Wooley: Australia’s a mess but it’s not all Labor’s fault

Coalition leader Peter Dutton will have to make political history if he is to overthrow Anthony Albanese, writes Charles Wooley

This Mark Knight cartoon was first published in the Herald Sun, on December 6, 2024.

Two years ago, despite Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s mismanagement of the referendum he had unwisely made his election victory captain’s pick, you would probably have rated opposition leader Peter Dutton’s chances of winning the next election as ‘Buckley’s’.

You wouldn’t have been alone. Even his fiercest media critics agreed, “The best thing Albanese has going for him is Dutton.” I thought so too.

Dutton was somewhat unprepossessing. Large and scary he looked every inch the stereotype of the old Queensland copper, which once he had been.

But at least a copper was what you would call “a real job”.

Albo on the other hand was from Labor’s political class, obscurely serving time on the way to the top as a research officer and political adviser. There was nothing to see there.

But physically at least you couldn’t help noticing Peter Dutton.

Unkindly Tanya Plibersek once described him in parliament as ‘Voldemort’ the villain of the Harry Potter series, best played by Ralph Fiennes.

Plibersek’s casting of Dutton in the role only lasted a few seconds. No sooner than the word had tumbled from her lips, she retracted it.

An old parliamentary trick, but the point had been made.

Labor thought the opposition leader would frighten children and hopefully the Australian electorate as well.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in West Ryde, Sydney, greeting members of the audience as he leaves after he makes a speech at the Liberal Party Rally in support of Bennelong, Parramatta. Picture: NewsWire/ Gaye Gerard

With Dutton’s vision of a nuclear future, they might have added the mad and villainous Dr Strangelove to this imagined repertoire. But the Peter Sellers’ character had a full head of hair and perhaps that’s why Labor chose a different player from popular culture, the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons.

Sometimes you can’t take a trick. Despite the powerful image of the mutant goldfish, subsequent polling has suggested a majority of Australians were prepared to at least consider nuclear energy. Despite the implied threat that Homer Simpson might become the safety officer at your local nuclear power plant.

Albanese suffers declining political stocks while Peter Dutton has political history against him.

Not in a hundred years has an Australian government been defeated in its first term.

In that sense to lose government the PM would need to do a really big job on himself. And perhaps he has. The divisive Voice Referendum was a major political failure for this government. And Albo and former minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, did an outstandingly bad job of arguing for it.

Many of his more talented frontbench seemed distant or decidedly half-hearted on the matter. They could see what was coming.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese addresses the National Press Club of Australia, in Canberra, on January 24. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Does the 60/40 failure of a referendum the PM had made his own personal political statement possibly count as a de facto election?

It’s a stretch. But then so is the Albo government, only in power since May 23 2022, but it feels like so much longer.

The drawn-out referendum didn’t help. The unseemly enthusiasm for the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge and purchasing a $4.3m clifftop mansion at Copacabana while the ordinary voters were scratching to feed themselves and pay the mortgage.

These aren’t the politics of envy. These are the politics of being pissed off and from what I gather that is where Australians are right now. They hear Dutton when he says, “In the past two years, Australia has experienced the biggest fall in household disposable incomes of any developed country. And for the past 21 months Australia has been in a per-capita recession-the longest recession on record.”

Now you can argue that this condition does not eventuate overnight, and the previous 10 years of Coalition government must reasonably have something to do with our problems today.

Rightly you can argue that, but is anyone listening?

I suspect that they are not. When the electorate is peed off it is not thinking reasonably. As John Howard once told me; “You are in serious trouble when the mob don’t like it.”

Howard didn’t get everything right, but he certainly ran an effective government, the second longest in Australian history under a single prime minister. Yet in 2007 at the end of his fourth term he was swept from office and even lost his own seat of Bennelong. It wasn’t his perceived unkindness to refugees, nor his readiness to join those foreign wars that we might have been better to avoid, but the remorseless upward march of interest rates, beyond his control, that was Howard’s undoing.

This Mark Knight cartoon, featuring Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, was first published in the Herald Sun, on December 6, 2024.

In government, unless it is good news, you want the finance stories at the back of the paper and up the end of the television news bulletins. Not front and centre as they are now.

Certainly, the joint’s a mess.

No matter where you look.

Housing, energy, education, the economy, defence, to name a few along with a deepening national disunity and lack of confidence.

To be fair to Albo it’s hard to see him achieving such national disintegration in just two and a half years. This has been a long time coming and it is disingenuous of the Coalition to suggest that the previous 10 years had nothing to do with it. Credit where it’s due.

The polls suggest that neither party will win outright, and the next prime minister will lead a minority government.

Then Albo will surely be off to Copacabana.

I haven’t decided how to vote yet, but for what little it is worth I’ll let you know when I know.

Peter Dutton says that Albanese “is the worst prime minister since Whitlam.”

That is manifestly unfair and not the judgment of Australian political history.

I might not have argued had he said, “the worst since Billy McMahon.”

Indeed, last week Dutton could have been speaking about almost every recent PM when he said, “Australians have endured one of the most incompetent governments in our nation’s history … the past three years have been a litany of bad decisions and broken promises.”

I wonder when was it not always thus?

And Albo’s rejoinder could have been a description of every opposition leader in history.

“We do need leadership in this country, but we need leadership with a heart. Peter Dutton represents a cold-hearted, mean spirited, sometimes just plain nasty response and that’s not going to help people.”

Perhaps the only place either man gets it right is in his characterisation of the other.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist