Is it too early to be worrying about Peter Dutton?
What's the state of play for Labor?
No Labor leader ever gets it easy. But the Albanese Government did seem to have a relatively elongated “honeymoon.” After the 2022 election, there was a general sense of fatigue from the shrill partisanship of Morrison. A feeling that the right-wing talking points just weren’t hitting home.
But the media consensus is clear: the honeymoon is over.
Since the Voice referendum the right-wing chorus is hitting fever pitch, clearly emboldened.
On his own terms, Dutton has had a positive few weeks. He did his best to spin the referendum result as a verdict on the PM, and political events – most notably the High Court decision on indefinite detention – has shifted media attention to his preferred terrain.
Is it time to start worrying about the prospect of a Dutton Government after the next election?
In one sense, the thought of Peter Dutton as PM should always invoke fear. His is a conservatism of fervid conviction. He pursues his agenda relentlessly because it is not just about political point scoring for him. He has a clearly enunciated unremitting ideological agenda.
Not that he is above stooping to the basest and most abysmal forms of political point scoring, as he has demonstrated again recently.
But those of us who are politically engaged on the left should not presume that the way we see Dutton is the way he is perceived more broadly across the electorate.
A very solid chunk of progressive votes can’t stand Dutton, a solid chunk of conservative voters think he has something going for him, and a significant section of the electorate don’t think about him much at all.
But the danger of Dutton is not, and never was, that he would sweep to office on a cresting wave of popular support. It is not impossible that the Coalition wins a majority at the next election, but winning 21 seats is unlikely.
The danger was always that he would reconsolidate the conservative vote, find pressure points that would strip support from Labor, and use this to win back enough votes at the next election to deprive Labor of a majority. This would be the platform to go on and win office at the poll that followed.
What makes this strategy even more viable is the pincer movement on Labor from the Greens on the progressive flank (and to a lesser extent the Teals).
How worried should Labor be about this threat?
I agree with Sean Kelly’s really good recent piece that called for a sense of proportion. Dutton has had (on his terms) a couple of good weeks. But this alone does not a successful ascendancy make.
Comparisons have been made between Dutton’s approach and the spoiler politics of Tony Abbott, and these are apt – even if they do tend to fall into the mistake of seeing this negative brand of politics as a political tactic, and not the logical result of the degeneration of conservative thought and the radicalisation of right-wing politics (part of a global phenomenon).
But Abbott confronted a deeply divided Labor minority government. The Albanese majority government certainly seems to have learnt from the disunity of those years.
The Coalition still languishes in the polls. There is no consistent trend that would suggest that either Dutton is building a popular personal brand or that the Liberal Party is being rejuvenated (I am not even going to start on the Nationals). But polls change, and it would be foolhardy to deny that possibility.
From the start of his Liberal Party leadership, Dutton made clear that he saw the cost of living crisis as his primary opportunity to claw back enough Labor support to find a pathway to power. This is galling, of course, and the height of hypocrisy – it was Coalition action/inaction that lay the basis for the inflationary surge to become a cost of living crisis.
But his bet was that by the next election nobody would be blaming Scott Morrison anymore, but the government of the day. His plan was to spend the next three years relentlessly targeting Labor as either inactive or uncaring.
This is the government’s primary danger – but also its major opportunity.
It is a danger because attitudes are clearly changing around the cost of living crisis. In Labor’s first year, there seemed to be an appreciation that the inflationary spike was not the Albanese government’s fault. More than a year on, the electorate is inevitably less forgiving.
It obviously does not help that the right-wing media is baying for any shred of flesh they can extract from the government at the moment.
It is also a danger because the pressure on this question is not just coming from the right – but also the left, with the Greens seeking to position themselves in this area, most prominently around housing.
Labor does have a positive record of action. We have already seen:
- Annual wage growth at a 14 year high.
- More job growth than any other first year government.
- Major investments into childcare
- A massive boost to Medicare bulk billing funding.
Among others. All of these are positive steps, but they are lagging behind the scale of the deepening crisis.
We are seeing two factors pushing against these measures that pose serious challenges for the government.
The first is the difficult realities of economic management when the Reserve Bank is insistent on using the blunt instrument of rate rises to combat supply-driven inflation. The Bank’s own modelling predicts a long stretch of real wage decline ahead with further rises mooted.
The second is a media environment in which the government’s positive changes receive almost no substantive coverage. The government’s initiatives have almost no purchase in the media debate which has demonstrated its typical disinterest in substantive policy when splashier (and for the right-wing media, more overtly polemical) headlines are available. Labor simply can’t rely on traditional means to ensure that the electorate gets the message about the changes it has made and how that will affect their lives.
Dutton is convinced that the cost of living crisis is his opportunity. No matter how well it performs economically, Labor has consistently suffered from the perception that it is not a good economic manager (though the reality is the exact opposite).
And things are getting tough out there – extraordinarily tough.
But Labor has two major advantages that the Coalition lacks. One is the power of government and the ability to show through action its commitment to protecting the standard of living for ordinary Australians.
The second is that the party is infused with a genuine commitment to protecting working people’s living standards and quality of life. This is not just a cynical ploy to win electoral advantage, it is the literal reason for the party’s being. The Albanese government can connect with the urgency of the crisis in a way the Coalition never could.
It doesn’t have a second to lose. There is a long running trend in suburban former heartland seats of Labor support enervating. These areas are where the cost of living crisis is biting deepest (building on many years’ worth of neglect of these areas where people were already doing it tough). Dutton is targeting these areas, that is clear. But regardless of that, Labor should always be obsessed with elevating the living standards of working people in these areas. The cost of living crisis only highlights a vital task that for too long has been neglected.
But now it is vital that Labor makes sure that it is visibly doing everything it can to make life better for ordinary Australians. Most people don’t expect the government to “solve” the crisis, but they do know that they are doing it tough, and they are looking for a government that demonstrates it knows how tough things are, and that will do everything it can to fight to make it better.
The vital task is to find ways to engage electorates, local communities, and community groups around these policies and how they will affect people on the ground in the time to come. This is the electorate-by-electorate work that is far from glamorous, but can have a major impact on community sentiment and understanding.
Dutton is not trying to win – that would require a positive program for Australia’s future, something the Coalition seems completely uninterested in. His plan is to make sure Labor loses.
The positive for Labor is that the way to avert this danger is by doing what the party does best, and what Albanese has demonstrated himself to be particularly adept at: ignore the noise and don’t obsess over a bad few days or couple of weeks in the news cycle, focus on the issues affecting Australians the most, and take practical action that reflects Labor values.
The party shouldn’t obsess over Dutton, but focus on its own mission. But the spectre of Dutton shouldn’t be ignored, hopefully it will be a stark reminder of just what is at stake at the next election, and a reminder to all true believers what we are fighting for.