Federal budget 2023: Peter Dutton thinks you’re ‘poor’ on $126,000 but his solution is bankrupt

Peter Dutton delivering his budget reply speech in parliament on Thursday night. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Peter Dutton has drawn a new political battleground around what he claims are Labor’s “working poor”.

This is the new middle Australia the Coalition claims has been abandoned by the Albanese government’s first full-year budget.

It is a politically potent argument. And it is one that will be strengthened should the central bank feel it is forced to intervene on the back of a big-spending Labor budget. But this is the great political gamble.

Peter Dutton arrives to deliver his Budget reply in the House of Representatives. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Dutton has failed to back in his counterclaims with any substantive policy prescription as to how a Coalition government would remedy the problem. Almost a year into the Coalition’s term in opposition, Dutton struggles to identify the key points of ­difference or find a weakness in the Labor leadership that ­resonates.

His budget-in-reply speech was heavy on rhetorical attack but lacking in policy solution.

The so-called working poor under Dutton’s prescription includes 10 million Australians earning less than $126,000 who face a tax hike and about 175,000 more who he suggests will be ­unemployed.

These millions of middle Australians whom he portrays as “the backbone of our country” will be worse off under a $185bn spending spree.

But Dutton has given little more than broad brushstrokes to a Coalition canvass.

The Liberal leader’s budget-in-reply speech was so absent of ­policy prescription to the policy crisis it claims the government has ­surrendered to that the only conclusion to be drawn is that Dutton is scared of having a fight.

Of the 16 policy areas defined, at least a quarter of them Dutton agreed to, which risks under­mining the fundamental premise that the Labor budget will be inflationary.

At best, Dutton’s speech was an appeal to the base, keeping taxes low, and an ill-defined ­affirmation of its commitment to the aspirational class.

To the extent that there was any policy detail, it was lacking.

In the end, this was a political speech, heavy on criticism of the government, and a reassertion of the fundamental principles that the Liberal Party was the party of small business and superannuants.

But it lacked specifics.

Dutton’s speech was more akin to a rally address, but it didn’t broach the great challenge for the federal Coalition – what does it stand for and what it is going to do about it.