Keep it simple: the golden thread that binds Peter Dutton’s budget response

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton delivers his budget reply on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Peter Dutton’s response to Labor’s grand visions for billions of dollars in new investment, a new economic orthodoxy, a transition as great as the industrial revolution, a green super power, a Future Made in Australia and world-beating high technology development is to simply go back to the basics.

There is nothing complicated in the Opposition Leader’s reply to Jim Chalmers’ big spending, expansionary budget, it’s all simple, easy to grasp and the nearest it comes to offering fabulous vision is to try to turn what has become a “housing nightmare” back to the great Australian home ownership dream.

The formal slogan is to get Australia “Back on Track” and the underlying message is “back to basics”. It is a message for Middle Australia, the suburbs, resources industry, small business, the regions and those feeling downtrodden by the “usual CEOs and big businesses”.

Dutton is flipping the political alignments to make the Coalition appealing to tradies and truckies, mums and dads and family business in what Chalmers describes as “faux class warfare”.

Labor’s $13.7bn central industrial policy of a Future Made in Australia will simply not continue under a Coalition government because it will not spend the money “on corporate welfare for green hydrogen and critical minerals”.

Dutton wants to harness the anxieties Australians feel about the cost-of-living, housing, too-high immigration, threats to the revenue base of mining and gas, physical threats through crime and domestic violence, as well as high-cost, long-term power and carbon reduction targets.

Even his grandest vision of starting a nuclear energy industry is coupled with the down-to-earth promotion and use of the vast gas reserves at Australia’s disposal.

When it comes to combating domestic and street violence, ludicrous bail laws and social media porn Dutton intends to be a cop on the beat.

Cutting Australia’s permanent immigration initially from 185,000 a year to 140,000 is the golden thread that runs through his broader message that there is too much government spending, housing shortages are forcing people to live in tents and cars, there needs to be a two-year ban on foreigners buying existing homes and foreign student intakes need to be capped.

Apart from dumping support for FMA, Dutton also pledges to repeal Labor’s industrial relations laws that most burden small business, remove the regulation choking gas and resources development and negate a trillion dollars in spending on new wires and poles for renewable energy with nuclear power plants in superseded coal-fired facilities.

Dutton did not meet any of the benchmarks Anthony Albanese and Chalmers set on details for nuclear energy, address tax changes or provide detailed costings for an energy policy, but he has demonstrated that he will decide when to release the detailed tax and energy policies and not be spooked into acting too soon and exposing his flank unnecessarily.