

But time, as Entsch notes, is running out.

The next three weeks will reveal whether the opposition leader is prepared to throw caution to the wind and go for broke, seeking a win, or whether the former cop from Queensland is prepared to bank a handful of seats and adopt a two-term strategy, which some commentators suspect has been the plan all along.

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