Donald Trump’s agenda won’t work for Anthony Albanese or Peter Dutton
His muscular, nationalistic mission to ‘make America great again’ will excite and horrify many Australians and throw an unpredictable factor into our electoral equation.
Donald Trump has declared a new age of transformation and restoration. While Trump’s revolution will not sweep Australia, its impact will shape the mood and tenor of the coming Albanese-Dutton election contest.
Trump’s muscular, nationalistic, executive power mission to “make America great again” will both excite and horrify many Australians and throw an unpredictable factor into our electoral equation.
Might Trump provoke a crisis with Australia as he has with Canada? Probably not, but he seems to care little for longstanding friendships if irritated by governments he dislikes.
Who could have predicted his showdowns over Greenland and Panama?
Anthony Albanese will hope Australian-American relations stay low-key until after the election. Labor, obviously, will do nothing to provoke Trump while seeking to build common ground over national security, AUKUS and shared strategic interests.
Virtually every day, however, Trump enunciates policies and principles that are anathema to Albanese and the Labor Party.
It will require an extraordinary feat of Australian diplomacy to prevent these differences, sooner or later, impinging on the relationship with damaging import. The opening days, however, have been encouraging for Albanese, Penny Wong and Richard Marles.
Trump has begun with devastating fireworks. His persona as a showman, conviction politician and powerful president is likely to enhance his domestic standing and send other heads of government into calculating retreat.
His executive orders will create conflict within the US system, notably with the judiciary. Indeed, they are designed to precipitate such conflict in the cause of asserting executive power and transforming US polity.
Trump doesn’t run away from conflict – he thrives on it. In the end, he will stand or fall on his ability to deliver results, but final judgments might be years away.
Assessing the influence of Trump on Australian politics, Inquirer conducted interviews with Peter Dutton, Tony Abbott and former Liberal Party federal director Brian Loughnane, each offering different but nuanced views on how the US revolution might affect this country.
There is no Trumpian figure in Australia. There is no Trumpian transformation agenda in Australia. Dutton is not an Australian version of Trump – here is the essential reality.
Australia and America are different countries despite sharing a range of overlapping attitudes.
Dutton told Inquirer: “People see a distracted Albanese government just as people saw a distracted Biden administration. There is in people’s minds a clear sense the country is moving in the wrong direction and I think there is a parallel on that basis between the United States and Australia.
“I look forward to a very productive relationship with President Trump. But he and I are different people. We come from different backgrounds. We’ll have different approaches on issues and there will be points where we agree.
“But my focus is not on what’s happening in the US or the debate there. It’s on how families here deal with a cost of living created by a prime minister who is out of his depth and out of answers for families in their hour of need.”
Dutton dismissed efforts by the left to cast him as Australia’s version of Trump as “another counter-productive personal attack that will backfire”.
Trump, however, inevitably raises the pivotal issue of the extent to which a change of government at Australia’s election might become a transforming event.
Abbott, typically, is optimistic. He sees Trump’s win as having global significance with direct relevance for Australia.
Abbott told Inquirer: “I believe Trump’s re-election has had a seismic effect around the English-speaking world and that it assists Peter Dutton at a number of levels. It validates strong leadership. The line the left has run against Dutton from the start, that he was a hard man without compassion, isn’t working. We can see this in the polls. Dutton can be as strong as he chooses and still look more reasonable than Trump.
“The big message is that the green-left zeitgeist that has dominated the West for the past decade and a half has manifestly failed. We are weaker, poorer and more divided than at any time in the past 70 years. That’s because of the green-left fantasy that military strength is irrelevant, that you can build a strong economy on intermittent, weather-dependent energy, and that national cohesion can be replaced with flaccid multiculturalism.
“This model doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t work in America and it doesn’t work in Australia. Dutton is right – this is the most important election since 1949. It’s the clearest contrast since 1949.
“People should not underestimate how transformative what Dutton has already committed to is. On energy he will be very different, he will be different on immigration, on social cohesion and national symbols, on the economy and national development, the same applies to national security. On the basis of what Dutton has already announced, he will be a transformative prime minister.
“I think Dutton is in the Howard mould. He is prepared to take risks but won’t overdo it, in the way I was tempted to overdo it sometimes. The great thing Dutton has got going for him is that there are no rivals breathing down his neck.”
Yet the mood in Australia is far different to that in America.
Dutton is extremely cautious about any Trump parallels. Suggestions by pro-Trump populist commentators in Australia that Albanese can be swept away in a “down under” version of the Trumpian counter-revolution owe more to hubris than reality.
The early proof was Dutton’s signal that a Coalition government would not follow Trump and leave the Paris climate change accords despite pressure from the conservative wing of the Coalition. The financial truth is that the mass global investment in renewables will continue, even if it slows somewhat under Trump. The rush to renewables won’t be stopped.
Dutton, for example, says it is in Australia’s national interest to remain in the Paris agreement and that the nation risked trade retaliation if it withdrew. The issue is significant in its own right but also as a test case to determine how far Dutton might follow Trump. In this case, he deems following Trump to be electoral folly. Dutton, moreover, will retain the Coalition’s net zero at 2050 target. Nor will he follow Trump in quitting the World Health Organisation. Obviously, he won’t be proposing tariffs.
Trump’s election can assist Dutton – but as a vibe, not as a policy prescription. The distinction is critical and Dutton knows this. Dutton’s aim is to make Albanese’s record the election issue – focusing on cost-of-living – and deny Albanese the chance he craves to make the Coalition the election issue.
Brian Loughnane ran Abbott’s 2013 campaign, stays in close touch with conservative politics in the US, Canada and Europe, and knows the type of advice that campaign directors give to Liberal leaders.
His message is that while Trump ran a campaign as wide as the sky, Dutton will be the opposite – focused and targeted.
Loughnane told Inquirer: “I think the differences between Donald Trump and Peter Dutton are more important than the similarities. Dutton is a pragmatic conventional centre-right Liberal leader, initially promoted by John Howard, and is an experienced minister from the past period of Coalition government.
“By contrast, Trump has won a mandate on a bold agenda seeking not just policy changes but aspiring to dismantle or roll back much of the economic, energy and cultural foundations of the Biden administration. Trump aims to change the fundamental direction of the United States – but the politics of the Australian election will be different and won’t be conducted on the same scale or have the same significance.
“The mood in Australia is more about disenchantment with the Albanese government rather than a reinvention of the national compact. Dutton can be expected to run a targeted and disciplined campaign with a focus on cost of living rather than seeking any society-wide reconstruction.”
Loughnane agrees that Trump’s victory “has exposed the current weakness of centre-left progressive governments”. That gifts Dutton an opportunity.
“In this sense the times might suit Dutton,” Loughnane says.
“Dutton won’t campaign as Australia’s version of Trump – that would be folly. But he will seek to tap into a rising sentiment of scepticism about progressive policies, their weakness in combating inflation and the decline in living standards that has occurred.
“The fact that this narrative has played out in other countries should not be exaggerated but it is only likely to further encourage Australians to seriously consider a change of government.”
So, in a campaign sense, Dutton is the opposite of Trump.
Trump made himself a massive target, probably the biggest target in presidential history, and accordingly won on a mandate of transformation.
Australians, unlike Americans, are not consumed by grievance. Voters are disenchanted with Albanese. They see him as a weak and ineffective leader, and increasingly blame the government for the ongoing losses in per capita income and living standards attrition caused by ongoing inflation.
But Dutton’s campaign message is “let’s get Australia back on track”. It’s practical and about your living standards.
It’s not a revolution. It’s not about reinventing the social and economic order. It’s not about declaring a national emergency or repelling an invasion. It doesn’t correspond to “making Australia great again” – or to use a local reference, Dutton won’t be running a Fightback Mark Two agenda.
Dutton told Inquirer the coming election had a historic dimension. “This is an absolutely critical election,” he said. “The times in which we live are precarious and, as the Prime Minister says, the most dangerous since the Second World War. The prospect of the situation deteriorating further with a Labor-Green government should be at the forefront of people’s minds.”
Yet claims that this is the most important election since 1949 – or even that it constitutes a major ideological divide – are not verified so far in the policy ambitions of either Albanese or Dutton, despite the rhetoric of the leaders.
Indeed, the risk is elsewhere – the fear that Australia faces a dispiriting, low-grade, unadventurous election, weak on policy reform with the prospect of an ongoing divided country and a minority government, probably Labor, at the conclusion.
At this stage, genuine economic and productivity reform is not on the table from either side. Neither leader talks substantial tax reform, suggesting this will be lost for yet another parliament. Yet if Trump proceeds with his tax reforms, such as cutting the corporate rate to 15 per cent, aggressively cutting red and green tape, and slicing into public sector spending – Australia will resemble a stranded entity in a world it never envisaged.
