Can Peter Dutton turn potential rout into strategic defeat?

Peter Dutton in Question Time yesterday. Picture Kym Smith

Peter Craig Dutton may become the 30th prime minister of Australia not that long after Malcolm Turnbull lost his 30th consecutive Newspoll, but that is the easy part.

When Turnbull loses the prime ministership it will be more because of his own political and temperamental incompetence than anything else.

While there have been snipers, he is the author of his own demise.

There have been policy missteps, culminating in his disastrous castration of the national energy guarantee (which really had only three legs to start with); strategic missteps, such as over-egging the chances of winning the Longman and Braddon by-elections; interpersonal missteps, such as failing to keep key supporters close enough; and the most fundamental misstep, becoming leader of a party that he tolerated rather than loved.

All of which, and more, led to what is almost an organic leadership coup that has warriors but no apparent leaders.

Turnbull has pulled the whole edifice down on himself and, almost without effort, Peter Dutton looks to have ended on top (although he may have paved the way for someone else).

So shambolic was this affair that I know key players who weren’t even approached, let alone lobbied, by either side.

Given the genesis of his rise I have no doubt most of those voting for Dutton don’t expect him to win the next election. This is to turn a rout into a strategic defeat.

Can Dutton do this, or does he turn the rout into a massacre?

His first job is to reclaim the alienated base. In the Longman by-election the Liberal National Party first-preference vote dropped from 39.01 per cent to 29.61 per cent.

Longman is the seat next to Dutton’s, typical of the sort of seat the Liberal Party needs for a safe margin of government. The LNP first-preference vote from last election sprayed everywhere. One Nation was up 6.49 per cent, the ALP 4.46 per cent, and there were a slew of other minor parties and independents. While the LNP needs a second-preference strategy for some of these voters, second preferences are unreliable (and where they’ve shifted to Labor, unattainable). It needs to grab first preferences. And it can do this.

The great narrative coming out of international elections is this sort of voter is quite patriotic and fears they have lost control of their country and even their lives. Voting for minor or single-interest parties is a way of exerting a greater degree of control. But they will vote for major parties, as John Howard demonstrated through most of his prime ministership.

Dutton will attract these voters. As a former copper, he comes from their class, and this choice of profession shouts order. He’s a plain speaker and doesn’t use big words. As home affairs minister and minister for immigration and border protection, he was the government’s symbol for control.

Of all in the ministry he is the one most invested in the culture wars and this should resonate with these voters.

There are at least 10 seats at risk in Queensland, so this could be part of his job done. But what of south of the border?

Queenslanders aren’t unique; their cousins exist in the middle to outer rings of the great metropolises as well as predominating in rural and regional communities all over the country.

The Liberal vote may drop in safe, rich, inner to middle suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, which still will stay Liberal, Labor or Greens, for example, but rise in more working-class seats such as, say, Lindsay, where the ALP has made itself vulnerable.

At the moment Dutton may be relatively unknown in these areas, but that will be fixed by his enemies. GetUp!, the Greens and the ALP will paint him as an inhumane monster for stopping the boats, and Dutton should encourage them.

One thing Dutton shouldn’t do is try to show us the “real” him. He needs to define himself by what he says and does for us. He is not a reality-TV contestant but a potential democratic leader.

Once he has secured the base he needs to reach out to other voters, and he needs to do that by refram­ing the debate and fixing the policy morass we are in.

The most urgent of these areas is climate change, of which electricity policy is only one aspect. The electorate is stuck, wanting lower emissions and lower prices. No politician has been game to tell them this is impossible, and reali­ty is colliding with fantasy. So far this issue has claimed two of the previous three prime ministers, and potentially Turnbull.

Then there are the economic issues, such as company tax, intergenerational debt, housing ­affordability, superannuation. How does he neuter Bill Shorten’s pitch that the Coalition favours the big end of town over schools and hospitals?

He hasn’t started well in the ­social policy area, promising higher spending on health, education and aged care. Labor already owns this territory and these promises are not credible.

And how will he deal with education, particularly school funding, where the key Catholic vote is offside? If Dutton doesn’t have good answers to these questions, and more, then the LNP may be headed for the massacre.

It’s not that Turnbull has answers either, but the key reason for dumping a leader has to be change, and if that can’t be delivered straightaway, then it won’t be delivered, particularly with an election a mere eight months at most away.

Ultimately the challenge for Dutton, or any other aspirant, is to change the substance of the government, not just to revoice the script. That’s hard for any former senior minister to do because they’ve been one of the scriptwriting team.

And if Dutton wins, and fails, then the failure could be such that his own very marginal seat may be in jeopardy. It’s a very high-stakes gamble.

Graham Young is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress and former vice-president of the Queensland Liberal Party.