Joe Hildebrand: Analysis of what Peter Dutton got wrong in election campaign

Usually when you conduct a post-mortem the courteous thing to do is wait until the patient is dead – but it’s easy to see what went wrong for the Coalition, Joe Hildebrand explains.

Usually when you conduct a post-mortem the courteous thing to do is wait until the patient is dead.

Not so in this election, with the recriminations and finger-pointing already flying over what went wrong with the Coalition campaign — and that’s before the results are even in.

As an excellent piece in this masthead by my colleague James Campbell reveals, there was distrust and a disconnect between the office of Peter Dutton and the Coalition Campaign HQ. And in politics disunity is death.

Insiders also blamed a failure of Dutton and his frontbench to have clear, disciplined and focused messaging that resonated with voters’ concerns.

And here the great final irony lands with a thud.

According to the latest Redbridge poll released today, Labor has pulled even further ahead of the Coalition and now leads 53-47 two-party preferred.

And before people start jumping up and down and saying how they don’t trust the polls or that the polls had got it wrong before, consider a couple of things.

Firstly, this poll is consistent with all the major respected polls, which are showing uncannily similar results — in some cases exactly the same — in both primary and 2PP votes for Labor and the Coalition. So if this poll is wrong, then they all are.

Peter Dutton may have already started his post-mortem on the Coalition campaign. Picture: Adam Head / NewsWire

Secondly, the Redbridge-Accent poll had the Coalition well ahead before the election began. So if it is biased against the Coalition, then how did it have the Coalition with a major lead just a few months ago?

But more telling is the laundry list of issues that Redbridge quizzed voters on to see what was driving their vote either towards or away from the major parties.

Of the more than 20 areas and policies canvassed, virtually every single one was about the economy or cost of living or Budget cuts.

In other words, money, money, money. Turns out Abba had their priorities right all along.

The only one that didn’t was Labor’s response to anti-Semitism, which came in stone motherless last as something that was turning voters off the party.

As I and others have shouted from the rooftops, this election is about basic bread and butter issues and nothing else. Literally food on the table.

And yet Peter Dutton and his colleagues and supporter have spent the final week focused on whether we have too many Welcomes to Country or not or whether the Voice is coming back from the beyond the grave.

Did the LNP focus on the wrong issues? Picture: Lachie Millard

Whatever your position on any such issues, it is clear from the research — not to mention to Blind Freddy — that they are at best a second-order concern for the vast majority of Australians.

Do Coalition strategists really imagine there are undecided voters out there thinking “Well I was leaning to Labor because of the free Medicare and tax cuts but now I think I’ll go with the Libs because they’re more strongly opposed to Welcome to Country ceremonies…”?

Or is Campaign HQ desperately trying to tell Peter Dutton this and the calls just aren’t getting through?

Peter Dutton played a key role in defeating the Voice referendum, for which his supporters rightly give him great credit.

But the main reason the Voice went down was because people thought it was an out-of-touch ideological crusade at a time of a growing cost-of-living crisis, and they effectively punished the government for being distracted by it instead of responding to their concerns.

And so by talking about the same culture war issues in the final week of the campaign Dutton isn’t recreating his successful attack on the Voice.

This time he is the Voice.

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Analysis of what Peter Dutton got wrong in election campaign