It’s a sad fact but falling living standards won’t be fixed by what happens in Gaza

Anthony Albanese . Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Peter Dutton is like a greyhound chasing a rabbit. His pursuit of Anthony Albanese in parliament over visas for Gazans is instinctive. Politically primeval.

The Liberal leader simply doesn’t know how not to do it.

And why would or should he? He can smell blood in the water and his attack plan has so far been devastatingly effective.

This is now an issue of the Prime Minister’s character.

And at the moment it is being decimated.

Few would expect the Coalition to let Labor off the hook, considering the bizarre cloak of secrecy and obfuscation Albanese and his new Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, have thrown over the issue.

This is Dutton’s ecology and he is terraforming the national security space.

At some point, if Dutton is serious about wanting to be prime minister, he will have to return to the top three issues that concern the average soft voter. Cost of living, cost of living and cost of living.

There is more than a sliver of daylight between this and the next issue. It has become a chasm, of the likes that both Labor and Liberal strategists admit is unrivalled outside the pandemic as a single-issue concern.

Yet Dutton appears intent on trying to drag out the politics of Gaza for as long as the parliamentary session allows, which is Thursday.

He may well turn his attention back to the economy at some point, if his advisers allow him to.

But this current brawl, which will end with most voters remembering little of it, defines more than anything the disconnect between the political class and everybody else.

While Dutton sees this issue as part of a broader strategy to undermine confidence in Albanese’s ability to manage anything, Dutton himself has yet to establish a beachhead on economic management.

Not a single question was asked on Tuesday from the Coalition on cost of living.

One thing is certain, the next election will be a contest defined by which side has the better and more believable economic story.

Some polls suggest this equity remains in the Coalition’s favour, as it has traditionally, but Dutton will have to do more than he has to establish this as an election winning formula. He needs to work out how to turn these equities into votes.

The Coalition cannot descend into complacency or false assumptions about it.

If the minutes from the central bank’s last board meeting prove anything, its this: the inflation problem is unrelenting and more persistent than all but two economists predicted.

Forget about rate cuts. The risk of further interest rate rises has been slapped down on the table. We know the board had its finger hovering over the rate rise button two weeks ago.

A collective pessimism still prevails. This means a more protracted and sharper political contest over the fundamental question that hinges on which side is believed to offer a credible pathway to prosperity.

There is also a redefining of the notion of prosperity.

Labor offers the levers of state as its remedy. The Coalition offers little other than opposition to this.

For Dutton to win the political argument, he must not only establish in voters’ minds that the government is to blame for the dramatic fall in living standards, he must convince them there is more substance to his leadership than national security.

There is no evidence that he has been able to establish this.

Economics is not his comfort zone but retail politics should be. And an opposition leader should be able to retail the hell out of this crisis.