It’s now easy to see the shadow Donald Trump is casting on the election campaign

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Try as they might, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton’s election campaigns just can’t get away from the elephant in the room: Donald Trump.

And even though both had rock-star welcomes at their official campaign launches over the weekend, where they both announced competing housing policies, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s mimicry of a popular Trump slogan almost outshone it all – and played right into Labor’s strategy of trying to link Dutton to Trump any way they can.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price speaking at a Liberal Party event in Western Australia, where she uttered the Trump-esque slogan “Make Australia Great Again”.Credit: James Brickwood

Speaking with host Jacqueline Maley on the Inside Politics podcast, chief political correspondent David Crowe and national affairs editor James Massola discuss if the wheels have fallen off the Coalition’s campaign after an eyebrow-raising week on the trail.

To listen, click the player below, or read on for an edited extract.

Maley: David, on Monday, you wrote up Resolve polling that gave us actual data about the impact of Donald Trump on this political election campaign, as opposed to our vibes and feelings on that subject. What did the polling show?

Crowe: Well, one of the big findings was that 68 per cent of voters say Donald Trump is bad for Australia. That’s up from 40 per cent from last November. So we know that there is this strong feeling in the Australian electorate about the problem presented by Donald Trump. Now, there’s been a lot of supposition about how that plays out domestically because there’s this perception that Peter Dutton would be more aligned with Donald Trump on some policies. So we asked directly, does your view of Donald Trump make you less likely to vote for Peter Dutton, or more likely, or less likely to vote for Anthony Albanese or more likely, two separate questions worded exactly the same way. And they show a greater tendency of voters to mark down Peter Dutton on this point. And so there’s a key problem here for Peter Dutton to overcome this perception among voters that he’s not the right person for this era with Donald Trump in office.

Maley: Yeah. Labor, of course, is very explicitly linking Dutton’s agenda to Trump’s, particularly in the case of Dutton talking about anti-woke measures and his desire to cut the public service. And he’s also made some remarks praising Trump. You know, a while ago now, he said, Trump was a big thinker and very shrewd. And this perception was made much, much worse on Saturday, wasn’t it, James? When Jacinta Nampijinpa Price stood next to Peter Dutton at a press conference in Perth and said a Trump slogan.

Massola: Yeah, “Make Australia Great Again”, Jackie, I think was the exact phrase... What happened with Jacinta Price, I think is emblematic of what’s been going on with the Coalition through the course of this campaign is that there is a cohort of Coalition voters and politicians who can’t quite resist the lure of the Trump brand and stance on certain issues, like woke education and these sorts of things. And I think for Peter Dutton, it’s been particularly damaging, as, you know, as the poll sort of proved – it’s been really messy – It’s a massive turn off for Australians.

Maley: It does seem a little bit like the campaign is getting away from Peter Dutton. I wonder what you guys think about that?

Crowe: I think it’s getting to a very challenging time for the Coalition. You can almost hear the crunching of the gears as they try to shift course on Trump. It was earlier in the year, I think they thought that aligning themselves on some of those issues was going to be good for them. Then, it became clear that was a net negative, they’ve got to change. However, that wasn’t nailed down clearly as a strategic position at the beginning of the campaign. Otherwise, surely the message to [Price] would have been, “Whatever you do, don’t be pro-Trumpist with your rhetoric.” And so they are adapting too late, and it maybe too late to right the campaign in that sense. But then you get these other mistakes as well. The mistake about working from home, where Peter Dutton had to adjust his language last week, and then the mistake this week on the Russian talks with Indonesia or whatever status they had, then Peter Dutton saying the Indonesian president had said something when in fact he had not. You know, that was loose talk, but also a big problem because it was about national security, which is meant to be Peter Dutton’s strong suit.

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