Peter Dutton is being tested for the first time, and he doesn’t seem to be passing
(First published in The New Daily 5 April, 2025)
About 2½ years ago, when Peter Dutton was undergoing his third attempt to find a political persona that connected with people, a Coalition MP told me “until we know what we stand for, and who we represent, this is the best we have.”
Under Dutton, the Coalition is still struggling to decide who it represents and what it stands for. And the ‘best’ it has has started the Coalition’s election campaign floundering for a narrative.
For those who have followed Dutton’s political strategy over the years, this won’t come as a surprise. Because Dutton, for all his bluster and strongman tactics, has never actually been tested. Not as a minister, not as Opposition Leader.
It’s been by his own design. Dutton has spent his political career picking fights, being divisive and creating his own echo chamber where he is rarely challenged and has his own ideas reflected back to him.
While a minister in Coalition governments, Dutton always had a leader who could clean up after him. He could lie about African gangs, or rape victims on Nauru, or whatever else he felt would play to the base and there was always someone else who would come in and tone down what he said, providing the cover for the next divisive comment.
As leader, Dutton has been responsible for it all. So he has responded by not responding.
When things weren’t going his way, he would just disappear for four days.
As political commentator Niki Savva and others have pointed out, Dutton responded to setbacks by throwing up distractions.
Saying no to the Indigenous Voice and proposing nuclear were policies that emerged immediately after losing the Aston and Dunkley byelections.
More broadly, Dutton didn’t have to come up with answers to the tough questions because he rarely faced them.
A review of the transcripts publicly published on his website show that as Opposition Leader, Dutton fronted up to the Canberra press gallery just 16 times over the parliamentary term.
In the past year, he has done just three Canberra press conferences, including none between July 2024 and February 2025.
By contrast, his publicly available transcripts show that over the same time he has appeared on 2GB radio 85 times – including 57 ‘interviews’ with Ray Hadley and 26 with Ben Fordham – and 81 times on Sky News, with 20 appearances on Sharri Markson’s show.
That’s not to say he hasn’t done any other media. He has, but it has mostly been away from the institutional knowledge of the press gallery, where he has been able to make claims without follow up.
While this strategy has served him well in playing to the Liberal party base and keeping his media cheerleaders happy, it has done nothing to prepare him for an election campaign. And it’s obviously made him too comfortable.
Not being used to scrutiny is the reason Dutton felt comfortable admitting he would much prefer to live on Sydney Harbour at Kirribilli House, instead of The Lodge in Canberra.
The Queensland MP who is trying to order public servants on flexible work arrangements back into the office because the taxpayer shouldn’t be paying for them to work from home, wants to be a prime minister who works away from the prime minister’s home.
When Dutton told a Sky After Dark audience he wanted to get “woke” ideologies out of schools, he probably never considered he might be asked to explain what he meant by that the next day.
Because Dutton has never had to have the answers before. It’s previously been enough to blow and bluster and then just disappear, before turning up again when the news cycle moved on.
But it turns out that in an election campaign, you actually need to address issues people care about and it’s not as easy as just telling people you’ll get to it.
Dutton has prioritised keeping the Liberal party room together over almost everything else as Opposition Leader, operating on the strategy that making the election about the Albanese government itself rather than what a government he led would do differently, would be enough to win voters.
And maybe, at one point in the election cycle, it would have.
But the winds of luck, and turning tides have blown Albanese’s way in the past six months.
Falling inflation, an interest rate cut with more on the horizon, a sweetener of a tax cut top-up and the strategised advantage of being boring in an unpredictable world, has seen a lot of the discontent among voters return to general apathy.
Voters don’t love the Albanese government, but they don’t hate it. And that’s not enough, especially when they don’t love the other guy either.
While Albanese, aided by the advice of Daniel Andrews instead of Stephen Smith this time, has come out of the campaign blocks with a plan, a strategy and an upbeat attitude, Dutton, taking advice from Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison, has seemed lacklustre and lost.
Dutton’s media strategy has followed suit, with story after story in the including the line that Coalition campaign media didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The first three days of the campaign appeared to be spent in factories.
There were no big announcements, no meetings with voters who had not been pre-vetted.
On the day of the much telegraphed Trump tariff announcements, Dutton appeared slow to respond having headed to Western Australia, where the time difference meant he was behind in more ways than one.
On the flip side Albanese held a press conference almost as soon as Trump was off the stage, setting the agenda and the narrative. That meant Dutton – who has always be seen to hold a competitive advantage on all Trump matters – was on the back foot.
When he did speak, it came across like he was upset the tariff announcement for Australia was not worse, and his message boiled down to ‘we would have done all the same things as the Albanese government, but also begged more’.
So far Dutton’s campaign has followed a pattern of only being reactive, seemingly bereft of its own agenda and direction.
This appeared clear when the day after Phil Coorey wrote in the Australian Financial Review that it seemed incredulous Dutton was yet to appear at a petrol station, given the Coalition’s fuel excise cut policy, Dutton appeared at a petrol station.
Dutton has made the Coalition all about Dutton and now he’s carrying the campaign alone. That too, was predictable.
A lack of policy detail means Dutton’s shadow cabinet can’t help carry the load, because they don’t know what the answers to the policy questions are.
We’ve seen this over the confusion of the public servant job cuts (is the answer coming after the election as Bridget McKenzie has claimed, or now, as ACT Liberal candidates have told media).
Are all the job cuts coming from Canberra as Dutton and others have stated, or are they being spread across the public service as others have claimed?
There was similar confusion over the Andrew Bragg-backed policy to lower the buffer that banks require home loan applicants to hold.
Dutton continues to refer to the Coalition’s gas policy, but every indication is it didn’t exist until very recently, meaning it’s not ready.
Dutton has focused on big utes over big ideas, held back policies to ensure a small target and divided Australians to unite his party room.
He’s borrowed from Trump, but lacks Trump’s charisma, which is why the ‘Temu Trump’ label has taken hold.
Much was made of Albanese’s horror first week on the 2022 election campaign and his bounce back to victory, but that was against a very unpopular leader, a tired government and with the support of a team able to jump in and clean up the messes.
Dutton might find his stride, and four weeks is an eternity in politics, but for maybe the first time in his political career, Dutton is being tested. So far he doesn’t seem to be passing.
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