All eyes on Dutton as he takes on ‘the worst PM since Whitlam’
Peter Dutton has overturned early assessments of him as downright unpopular, too conservative and, as an ex-cop, a ‘hard man’ on border protection and crime. In fact, some of these impressions have become decidedly advantageous.
Suddenly, all eyes are on Peter Dutton.
Yes, 2025 is an election year with a poll to be held within months and he is the Opposition Leader, but there is more to the strength and tone of the focus than just the usual uptick in interest in the person who would be prime minister.
What’s more, the public and political interest in Dutton is greater than would be expected for an opposition leader facing the daunting metric that a first-term government in Australia has not been defeated in almost 100 years.
The first reason for the interest and support demonstrated through all the public polls is that Dutton has exceeded expectations as a Liberal leader.
He has grown into the job and overturned the early assessments of him as downright unpopular, too conservative and, as an ex-cop, a “hard man” on border protection and crime who Labor thought was unelectable. Indeed, some of these impressions have become decidedly advantageous.
Labor described him as Harry Potter’s Voldemort who would frighten children, and when the Liberal Party lost the Aston by-election in 2022 he became the first opposition leader to lose a seat to the government in 100 years.
Labor had started to plan second and third terms of government, but now there is a real fear of slipping at least into minority government after only one term.
But the eyes on Dutton in 2025 are seeing a new political environment that’s vastly different to the post-pandemic vibe of Scott Morrison’s election defeat in May 2022.
And this new environment allows for a positive reappraisal of the Liberal leader against the growing dissatisfaction with Labor.
The second main reason for the emphasis on Dutton is that Labor has decided to put him at the centre of its campaign for re-election. After successfully undermining Morrison’s leadership and narrowly winning in 2022, the ALP is returning to negative, personal attacks as a campaign foundation, along with US presidential-style leadership and rally techniques.
This renewed and reinforced public attention on the Opposition Leader is not entirely good for Dutton and not entirely bad for Anthony Albanese.
Yet in these political and economic circumstances, with so much anxiety and uncertainty in the electorate, there is an upside for Dutton and a downside for the Prime Minister.
Labor’s personal focus on Dutton is designed to reinforce previous negative views of him, shared by some moderate Liberals, ALP voters and Climate 200 teal independent supporters.
This typecasting is thus projected into the future – a future in which voters, already worse off than they were three years ago, will be “even worse off” under Dutton as prime minister.
But this concentration on Dutton’s character, personality and experience with only a big-spending infrastructure platform and promises of “not leaving anybody behind” in these tough times – and without substantial economic achievements to show – is a big gamble.
Labor is adding to Dutton’s profile. It is putting him on the same footing as the Prime Minister in a presidential-style campaign, assuming people accept taxpayer-funded projects, subsidies and rebates are preferable to better economic management and that voters will adopt Labor’s personal portrayal of Dutton’s leadership.
Certainly Dutton has embraced the leadership contest and is doing his own framing of his character as someone who has worked hard, who bought his own house as a young man, and he takes every opportunity to contrast his “strength and experience” with Albanese’s “weakness”.
Dutton’s first election campaign rally in the Labor-held seat of Chisholm in Melbourne last Sunday set out the Coalition’s priorities in getting “Australia back on track” if elected, as well as some personal background in response to Albanese’s promise last week to “Build Australia’s future”.
Taking a deliberately positive approach as he aimed for an anxious middle Australia in times of financial hardship and global uncertainty, Dutton declared: “We live in the best country in the world because previous generations had the strength to make the right calls in our national interest.”
But he immediately turned to the negative appraisal: “However, bad decisions by the Albanese Labor government have caused Australians to become worse off, our country to be less safe and our nation to be divided.
“In the past two years, Australia has experienced the biggest fall in household disposable incomes of any developed country. And for the last 21 months Australia has been in a per-capita recession – the longest household recession on record. When a government gets its priorities wrong, things go wrong for the Australian people.
“I’m determined to get Australia back on track,” he added as he returned to his fundamental theme that Australians were “worse off now than they were two years ago”.
Promising more detailed policies closer to the election, Dutton set out “12 priorities of a Coalition government”: to “fight cost-of-living pressures; build a stronger economy; back small business; deliver affordable and reliable energy; fix the housing crisis; rebalance our migration program; keep Australians safe; deliver quality healthcare; grow a stronger regional Australia; focus on practical action for Indigenous Australians; build strong and sustainable communities; and cut government waste”.
“This year, Australians will have an opportunity to remove a weak and incompetent Labor government that has sent our country backwards,” he said, reinforcing his argument that this election will decide the nation’s fate for a decade. “This year, Australians will have an opportunity to elect a new and strong Coalition government to get our country back on track.
“There’s a saying, ‘oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them’. Yes, governments lose elections. But oppositions can – and do – win elections if people know what they stand for.”
Again, a contrast of strength and conviction with weakness and lack of clear commitment.
Albanese’s response on ABC radio was that Dutton was trying to take Australia backwards and we would be even worse off under a Coalition government.
“You can’t go backwards, which is what Peter Dutton’s promising,” Albanese said. “He was there today talking about cost-of-living relief as just sugar hits.”
