If Dutton is to beat Albanese, he must abandon this matchy-matchy phase

After many months and a slew of polls finding Opposition Leader Peter Dutton slightly ahead of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on a number of measures, including the two-party preferred vote, polls are showing the prime minister once again edging ahead. The YouGov poll of 1500 Australian voters gave Labor a lead of 51 per cent to the Coalition’s 49 per cent.

Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton doing live TV crosses from Canberra on Wednesday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Of course, as pollsters always warn, slim margins of these sorts fall well within the margin of error of most polls. But as tiny leads are interpreted when they start forming a trend, so it’s also worth considering the drivers behind a slight but sustained decline.

So here goes: after three years in which he chose the path of dinner party opprobrium on issues from the scope of the constitutional amendment to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to parliament to nuclear power – and saw his numbers in the polls rise despite it all – it is striking that Peter Dutton fell a little out of favour when he chose to match the promises of the Labor Party over the last couple of weeks.

There was the $8.5 billion Labor announced to boost GP bulk-billing, which the Coalition quickly matched and went better on, adding half a billion on top for mental health services. And then there was Labor’s $150 power bill rebate, which the Coalition matched within hours despite calling it a “Band-Aid on a bullet wound”.

For a weak and wobbly fortnight, the Coalition looked spooked by Labor’s carefully designed political wedges. In trying to neutralise them, it looked shaky and lacking in conviction.

Which is precisely how Albanese would like his opponents to be. His government, which Ross Gittins labelled “timid, uninspiring and uninspired” on budget night, benefits when its opponents look even more afraid and unimaginative.

Now, if you speak to the Coalition’s biggest boosters – and I have had the pleasure of the full harangue – the Coalition had always planned to increase funding for GP bulk-billing. It just brought forward announcing its policy when Labor laid out its own. That may well be exactly what happened. But to the cynics among us (me), it looked a lot like the move of an opposition which, feeling that it might now win the race, suddenly becomes wary of tripping and slows down.

Whichever it is, the dreaded “optics” weren’t ideal for Dutton’s image. And as Treasurer Jim Chalmers demonstrated this week, perception is the art of politics.

Perhaps buoyed by the slight turnaround in the polls and certainly fizzier than a Sydney auctioneer off the back of the Reserve Bank’s quarter-of-a-percent interest rate cut, Chalmers delivered his fourth budget this week with the aplomb of a practised magician. The centrepiece was a beautiful sleight of hand, ensuring (as Andrew Clennell astutely pointed out on Sky) that the headlines were dominated by the tax cut – however “modest”, as Chalmers called it himself – rather than by the national debt, which is on track to reach a trillion dollars next year.

Queensland LNP leader David Crisafulli (pictured with Peter Dutton) has been lauded for “the ability to speak with authority and authenticity at the same time”.Credit: Matthew Absalom-Wong

This chicanery is the equivalent of the government skimming your credit card to buy you a coffee. But the politics are great. Labor can now claim to be the party of tax cuts while also enjoying its traditional strengths in voters’ minds of health and welfare.

Dutton had a choice to make: match the tax cut, which would have looked like another copycat move; increase it and risk the accusation of fiscal irresponsibility; or oppose it. Of the bad options left to him by Jim Chalmers’ design, Dutton chose the strongest one: he called out the tax cut as a cruel hoax on taxpayers. It is so unusual for the Coalition to oppose a tax cut that it took many commentators’ breath away when he did exactly that.

Happy days for the Albanese-Chalmers team – or so they clearly think. Their campaign lines are already spilling merrily from their lips. Dutton, so you can expect to hear repeatedly over the next five weeks, “will cut Medicare to pay for his nuclear reactors, but he won’t cut income tax for every taxpayer”.

Well. It would seem that no one in the Labor government has spent any time wondering why they, a first-term government team, risk falling into minority. Or – some very optimistic Coalitionists hope – even losing government entirely. Dutton took the option that shows why: he chose to once again do something hard and, in doing so, to look like a leader.

After delivering the budget reply speech on Thursday night, he headed to Queensland, where the new Liberal premier, David Crisafulli, is trying the role of leader on for size as well. Crisafulli performed well during the recent cyclone threat up north and has been lauded for “the ability to speak with authority and authenticity at the same time”.

The Queensland premier followed his cyclone success with a hard call, breaking an election promise not to build a new stadium. Apologising, he acknowledged the dilemma he’d faced, saying: “I know which one would have been politically easier for me to make, but I’ve made the right choice”. The polls aren’t in on the broader public reaction, but ABC Brisbane afternoon host Ellen Fanning tells me the talkback radio response has been overwhelmingly positive.

The polls aren’t the point anyway. The longer-term trend of Dutton’s ascent is a reminder that they are just a measure of current opinion, not a substitute for a decisive leader or a bigger vision. Australians are sick of government-by-focus group.

As the last fortnight of matched promises washes through the laggy polling cycle, we can expect to see some more positive polls for Albanese from Dutton’s matchy-matchy phase. Whether that will last throughout the election campaign will depend on whether Albanese and his team can learn at this late stage to ignore them.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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