Dutton has a peculiar obsession with details. Perhaps he could offer some of his own

Peter Dutton is a details guy. But he’s not your usual details guy. He likes details, for sure. As far back as 2022 he said there was “bewilderment” at the Albanese government’s failure to provide sufficient detail on its proposal for an Indigenous voice to parliament. For months afterwards, he kept up the call for more and more information, but no amount of detail was enough for him.

Eventually, he came clean and opposed the Voice. But his apparently insatiable hunger for detail, designed to undermine Anthony Albanese and the idea of the Voice, proved to be a political masterstroke. It handed Dutton a decisive win over Albanese, with more than 60 per cent of voters rejecting the Voice at last year’s referendum. So we know Dutton likes calling for details. It’s become his familiar response to just about anything the government puts up.

Peter Dutton is often short on detail.Credit: Illustration: Dionne Gain

But this is where his status as a peculiar details guy comes into play: he’s all take and no give. The biggest and boldest idea Dutton has produced as Liberal leader is to create a nuclear energy industry by building seven nuclear power plants around the country by the middle of the century.

Indeed, it’s one of the biggest and most challenging ideas put forward by a major party in recent times. Nuclear energy is subject to formal, legislated bans federally and in the three biggest states, so to overturn that and create a new industrial sector with all of the necessary expertise and financing would be a monumental task.

Soon – by next May – Dutton will ask Australian voters for permission to put that idea into action. It warrants deep and wide public discussion, to say the least. But if you want to know how this proposal will work, how much it will cost, how it will be paid for, what it will mean for Australia’s carbon emissions reductions in the long years we spend waiting for nuclear energy to come online, or a host of other details, that’s stiff. Dutton told us this week that he’ll fill the public in on the costings only when it suits him and his party. Got that?

In purely political terms, what Dutton has achieved since taking over as Liberal leader is considerable. He sized up Albanese, judging correctly that public support for the prime minister was shallow and could be eroded by sustained rough-house tactics. Poll after poll has suggested that Labor has fallen back to roughly even with the Coalition. Albanese’s personal approval ratings have fallen into the negative zone and the electoral contest is now a day-to-day scrap, with no clear front-runner.

Taken in the broad, that’s good and potentially great news for the Coalition. Apart from the nuclear energy proposal, which can’t be called a policy yet, its offerings have been thin. Imagine if they could get back into office without having to do all the slow, grinding work of establishing and advocating a comprehensive policy agenda. That would certainly be in keeping with Dutton’s political modus operandi, which is chiefly about clobbering the other side.

But as the election looms, has Dutton’s style of oppositional leadership peaked? Like many a self-styled hard man, there’s a fair bit of bluff in his approach. Telling voters all their difficulties with the transition away from fossil fuels will be over if they embrace nuclear is not courageous. Being frank about the costs and giving people enough time to absorb and test the information is courageous.

There’s also a good deal of projection in Dutton’s rhetoric. Last year, he ran hard on the accusation of the Albanese government as wildly divisive because it ran a referendum. This from the man who as defence minister told Australians to prepare for war with China, who asserted that Melburnians were too afraid to go to restaurants at night because of African gangs, won’t have a bar of Gazans being accepted as refugees, and who said it was a mistake to take Lebanese Muslims as immigrants.

On that last contribution, he later volunteered that he had apologised to the Lebanese Muslim community. But when asked recently for the details of the apology, he refused to say to whom he had apologised and when it had taken place. He also condemned journalists who had made the inquiries as left-wingers. More than any major party leader since Mark Latham, he is very much an us-and-them player.

Hope has been running out on the Labor side since Dutton scored that big psychological and political victory over Albanese in the Voice referendum nearly a year ago, but there is still some remnant of dynamism in our public discourse. While Albanese has lost his early primacy over the Liberal leader, there’s been no noticeable community groundswell of enthusiasm for Dutton, who remains an unpopular figure.

In our ridiculously short three-year electoral cycle, the election campaign has effectively already begun. As the contest ramps up, it will be highly personalised and quasi-presidential. Albanese is hardly renowned as a polished or very effective campaigner or policy advocate. But there’s a chance he could profit in a head-to-head match-up with Dutton who, after almost a quarter-century in parliament, is best known not for his bright optimism but for his gloomy negativism - and selective affection for details.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist.

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