Dutton returns to basics as he takes the fight to Labor

There is a clear message for Peter Dutton in the lukewarm response that Jim Chalmers’ first budget has received from across the spectrum. The message is that wishes and good intentions cannot compete with facts. It is never enough to promise to do things people want done and to say things they want to hear. Delivering on promises is more difficult when events get in the way. Mr Dutton’s budget reply speech on Thursday confirmed the opposition has been able to hone its message against the government. The theme is broken promises and the absence of a plan.

In political terms, the Chalmers budget was the point at which Labor took full ownership of the economy and the continuing rise in electricity and energy prices that threaten to overwhelm the government’s good intentions. Labor has shown its default response is to intervene with increased regulation. This is a gift to an opposition that must anchor its values in fidelity to small government, balanced budgets, secure energy supplies and low unemployment, guided by the animal spirits of free enterprise and the individual. Mr Dutton has shown himself prepared to fight. He has been able to defend the Coalition record in government but set out a plan of his own.

The opposition should be heartened by the short shrift given to Labor’s attempts to ram through an omnibus bill to rewrite Australia’s industrial relations laws in the Senate on Thursday. Senators from across the political spectrum rejected out of hand a Labor demand for a speedy consideration in a Senate inquiry that would leave only weeks for analysis and debate, and a few days for public hearings. As a result, consideration of the bill has been pushed into the new year, as it should have been all along. Mr Dutton said the government’s IR plans would take the economy back to 1982, a time when unemployment reached 9.4 per cent, inflation 12.4 per cent and two million working days were lost to industrial disputes. Industrial relations must become a totemic issue for the opposition, which has spent too long hiding from the fight as a result of the successful campaign mounted by the ACTU and Labor against John Howard and Work Choices. The result has been a wasted 10 years with a broken bargaining system due to changes made by the Rudd and Gillard governments. What is now clear is that the ACTU is in the ascendancy and seeking to force Labor’s hand with a new era of industry-wide bargaining. One positive for Mr Dutton is that the business community is finally waking to the fact that Labor is not its friend.

In his budget reply speech, Mr Dutton said Labor had missed the opportunity to help Australians at a time they needed help. “It didn’t address our economic challenges or inspire confidence,” Mr Dutton said, referring to the budget. “It’s a budget which breaks promises rather than keeps them … a budget which weakens Australia’s financial position, rather than strengthens it … and a budget which adds to, rather than alleviates, your cost-of-living pressures.”

Mr Dutton praised the government’s measures on childcare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, housing for veterans, domestic violence and funding to help Australians recover from floods. But he was forensic in his analysis of the energy crisis Labor now finds itself in, and said this was why the Coalition was seeking an intelligent conversation on the role new-age nuclear technologies could play in the energy mix.

He made a spirited defence of the stage three tax cuts, rooted as it should be in the core principle that hardworking Australians should be able to keep more of what they earn. He outlined Coalition priorities on the economy, energy, tax, housing, superannuation, employment, industrial relations, women, border security, defence and eduction.

Mr Dutton and his team will continue to hammer Labor on its broken promises, particularly around energy. But they must not lose sight of why Labor finds itself in the position it now does. It is the other side of the small-target strategy that Labor stuck to in opposition. It is the failure to develop a strategy for government. Mr Dutton used his budget reply speech to remind voters of the Coalition’s strong record of economic management. “There’s a historical pattern of Labor creating a mess and the Coalition cleaning it up,” Mr Dutton said. He said “when you hear them carry on about a ‘wasted decade’, it’s a distraction from the fact that this government has no economic plan”. The opposition has a duty to keep the pressure on, to put itself back into the game. But it must also have a plan that builds security for households, the nation and the economy that voters are willing to back.