While Dutton pledges to redefine the meaning of a casual worker, there is little sign the Coalition will roll back most of Labor’s IR laws. And while the Coalition pledges a government-owned nuclear industry far down the track, there is no agenda on how it will deliver cheaper power prices in the near term. While committed to smaller government, the Coalition is yet to put numbers on this electorally risky stance. Dutton says Labor has hired an extra 36,000 public servants at a cost of $6bn but hasn’t spelled out the Coalition’s precise response.
As for Albanese, over the past month he has launched an astonishing spending agenda in the prelude to campaign 2025 – including more than $7bn for the Bruce Highway, $3bn for the NBN, $2bn to save the aluminium industry, $2bn to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation for renewals and to unlock another $6bn in private renewables investment, new school funding for Victoria and South Australia, and extra funds for the apprenticeship program.
Here is an opening for Dutton.
He will play into one of Trump’s themes – the bankruptcy of progressive politics. The demise of the Biden administration and the resignations of those globally progressive icons Jacinda Ardern in 2023, and Justin Trudeau more recently, point to a credibility and intellectual collapse on the progressive side.
Several trends have come together and now afflict Albanese: the de-legitimising impact of high inflation; substantial attrition in living standards; and a cultural backlash against progressivism, from its embrace of identity politics to its cancellation of patriotic narrative.
Dutton’s entire campaign runs on these Labor vulnerabilities. Yet the fascinating aspect of Albanese’s re-election strategy is that he merely offers more of the same – the second term is a double down on the first term, even when the polls show the public doesn’t like the same. At face value, it’s an extraordinary strategy pointing to an exhaustion of ideas and the demise of Labor’s political imagination.
Albanese, post-voice, runs on a retail agenda, his theme being “building Australia’s future” – via infrastructure, government spending, better roads, homes, Medicare, schools, the care economy and the NBN. It’s an old-fashioned ALP agenda given a cosmetic gloss and polish.
It’s weak on the “sunlit uplands”. It’s missing the Labor conviction, innovative reformism and historical mission that radiated from Whitlam, Hawke, Keating, even Rudd. Albanese’s re-election pitch is that things would be worse under Dutton. That’s it.
He desperately needs a Reserve Bank rate cut, not for the modest financial dividend for households, but as the pivot on which to hang a badly needed narrative of sorts – that Labor always had a plan for the economy and there’s now evidence that it’s working.
That sales job might be enough to save Labor, given that Dutton sits on 55 seats and needs 76 seats to form a majority government. It highlights the importance of the strategic issue raised by Abbott and Loughnane. How ambitious should be Dutton’s agenda? Labor is desperate to wage a negative campaign against Dutton. So does Dutton run a small target agenda or get more ambitious by signalling a decisive shift in Australia’s direction?
The omens are mixed. Dutton is strong on the cultural agenda. His campaign against anti-Semitism exposed Albanese and Labor and constitutes Dutton’s most important cultural win since the Indigenous voice referendum. Dutton has turned this into a far broader position – opposing the rising tribalism of Australia, the growth in racial and religious hatred and the increased violence in the community, with the Jewish community the prime target.
He pledges to cut the permanent migration program from 185,000 to 140,000 places, reconstitute the Department of Home Affairs, and re-priorities action against non-citizen criminals. Welcome to Country ceremonies will be cut back. Relations with Israel will be restored. The proven method of explicit instruction will be pursued in Australian schools.
Under the current law, social media for under 16s will be restricted. Medicare funding will be guaranteed. There will be a full audit of spending on Indigenous programs. Prime agricultural land and coastlines will be prioritised against renewables projects. People will have access to superannuation to buy their first home. The Environmental Defenders Office will be defunded.
There’s a stack of branding and value-based differences with Labor. Yet the hard economic policy decisions remained unscripted.
Dutton told Inquirer: “If there’s a change of government, the new government will have a mandate to get our country back on track.”
Abbott offers a warning: “We’ve had a few false starts. The first Trump win was a bit of a false start because, in the end, the swamp got him. Brexit turned out to be a bit of a false start because a weak conservative government was unable to capitalise on it. The voice defeat has been a bit of a false start because the left establishment has continued with its usual separatism as if nothing had changed.” But he is optimistic that Dutton can “do a Howard” – get the balance right between caution and transformation. Howard, not Trump, is the model.
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