When former prime minister John Howard was slipping in the polls before a crucial by-election in 2001 he took the pressure off motorists by cutting excise on fuel and then freezing it.
In similar circumstances, Anthony Albanese slapped a sin tax on the family car. That may not completely explain Labor’s limp performance in Dunkley on the weekend, but it highlights the Prime Minister’s biggest weakness: he comes from a different planet than most of us.
That planet is the seat of Grayndler, a constituency where taxing the bejesus out of a HiLux is no doubt popular. It’s a place where 54 per cent of employees work from home, according to the last census. In Dunkley, 88 per cent of the workforce somewhat unfashionably work from work and only 5 per cent use public transport because there is little around.
On Friday, the Prime Minister had a prime opportunity to deliver words of comfort to the commuters of Dunkley, nine out of 10 of whom travel in a car or truck, providing a captive audience for 3AW, Melbourne’s most popular talk station.
Morning presenter Tom Elliot opened with a softball, asking the PM what he was doing to ease the cost of living. The PM responded by rattling off a list of stale announceables: cheaper childcare, energy price relief, stage three tax cuts, fee-free TAFE, urgent care clinics, etc.
Elliot turned to Labor’s promise to lower the average power bill by $275 in Labor’s first term. “That hasn’t happened,” he said. “What would you say to all the people who are looking forward to cheaper electricity?”
Albanese must have been prepping for this question for a year at least since it was apparent almost from the day he entered office that power prices were heading north. Retail electricity prices have risen by a third since June 2022, excluding government rebates. Yet Albanese appeared to be fumbling for his notes.
“Well,” he began, “what I say is, we know that renewables are the cheapest form of new energy.
“We had, unfortunately, a war in Ukraine that’s kept going … That led to a huge spike in global inflation.”
The price of a barrel of crude oil may be one of the little details across which Albanese’s head has not got. For the record, it has fallen from its post-invasion high of $US115 a barrel around the time of the May 2022 election to around $US80 today.
Fuel excise, on the other hand, has more than doubled from 22.1 cents a litre when Labor came to office to 49.6 cents a litre today. It will likely rise again later this year, taking it over the 50c mark by Christmas.
Blaming Vladimir Putin for the rising cost of energy may satisfy the laptop class in Leichhardt, but it’s a lame excuse to offer a tradie filling a Ford Ranger at the Ampol in Frankston, where diesel was $2.02 a litre on the weekend, according to Petrol Spy.
Howard cut the bowser tax in 2001 when fuel prices threatened to climb above a $1 a litre. They would be comfortably below $2 a litre today if Albanese had extended the temporary 50 per cent reduction in fuel excise introduced by then treasurer Josh Frydenberg in his final budget.
That would be easy politics, one might think, but probably too easy for the member for Grayndler, who has more than half an eye on the mood in his electorate where the prevailing sentiment on energy is precisely the reverse of that in outer suburban electorates such as Dunkley.
Cuts to the running costs of an internal combustion engine are frowned upon in the inner metropolitan areas that would be Labor’s stronghold were it not fighting off pressure from the Greens. For the Greens, the kind of cars normal people drive are more than frowned upon. They, and the dinosaurs who drive them, are despised as much as those who voted no at the referendum. Many of them are the same people, as it happens.
The challenge of winning the next election without losing his seat will keep Albanese walking on eggshells until the polls close. So it was more than a little awkward when Elliott uttered the c-word in his follow-up question on Ukraine.
Would the PM respond to the Ukrainian government’s pleas for more coal? Was it true his government was sitting on the request and hadn’t done anything about it?
PM: No, we’ve done more than that, Tom. We’ve announced $50m of support.
Elliot: So, you will be sending the coal to Ukraine?
PM: No, we’ve sent $50m.
Albanese’s excuses don’t cut it. Australia is a long way from Ukraine, he told Elliott, and our coal goes to our near neighbours such as China and India. He must know that companies such as Whitehaven would be only too happy to find the coal Ukraine is seeking, just as they did the last time.
Yet Albanese is not prepared to confront the pharisaical bullies from the climate cult for whom every piece of coal disturbed from the ground is poison, even if it relieves human suffering.
Saturday’s result may have been encouraging for the Liberal Party, but politics, like tennis, is a game where finishing second is the same as finishing last. There is no such thing as a typical seat, but Dunkley is more typical than most. It is populated with the kind of people Peter Dutton must attract if he wants to be prime minister: working couples with two cars, two jobs and a mortgage.
Dutton, too, must also negotiate the cultural fault line between the inner metropolitan elite, with their luxury beliefs, and the rest of Australia.
The loss of former blue-ribbon seats to the teals in 2022 has prompted some in the party to argue the Liberals should appease the climate cult by moving to the centre, by which they mean the left. The Victorian state parliamentary party was an earlier adopter of this strategy and, despite its hammering at the last election, it reckons it’s on to a winner. Last week, it signed up to Labor’s fantasy target of 95 per cent carbon-free electricity by 2035.
Saturday’s result in Dunkley highlights the extent of its misjudgment. Could Dutton have won on Saturday by signing off on Albanese’s ute tax or by matching Labor’s punishing emissions target?
Albanese will want to claim that holding Dunkley was an endorsement of his government. Yet Labor MPs in marginal seats have been rattled. They will have seen how poisonous Labor’s climate policy is in suburbs where the rubber hits the road.
Nick Cater is senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.
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