Dutton the wrecker: that’s the label he risks being stuck with

Anthony Albanese has consciously changed the way Labor governs. But Peter Dutton doesn’t want to change the way the Liberal and National parties oppose. One man is trying to exorcise the ghosts of the past while the other wants to revive them.

The recalling of federal parliament on Thursday to debate the government’s intervention in the energy market served as a supplementary exam for both leaders. Their responses reaffirmed how much their approaches have been informed by what each man learned during the Rudd-Gillard years.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald

For the prime minister, it was his first policy test not covered by Labor’s successful but modest election platform. For the opposition leader, that meant he had to choose between bipartisanship or disruption.

Albanese is mindful that the government in which he served as a senior minister between 2007 and 2013 lost policy arguments it should have won by releasing ambitious reform plans without first preparing the public. Then it retreated when vested interests complained.

To avoid that trap on energy, Albanese gave the industry fair warning that he planned to cap their prices, and had the agreement of the states and territories locked in before he took the legislation to parliament.

These were two essential items of political housekeeping that Labor neglected before releasing its proposal for a tax on mining super profits in 2010.

Dutton was a shadow minister in the Nelson-Turnbull-Abbott opposition between 2007 and 2013, and the message he drew from that era was the Coalition was most effective politically when it stopped debating on Labor’s terms, and opposed whatever the government proposed.

Dutton saw how useful those vested interests were in creating a sense of chaos that polarised public opinion, and ultimately paralysed the political system.

Abbott’s magic trick was to convince Labor that it had lost control of the agenda even when it had the numbers in the Senate. It is a critical detail to bear in mind when weighing the risk Dutton took on Thursday in opposing Labor’s energy market intervention. The Coalition voted against the government’s entire package – the energy price cap, and $1.5 billion household assistance – without bearing any immediate political cost of obstruction. The legislation was going to pass with or without its support.

Dutton is gambling that voters will have forgotten his negativity when they see Labor’s plan in action. He can draw some comfort from the fact that Labor could easily fall into minority government at the next election, due in 2025.

Remember that Abbott’s policy-free yelling looked foolhardy at first, but it was validated by Labor losing its majority in 2010. He moved from wrecker to prime minister-in-waiting from that moment onwards.

But Abbott’s shortcut back to power after just two terms in opposition relied on a divided Labor government, and on social and economic forces that are simply not there for Dutton.

Consider the successful campaign against the mining tax which helped bring down Rudd’s leadership on the eve of the 2010 election. The mining companies had the public on side; voters believed BHP and Rio had saved the economy during the global financial crisis. The miners were able to convert that feeling into an argument that Labor should keep its hands off their excess profits.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

The energy companies don’t have that card to play. Where mining profits were associated with high-paying jobs for those in the industry, and decent returns for mum and dad investors in the share market, and for every Australian with a superannuation account, energy profits are felt in higher prices for households and businesses.

It is true that Labor’s intervention in the energy market feels rushed. But the government has been working on it for two months, with ministers publicly weighing options throughout the process.

Kevin Rudd dropped the mining tax on the industry, and the public, in an election year. He lost his job before he could negotiate a deal. Julia Gillard’s first act as prime minister was to call a truce with the miners. She asked them to help design a compromise tax.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers explained what went wrong in his 2013 book, Glory Daze, which reflected on his time as an adviser in the Rudd-Gillard government. They had simply left it too late to design the mining tax, consult with industry and prepare the public “for a reform of this size”.

The then treasurer, Wayne Swan, had his plate already full with preparations for the May budget, while Rudd was dealing with the fallout from the defeat of his climate change legislation the previous December. Rudd was also trying to land his hospital reform.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers speaks about Labor’s energy plan in parliament.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“Ideally, we would have had a longer run-up and a better sense of the first iteration of the tax before we announced our intention to implement it,” Chalmers wrote.

Albanese and Chalmers have the advantage of facing this policy challenge at the beginning of the term, not in the witching hour before an election. And they have political capital.

Albanese is still enjoying his political honeymoon. He has a clean sweep of reforms from his emissions reduction target to changes in workplace bargaining rules already passed by parliament. Rudd entered the ring with the mining companies as a weakened leader. His approval rating had crashed after he walked away from his climate change policy.

The Albanese method was distilled in a short interview on Sky News, where he thanked the crossbench, took a potshot at Dutton, and called the bluff of the energy companies. It is both collaborative and assertive.

The prime minister couldn’t resist dropping two names in particular when thanking the crossbench. “I must say this,” he told Sky’s Kieran Gilbert, “that the minor parties, and the crossbenchers, were all prepared to be constructive. All engaged. Whether it was Adam Bandt, or Bob Katter, or other independent senators and members. The opposition, having failed to put in place a policy for 10 years, today voted for higher power prices. They voted to defend the interests of big corporations making massive profits without any recognition that there is a responsibility to manufacturers, to households, to deliver for their interests.”

The Dutton method assumes there is a political reward for saying “I told you so”, even though he can’t say what will go wrong, or how he intends to fix the problem in government.

“They had the numbers, so they kept the bill together because they saw that as a wedge against us,” Dutton told 2GB’s John Stanley on Friday. “That’s fine, that’s the politics that the prime minister is playing, and people can see through that, but it’s a very serious bill and I don’t think we fully understand the consequences of it yet – but we will over the next couple of years.”

Dutton sees the energy price shock as a means to relitigate the climate wars. But the electoral history he risks repeating is not Labor’s in 2010 or 2013 but the Coalition’s in 2022. Eight of the 18 seats the Liberals and the Liberal National Party in Brisbane lost on May 21 were to the teals and Greens. They won’t come back if Dutton is seen merely as a wrecker.

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