Dutton’s had a great year, but 2025 will test his one great weakness

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton recently admitted he was holding something back.

Dutton was in Sydney earlier this month, standing alongside Liberal northern beaches candidates who hope to win back the teal-held seats of Warringah and Mackellar, and he was asked if his party’s nuclear policy costings were being held back to avoid scrutiny over Christmas.

“Nope,” came the blunt answer, he was just letting the government kick another own goal.

“There’ll be plenty of time to scrutinise. We’re not releasing it on the day of the election,” Dutton said. “Part of the reason that there’s been a delay is we’ve gone to announce it a few times, to be honest, and the government’s latest disaster has happened on that day where we’ve decided that we’ll let people concentrate on how bad the Albanese government is.”

Dutton knows when to hold back and when to let rip for a ready headline, but his aversion to detail could prove a liability next year when he has to persuade the voters he’s prime ministerial material.

In 2024, if the polls are any guide, Dutton is in with a real chance to win the next election, forging forward as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese loses ground.

This month’s Resolve Political Monitor showed the Coalition’s primary vote fell by one percentage point to 38, Labor’s fell by three percentage points to 27 per cent and 35 per cent of voters nominated another party. This would almost certainly deliver a hung parliament on election day, with either side potentially able to cobble together minority government.

Dutton needs to win 21 seats to claim 76 seats and govern in majority – a huge mountain to climb – but a 70-seat minority Coalition government is possible, supported by a clutch of independent MPs – including but not limited to Dai Le, Helen Haines, Rebekha Sharkie, Andrew Gee, Bob Katter and Allegra Spender.

Dutton has been mostly gaffe-free (it’s hard to imagine him repeating his 2015 “joke” about Pacific Islanders being hit by climate change) and on message. He speaks in short, declarative sentences and quickly stamps out spot fires, such as when he quashed the abortion debate last month just as high-profile conservative Jacinta Nampijinpa Price said late-term terminations should be on the agenda.

“I support a woman’s right to choose,” he said in a rare phone call to ABC’s Radio National. “I’ve been in very difficult circumstances where, as a detective working in the sex offenders squad, I’ve dealt with women in domestic relationships who have been raped; it’s a very, very difficult situation. Ultimately, that’s a choice and a decision for that individual to make, and that’s the position I support.”

Peter Dutton dropped his opposition to stage 3 tax cuts when the changes proved too popular to fight. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Jenny Ware, a NSW moderate Liberal MP and the only current Liberal MP who chose to speak on the record for this piece, is not a natural ally of Dutton but she praises him for the job he has done, “particularly in the last nine months as Labor has gone odd on tangents”.

“Peter has called out antisemitism in Australia, at universities et cetera. He is now representing the quiet majority of Australians on this and other issues,” she says.

“A year ago, even if people weren’t happy with Albanese, they were saying Dutton isn’t ready. But the dial has shifted to Peter being electable and I think that all of the attacks Labor has launched on him haven’t worked.”

History proved Dutton right when he chose to oppose the Voice to Parliament in 2023, but he demonstrated political judgment again at the start of January 2024, when he quickly dropped his broken promises attack on the changes to stage 3 tax cuts after it became clear that most voters didn’t care about discarded election pledges if they got more money in their pockets.

The opposition leader has savaged Labor on its handling of immigration policy following the High Court’s NZYQ decision and prosecuted the case for reduced migration, linking the issue to housing shortages successfully, too.

On the number one issue concerning most voters, the cost of living, he has mauled Labor while offering scant detail about how he would fix it.

He picks his moments on when to lob culture war hand grenades, too, cannily tossing them at big corporates, such as accusing Woolworths of peddling a “woke agenda” on Australia Day, or starting an argument about which flags should be displayed behind a prime minister, pulling focus for 24 hours and then walking away.

But for a former cop with a strongman persona, Dutton doesn’t like scrutiny and he doesn’t always front up. While he gives friendly interviews with commercial radio hosts, appearances on the ABC and long-form newspaper interviews are strictly rationed.

When he does front up at a press conference it’s more often than not in a far-flung outer suburban seat or in a regional town, far from metropolitan newsrooms. Tracked down at these remote locations, he has proved brittle, taking a belligerent approach to questions asked by young reporters, especially if they happen to work for the ABC.

The long-awaited launch of his nuclear power policy costings last week was a case in point: it was released at a small press conference in Brisbane with subject-matter-expert reporters thousands of kilometres away in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. The contrast with Bowen and Albanese fronting up in Canberra in 2021 with their climate change policy costings was stark.

As the election approaches, there are more questions to be answered on the detail of what exactly a Coalition government would do on tax, industrial relations, health and education.

The seven Coalition MPs who spoke to this masthead on background to inform this piece are dreaming of, at worst, a minority Labor government and some are even canvassing a return to government after one term.

Dutton has enjoyed an unusual period of stability for a first-term opposition leader, assisted by the loss of Josh Frydenberg and many other Liberal moderates in May 2022 and the high number of conservative MPs and Queenslanders in the party room (usually but not always the same thing).

But as one of those seven anonymous Liberal MPs points out, Dutton “read the riot act on abortion to the party room, for example, and that was important. And he has read the room on [Australia’s commitment to] net zero. He is holding the line, despite what the Nationals might want.

“He has done an amazing job holding the government to account but he has to present enough of an alternative. His shadow front bench … Is everyone ready? I don’t think so.”

As the MP put it: “Policy is where Peter goes from an A+ to a B” and the loss of senior moderates Simon Birmingham and Paul Fletcher – both experienced policy wonks – makes it harder.

A veteran MP who asked not to be named, says Dutton has performed better than his mentor Tony Abbott and in a more difficult environment, as Albanese’s team is not divided like the Labor government of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years.

“Abbott’s approach was just ‘kill, kill, kill’ belligerence, and he had a fractured government to work with. He [Dutton] is not small or big target, he’s smart target, he picks his issues. The discipline with which he has shaped discussion of policies he wants to talk about and the sequence in which he has launched them shows very shrewd judgment,” the veteran says.

Nuclear policy has been Dutton’s biggest policy gamble to date and, while the announcement strategy managed to minimise scrutiny on the numbers, both Dutton and treasury spokesman Angus Taylor have over-reached in recent days, perhaps deliberately, by claiming the nuclear plan will lower power bills by 44 per cent, despite the costings explicitly stating they had not modelled electricity price impacts.

Labor believes this rhetorical overreach creates an opening for attack; the Coalition believes voters’ eyes will glaze over the fight on detail and bets a “he said, she said” fight will be a scoreless draw, which suits Dutton fine.

Although polling shows Albanese is not rated by voters, nor is he hated, Dutton’s charge to the Lodge could come unstuck if he attempts to skate through on a “trust us, we will fix it” vibe because voters, at this stage, aren’t desperate to defenestrate the government.

Professor of politics at ANU Ian McAllister, co-director of the university’s long-running Australian Election Study, says Dutton has been effective in 2024 and has room to be more expansive on policy in 2025.

“He has established himself, he has no obvious challengers, he is in a good position to make quite dramatic policy changes if he wins the election. For example, on nuclear energy he has a degree of flexibility. To do it he will need some sort of bipartisanship, so for example Dutton could propose an independent inquiry, some sort of assembly or even a referendum on it if he wins the election,” McAllister says.

Dutton has proven in 2024 that he is a worthy opposition leader. But he hasn’t yet shown how he would operate as a prime minister. He has just a few months to close the deal with voters.

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