Dutton can say and do whatever he chooses, knowing he’ll always be given cover

For a very long time, the worst job in federal politics has been opposition leader immediately after the fall of a government. Take that gig and you won’t become prime minister. The losing streak goes back more than 50 years. Billy Snedden, Andrew Peacock, Kim Beazley, Brendan Nelson, Bill Shorten – none made it to the top job.

In the political world, it’s known colloquially as the death seat, the role that requires the leader to sacrifice their ambitions for the good of the party as the vanquished recover from defeat.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

That orthodox expectation might need a rethink if Peter Dutton’s experience as opposition leader is the new normal. His looks like one of the easiest jobs in politics. He hasn’t had to oversee a serious assessment of what went wrong in the lead-up to 2022, when the Coalition lost 19 seats. There’s been no soul-searching or internal intellectual debate about the Liberal Party’s mission.

The instant view was that the Morrison government lost due to getting the politics wrong, not because it became a directionless, gimmicky mess. Once the Albanese government was sworn in and the new parliament got going in mid-2022, the Dutton opposition engaged in full-scale rhetorical combat against the new administration. In other words, it set about getting the politics right.

The strategy is working. If the saying about opinion polls that “the trend is your friend” is correct, then Peter Dutton and the trend are not just best mates but will be celebrating Christmas and spending the summer together with their families at their jointly owned beach house. Since early last year, the ratings for Dutton and the Coalition have been rising while Anthony Albanese and the ALP’s standings have been falling to the extent that the PM and the government are now trailing their opponents. And there are only a few months to go before an election will have to be called.

How has Dutton done it? For one thing, he got lucky by having Albanese as an adversary. Albanese overestimated the durability of his popularity and blew a massive hole in it by embarking on the Voice referendum too soon. Should the government fall next year, history is likely to judge that decision as the greatest error by any newly installed prime minister.

But there’s far more to it than that. Dutton made an astute conclusion about underlying changes in political allegiances within the community. Having seen many well-off voters turn away from his party in 2022, he noted that low-income voters in Labor seats were open to the notion of heading in the Liberals’ direction. He’s gone hard on populist ideas on cutting migration and hitting corporations, particularly the big supermarkets, in pursuit of those hard-pressed voters.

However, there’s one other element that gives him a special advantage. Dutton has been able to say and do whatever he chooses safe in the knowledge that if it doesn’t work out, most commercial media organisations in every state can be relied upon to give him cover. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. His attacks on the government are amplified; his reversals, policy missteps and refusals to provide detail are buried or ignored.

The biggest of his policy proposals, of which so far there are very few, is the creation of a nuclear energy industry. Notionally, it is to deal with climate change, although in the Coalition, climate change is the phenomenon that dare not speak its name. If we were to listen only to the Coalition on climate change, we would certainly never hear that it requires urgent action. That’s because most of its members think it’s bulldust. Nuclear energy, which the Howard government banned via legislation in 1998 and the three Liberal prime ministers who followed him made no attempt to overturn, is about demonising and avoiding renewable energy where possible – no more, no less.

Dutton’s policy has been made up on the fly. When first proposed, it was based on small modular reactors. When the business and technical case in favour of that technology started to falter this year, the policy switched to a mixture of older-style large reactors with a few smaller ones. The plan is to establish an entire new industry on the public purse. No costings have been provided, but the price tag has to be in the tens of billions of dollars. Traditionally, that “policy” would be viewed as a shambles and render the leader putting it forward, who has called for the nation to have a “mature discussion” on the issue, as questionable. But not now.

Dutton pledged in his budget reply six months ago to slash permanent migrant numbers. Last week he said his approach would “create 40,000 homes straight away”. How? We have not been told. Nor have we seen any modelling on the economic effect of such a large cut, given how much, with our tight labour market, migration drives the nation’s economic growth. He says these things, there are a few questions, which he bats away, and that’s it.

Some of the opposition’s positions move almost into the realm of the absurd. Last week, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor was in high dudgeon over the government’s adjustment of the Future Fund’s statement of expectations. Treasurer Jim Chalmers asked the fund to have regard for the energy transition, the supply of residential housing and Australian infrastructure when it makes its investments. He wants the Future Fund to transition into a genuine sovereign wealth fund once it has fully covered the Commonwealth public service’s superannuation liabilities during the next decade.

Taylor won’t have a bar of it. “The Future Fund is Australia’s money. It’s not the treasurer’s money, it’s not the prime minister’s money. It’s not there to invest in their pet projects,” he thundered. So there you have it: housing, the energy transition and infrastructure are niche stuff for the shadow treasurer. Silly. But, hey, it was a line to get him through another week.

No doubt the Coalition will release more information on its proposals before election day but only when it suits its political strategy. That strategy is succeeding, but that’s not the same thing as putting together a coherent, cohesive plan for a G20 nation in an increasingly uncertain and fractious world.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist.

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