Campbell: If Libs don’t work quickly, Labor will get to publicly define Dutton
There are plenty of reasons why Peter Dutton will find it hard to win the next election, but unless the Liberals quickly define him in the public mind, he is at deadly risk of being defined by Labor, writes James Campbell.
Opinion
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For years now we have been hearing that as the rich and well-educated inner city populations grow ever more Lefty, the Liberal Party will need to get more votes from the suburban and regional voters if it is to have a future.
That Scott Morrison understood this was evident from his final election campaign in which he showed he had little interest in pandering to the prejudices of potential Teal voters.
But as I observed at the time, effectively sacking one set of voters before he was certain he had hired their replacements was, to put it mildly, a risky strategy.
Fast forward two years and the evidence is starting to pile up that the strategy of courting socially conservative but poorer voters is starting to pay off.
In the latest RedBridge poll – the firm’s first since April – the Coalition’s primary vote is up from 37 per cent to 41 per cent.
The improvement has come from big surges in support from people with less education who are struggling with the current cost of living crisis.
Back in April, the government was ahead with people making-do on less than $1000 a week by 56 per cent to 44 per cent when preferences were distributed.
Today the Coalition is ahead 52 per cent to 48 per cent.
There’s been a similar turnaround among all voters whose household income is less than $3000 a week.
How much this change is down to Peter Dutton and his crew is arguable.
What is clear, however, is the people who have seen their standard of living walloped by higher mortgage payments and surging grocery prices are pissed off.
The number of people hanging on by their fingertips is indicated by the surge in the number of middle-class people who have been forced to turn to food banks.
A couple of weeks ago, a union official sent me a photo he had taken of the shelves in his local supermarket that had been emptied of discounted food.
“This image sums up Albo’s predicament,” he texted. “The nation is surviving off Woolies half-price specials.”
If a year ago you had written that, after spending so many years getting to the Lodge, Anthony Albanese might be a oncer you would have been laughed at.
Not today.
Returning to these RedBridge numbers – which I have been told mirror results from other pollsters – it’s clear the result of the next election will depend on two things.
The first is where these voters live. That is to say, are they distributed across Labor seats that the Coalition can realistically hope to flip?
It’s not impossible Labor could suffer significant erosion of support – particularly in Melbourne – but still just hang on because of the size of their buffers.
The other thing upon which the result of the next election is going to depend is how good the Labor machine is at targeting Dutton.
In private, Labor strategists do not deny the government is in deep trouble with a huge slice of the electorate struggling with cost of living pressures.
They know that if the next election is a referendum on the past three years, the government will lose.
To win, Labor is going to have to change the election from what it is shaping up as at the moment – a chance to give our verdict on Albo – to a plebiscite on the “risk” posed by Dutton.
Moreover, Labor strategists are quietly confident based on the way their negative material moved the dial in this year’s Dunkley, Victoria, by-election, that the Opposition Leader is vulnerable to a scare campaign.
It’s not just Labor people who think so either.
Sources in the conservative ginger group Advance say they have warned Liberals they are being complacent about the public’s knowledge of the history of the Opposition Leader, which they say is alarmingly low.
They say that when focus groups are presented with facts from his history – for example that he was forced to leave the Queensland Police after being badly injured in a car crash pursuing an escaped prisoner – they warm to him.
But unless the Liberals get their skates on by defining him in the public mind, Dutton is at deadly risk of being defined by Labor.
There are still plenty of reasons why Dutton will find it hard to win, but the number of Labor folk who think this government is going to be re-elected in its own right is dwindling.
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Originally published as Campbell: If Libs don’t work quickly, Labor will get to publicly define Dutton
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