The Dutton delusion: Many election myths were believed, then busted

One of the great dangers in politics – for both practising politicians and those, like me, who write about them – is in accepting the stories that everybody else is telling.

Last week, Liberal leadership hopeful Angus Taylor told The Australian Financial Review that his party needed to have “a more collaborative and collegiate environment, where we can have more robust debate despite differences of view”.

Illustration by Jozsef Benke.Credit:

It’s a good point. It is clear that the environment of the past three years did the Coalition no favours: changing it is crucial. And so it was odd to hear Taylor say, as well, “Dutts actually did do an extraordinary job holding the party room together”.

Perhaps this was simply the praise that sprang most easily to mind after the Coalition’s devastating defeat. Still, it was a little confusing. Was this unity, as Taylor’s other comments seemed to suggest, a cause of defeat or a landmark achievement?

Still, you can understand why it sprang easily to mind. For the past three years, Coalition unity has been repeatedly mentioned as an unequivocally good thing: a virtue, it seemed, in its own right. And not just by the Coalition: it was routinely described in much of the media as a signal achievement of Peter Dutton, an obviously good fact about his leadership to be praised.

And so it might have continued, had not the cost of that unity become horribly clear on election night: the consequence of policies like work-from-home that voters hated, a nuclear policy that served little purpose other than making it possible for climate deniers to sit alongside Liberal moderates, a Trump-lite approach that was wrong for the times, and a series of contradictory policy positions that were obviously never properly tested through discussion.

Peter Dutton, then the opposition leader, and Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price hailed the decision of the Australian people to say No to an Indigenous Voice to parliament in October 2023.Credit: Dan Peled

The reality is that after a large election loss, like the one in 2022, a party needs to resolve its differences over what is wrong and where to go. There are two ways to do this. One is via a series of elections in which its approach is gradually sharpened – which tends to be both exhausting and demoralising. The other is by having open debate. Dutton and those who praised him for maintaining unity were, in effect, choosing the long road of trial and error. Perhaps worse, the “unity” path not only delivered defeat: it means the Coalition is three years behind where it could be in conducting that difficult discussion.

We all can and should criticise the Coalition for this. But what should not be missed, as we head into another three-year term, is that much of the press backed this approach. Part of the Coalition’s mistake was to believe its own publicity.

And this was far from the only example. At several critical moments, much of the media – and no, not just the Murdoch press – backed in the Coalition’s errors, amplifying and reinforcing them.

Unity as a success story was one. The second was the narrative that took hold around the referendum: that it was a triumph for Dutton, proof of his ability and that his political instinct was right for the times. In fact, after the election defeat, it looks more likely that the Voice destroyed him, both by entrenching his image with voters and by convincing him he was doing everything right. But we shouldn’t forget that Dutton had help with that: much of the media was convinced of the same thing.

The final error is related. If the Voice did as much damage to Labor as was routinely assumed, Albanese – given the harm caused by inflation – should have been doing terribly in the polls. But that was never the case. And this is why it was remarkable that such a consensus formed around the idea that majority government was impossible, and even that Albanese was staring at disaster. Facts were ignored in favour of a vibe.

In each case, these stories took hold quickly. The Dutton “unity” achievement claim was made early in his leadership; once established it was rarely questioned. The story that the Voice defeat was harmful mostly to Albanese appeared immediately after the result and is still being repeated. And Dutton only got his nose in front briefly before the polls were being interpreted as foretelling Albanese’s fall.

What is crucial to note, now, is that these were only ever stories, not facts: first-glance narratives that deserved more interrogation, especially as time wore on. Instead, those early stories became harder to resist the more they were repeated by a small group of people to one another. They undeservedly attained the status of truth.

In those cases, that small group was the press and the political class. But you can see parallels in the way many discussions now unfold. These past three years have seen horribly damaging debates: around the Indigenous Voice, Israel and Gaza and migration. The experience suggests we are not very good at having such discussions. There is not enough listening. Partisan narratives become embedded early; those who attempt to question such narratives are often ignored or dismissed as political enemies.

Such tendencies worsen as you approach a vote, be it a referendum or an election: people become even more attached to those narratives in order to sharpen the boundaries between those on their side and who they have come to see as the opposition, as they hope for victory and seek to ward off defeat. As the pressure rises, defensiveness rises too.

The weeks after an election, in contrast, offer us all a chance to leave such divisions behind, to revisit our own positions and to wonder if, on some topics, our supposed opponents might just have a point. To question established narratives as we absorb new information. And this is true of the media too, which, let’s be honest, can often be defensive. So far, this renewed sense of openness captures some of what has happened since the election, as everyone seeks to adjust to a new reality.

As a nation, we need such habits to persist beyond the next few weeks.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist. He is an author and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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