Dutton on the march in Victoria, say Liberals, with four seats in sight

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is plotting an unlikely pathway to The Lodge by picking up four new metropolitan and urban fringe seats in the state where the Liberal Party has been a basket case – Victoria.

Dutton’s campaign team is focused on picking up the seats of Aston and Chisholm in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, McEwen in the outer north, and bayside’s Goldstein, positioning the city as pivotal to the next federal election due to unrest about a weak economy and a diminished state Labor government.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

After a decade of dire results in Victoria, and six years after Dutton famously said Melburnians were scared to eat out due to African youth gangs, Liberal strategists are growing in confidence that Dutton’s hardman image can work in a progressive state where polling shows his popularity is similar to Albanese’s. Labor’s negative campaign on Dutton is yet to be fully realised, however.

Victoria, the Coalition’s weakest state, where Dutton is more unpopular than in NSW and Queensland, has not factored into electoral calculus to this level since 1990, when Bob Hawke lost nine seats. Traditional marginal contests and newer Labor v Greens and Liberal v teal contests mean more electorates are up for grabs. The Liberals lost Kooyong, Goldstein, Higgins and Chisholm in 2022, leaving the party with only a handful of Melbourne seats.

Senior Victorian frontbencher James Paterson said fundraising and volunteer numbers were stronger than at the same time before the 2022 election defeat. Candidates had been preselected earlier than ever and the party was “well placed to make gains”.

“If Labor goes backwards in Victoria, it’s very hard to see how they can cling to a majority,” he said.

On Monday, Victorian senator Jane Hume tied the Albanese government to what she claimed was a tired state Labor government driving down house prices and struggling to manage high debt accrued under former premier Daniel Andrews, whose personal popularity has not transferred to successor Jacinta Allan.

Dutton told Melbourne radio presenter Neil Mitchell earlier this month that seats “we hadn’t expected to be on the radar” were in play. However, Dutton lamented the deficiencies of the Victorian Liberal Party, whose leader John Pesutto is being dragged through a damaging defamation case, and warned against a “Labor-lite approach” in Victoria.

Internal Liberal Party polling, detailed to this masthead by three senior Liberals unable to share the data publicly, said the opposition was in front or neck-and-neck in Aston, Chisholm, McEwen and Goldstein, with Kooyong and Dunkley less likely chances.

This masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor shows Labor’s primary vote is 29 per cent in Victoria, down from 33 per cent at the 2022 election. The Coalition vote share in Victoria is 36 per cent.

The Coalition’s national primary vote is at 37 per cent and above 40 per cent in other polls, with the two-party vote effectively even in an average of all polls. Those numbers give Dutton a chance of getting close to the 76 seats needed to form government, but a Labor minority is more likely.

The party’s positivity is tempered, however, by upcoming Labor advertising which will focus on Dutton’s record of conservative stances and attack policies such as nuclear energy. Goldstein’s independent MP, Zoe Daniel, argued voters had not turned their minds to what a Dutton prime ministership would look like, noting that the right side of politics was becoming more extreme.

“I think once there’s an election in the frame, then that’s a different set of decisions,” Daniel said.

“The fight for the centre is real, and this is the battleground. I’m trying to be the reason voice in the centre … and you’ve got, you know, sort of extreme left and increasingly harder right with more extreme positions.”

Liberals campaign officials consider Goldstein a greater chance of coming back to the party than Kooyong, where independent Monique Ryan’s primary vote is 6 points higher than Daniel’s.

The Liberal Party thinks it can take Goldstein from independent MP Zoe Daniel.Credit: James Brickwood

Former Liberal Goldstein MP Tim Wilson has been campaigning heavily for months, though Daniel said enthusiasm for the independent movement remained high.

The Liberal sources briefed on party research said the move towards Dutton was being driven in significant part by men concerned about the economy after the 2022 election where “wives influenced the voting behaviour of their unmotivated husbands”. Polls show climate change and non-economic issues are less important for voters than in the last election.

Labor picked up three Victorian seats at the last election and now holds 24 of 39 seats – a level of dominance similar to the Coalition’s stranglehold on Queensland.

Dutton was humiliated by the byelection loss in the Melbourne seat of Aston last year, but his fortunes turned shortly afterwards when the opposition decided to oppose the Voice to parliament.

Liberal strategist-turned-pollster Tony Barry said the election remained Labor’s to lose, but the Liberal brand was improving in Victoria. He said while Dutton was hoovering up right-wing minor party voters, he needed to win more swinging voters to win an election.

“Peter Dutton is eating into Labor’s territory and has put a number of other seats back into play but … Albanese still has more pathways to the Lodge,” Barry said.

“Labor’s brand in Victoria is struggling relative to its recent record highs.”

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