Then the Prime Minister went directly and calculatedly on a personal attack to reinforce what he believed voters thought about Dutton: “We do need leadership in this country, but we need leadership with a heart. Peter Dutton represents a cold-hearted, mean-spirited, sometimes just plain nasty response and that’s not going to help people.”
The attack was designed to mesh with Labor’s own retreat on economic improvement before the election, seeking refuge in being the party with a heart that would look after vulnerable people.
“We want to make sure that we deal with those immediate pressures but provide for building Australia’s future by doing things like strengthening Medicare, by doing things like making sure we take advantage of the opportunities which are there from the shift to net zero,” Albanese said, even as he conceded the macro-economic numbers didn’t address the concerns and experience of people facing day-to-day cost pressures.
This is doubly the case with the release of national jobs figures showing an explosion in employment by 56,000 – four times the expected number – boosted by part-time work and new government workers in health, education and the public service, demonstrating a tight labour market despite the paradoxical lift in the unemployment rate from 3.9 to 4 per cent.
With the eagerly awaited December quarter inflation figures due at the end of January sparking hope of an interest rate cut before the election, the latest jobs figures and a weakening Australian dollar point to a continuance of high interest rates. This makes the Labor shift to supporting the “care economy” with wage subsidies even more important politically.
Thus, every Labor minister who could make a public utterance echoed the Prime Minister’s denunciation saying Dutton was all about “Divide, divide, divide” and was negative, uncaring, arrogant and couldn’t be trusted to help those on lower incomes.
Recipients of Labor’s wage subsidies, rebates, job creation and workplace laws will respond positively to the ALP appeal, as will many of the voters in the most affluent electorates in the richest areas of the capital cities who feel the cost-of-living pressures least and can most afford the extra costs of renewable energy.
This works as a necessary bulwark for Labor’s traditional supporters at a time of historically low ALP primary support. It also works to appeal to Liberal voters – on the basis that your enemy’s enemy is your friend – in those independent seats, some of which Dutton must win back after the rich-blue revolt in 2022.
But the danger for Labor, even with the Coalition facing a mountainous task of winning more than 20 seats to get elected, is that voters may not adopt the same view as Labor HQ.
People in the outer suburbs of Australia, in the regions of Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania, in areas such as the Hunter Valley, the NSW coast and along coastal Victoria – facing cost-of-living pressures, small business failures, continuing high inflation, environmental threats to jobs and intrusive renewable energy projects – could adopt the principle of needing a “hard” leader who you wouldn’t want at your daughter’s wedding but you would like to run the country.
There is also a danger, given the degree of voter dissatisfaction with Albanese, that when presented with a choice between a “cold-hearted” tough manager and “weak” leader in a presidential-style campaign, voters will choose Dutton. This is especially risky when seen against the backdrop of improving voter satisfaction for the Liberal leader, particularly on economic management, and the voter preference for him over Albanese clearly evident in the latest quarterly demographic political breakdown in Newspoll.
Given an election must be held by mid-May, Labor cannot afford a further loss of momentum or support, which Albanese has frantically set out to address by crisscrossing the nation and promising new government spending of about $1bn a day since he started campaigning last week.
This is where Dutton responded in the tit-for-tat leadership exchange, building on his own understanding of the public view of Albanese and his government as lacking any great achievements, being unable to explain what they were doing, being weak and the “worst since Whitlam”.
“Under this Albanese Labor government, I’ve seen the mood of Australians change,” Dutton said. “Australians have endured one of the most incompetent governments in our nation’s history. They’ve suffered under one of our country’s weakest ever prime ministers. The last three years have been a litany of bad decisions and broken promises.
“As a result, Australians are worse off. Our country is less safe. Our society is less cohesive.”
Dutton declared Labor had no intellectual argument against his nuclear power plan but could only produce a three-eyed cartoon fish from The Simpsons.
“I think the past three years are a good indication of what the future will look like under a returned Labor government,” Dutton said. “That’s a future Australians can’t afford. Weak leaders create hard times, but strong leaders create better times. And the next federal election is a sliding-doors moment for our nation.”
Thursday’s cabinet shuffle to distribute outgoing Bill Shorten’s massive load among existing ministers without adding any new talent to the frontbench was dismissed as: “Essentially a shuffling of chairs on the deck of the Titanic. This is a government that is losing its way and has lost its way over the course of the last 2½ years.”
When asked about being cast as cold-hearted and mean, Dutton responded: “I just think the personal campaign will continue. But to me what’s more important is what we can do to help Australians get through the cost-of-living crisis that Labor’s created.
“With Labor acting like an opposition in government, we’ve acted like a government in opposition. The Prime Minister is embarking on personal attacks because he doesn’t have a positive story to tell about himself. If he had a successful period as Prime Minister, if he’d had a period of achievement over the last 2½ years, he wouldn’t need to continue to make up these lies and throw this mud.
“People want more from their prime minister and, unfortunately, this Prime Minister, who’s the weakest that we’ve seen since Federation, is leading in a way that makes Gough Whitlam look like a competent leader of our nation.”
While the formal election campaign has yet to start, it is likely the themes of the first two weeks of the faux campaign – with the two leaders setting out broad plans and heavily investing in a leadership contest – will repeat and resonate all the way through to polling day.
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