Dutton can’t win by aping Trump – and he knows it

It would be an error for Australian conservatives to draw too many parallels between the election of Donald Trump and our election next year. Early indications are that this is an error that Peter Dutton and his senior colleagues are determined not to make.

However, there are others on the right who have gleefully embraced Trump’s victory as a template for Australian non-Labor politics. Few things would do more damage to the Coalition’s chances next year than to read the wrong lessons from Trump’s success.

Peter Dutton is not Donald Trump – or anything like him. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, AP

Of course, there will be similarities between the two elections, most obviously public hostility towards incumbents. In a year that has seen more elections in major democracies than before, almost every incumbent administration, irrespective of its political colour, has either been defeated or, as occurred in India and Japan, retained office after suffering greater-than-expected swings against it. As the opposite directions of the anti-incumbent upheavals in Britain and America demonstrate, what happened on November 5 reflects a global trend but not an ideological one.

In a US election in which endless exit polls identified the cost of living as the most important issue, the Democrats – like incumbents everywhere – would always have been vulnerable. That a change of administration took place in such circumstances was predictable. Yet the unremarkable nature of the outcome has been lost in the sheer spectacle of the most remarkable campaign since 1968 – perhaps ever.

There is no doubt the US election had just about everything: the president withdrawing after the campaign had already begun; two assassination attempts – one so breathtakingly close to succeeding that it generated its own mythology; the defection to the Republicans of the scion of the Kennedy dynasty and the counter-defection of Republicans once regarded as the gold standard of hard-right conservatism; the high-profile intervention of the world’s richest man, with the transformation of many of the leading lights of Silicon Valley from lefty hipsters to right-wing tech bros; the amazing spectacle of the Trump show, in all its cultishness, crassness and eccentricity.

Most remarkable of all was, of course, the sheer weirdness of Donald Trump himself: narcissistic, vulgar, bombastic, mendacious, idiosyncratic, outrageous; while at the same time flamboyant, mesmerising and on occasions very funny. He broke every rule, told every lie, did the unthinkable, said the unsayable and still came up ... (you complete the pun).

Peter Dutton’s personality is as unTrumpian as it is possible to be.

The epic unconventionality of Trump’s campaign dramatised a result that would probably have been the same had the Republican candidate been less unorthodox. For that reason, the outcome is fertile ground for over-interpretation and exaggeration.

Peter Dutton is not Donald Trump – or anything like him. He does not have a single one of the traits I mentioned above. His personality is as unTrumpian as it is possible to be. While he may share Trump’s outlook on some things – for instance, their commendable loathing of identity politics – he has been careful to slap down attempts to use Trump’s victory to import culture-war issues which, while they may resonate in America, make Australians uncomfortable.

Both the left and the far right will attempt to reframe the Australian political debate by drawing exaggerated comparisons with what happened in America. For instance, last Wednesday, Laura Tingle idiotically observed on the ABC’s 7.30 that Dutton’s criticism of Labor’s failure on border protection – an issue at every election since 2001 – took him into “very Trumpian territory”. Four undocumented asylum seekers had been discovered in a remote part of the Northern Territory. Trump has promised to forcibly deport 11 million.

On the other side of the spectrum, some have grasped Trump’s victory as an opportunity to reverse the Morrison government’s decision to commit Australia to net zero emissions by 2050. That would undo all the successful work Dutton and Ted O’Brien have done to refocus the debate away from targets to the composition of the energy mix, defining Labor as the zealots of the climate change argument. Dutton ruled that out immediately.

An issue of great importance in American politics, but an electoral no-go zone in Australia, is abortion. Dutton is very conscious that in the Queensland election, undisciplined language by a couple of candidates opened the door to a Labor scare campaign that probably made the difference between a massive LNP landslide and just a very big one. Dutton, whose pro-choice position is as clear as crystal, was right to read the riot act to his party room that there was no room for culture war-style self-indulgence.

In the months ahead, we can expect to see plenty of false comparisons between America’s election and Australia’s. Labor, Green and teal politicians, along with intellectually lazy left-wing journalists, will routinely label anything Dutton says about traditional conservative issues such as migration and border protection as “Trumpian”. Those who inhabit the tiny but voluble echo chamber of the far right will demand that the Coalition follow the whole Trump playbook, not realising that Australia’s politics are very different from America’s, nor appreciating – or perhaps not even caring – that this would be the primrose path to electoral defeat.

Dutton and his front bench will, I expect, pay no heed to either. They know that next year’s election will be about the cost of living, not the culture wars. Fascinating as the US election was to watch, and hugely consequential though Trump’s return to the Oval Office is, what happened in the United States has not fundamentally changed the game for Australia’s election next year.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at ANU.

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