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https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8868678/election-2025-peter-duttons-strategy-for-election-spotlight

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As the federal election draws near, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is honing a campaign strategy that appears to be straight out of the populist conservative playbook.

It's been six days since Dutton emerged from a comparatively quiet summer break to launch his campaign for the prime ministership, with the slogan "let's get Australia back on track".

"This year, Australians will have an opportunity to remove a weak and incompetent Labor government that has sent our country backwards," the opposition leader said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who had opted for the hope-filled slogan "building Australia's future", quickly slid back into negative campaign mode, warning voters: "We don't want Australia to go backwards."

The Prime Minister told ABC radio he'd been stunned that Dutton's campaign launch in Melbourne had delivered "not a single new policy initiative in what was built up as a major speech".

Dutton "had nothing positive to offer," he jibed.

But while the Opposition Leader has been sparing in his policy announcements, his messaging targets key voters precisely where it can have the greatest impact.

His language has been described as "Trumpian", with a strongman flavour that emphasises law and order, patriotism and economic conservatism while, crucially, forensically targeting voters' pain points.

"Australians are worse off," Dutton says.

"Aspiration has been replaced by anxiety. Optimism has turned to pessimism. And national confidence changed to dispiritedness."

And he's throwing around the term "woke" at every opportunity, using it on Thursday to take aim at Bendigo Bank for knocking back a company's application for finance because it was involved in native forest logging.

Former Liberal party campaign strategist Tony Barry, now corporate affairs director at polling firm RedBridge group, says Dutton's slogan to "get Australia back on track" is squarely based on research, and is more compelling in the current circumstances than Albanese's bid for optimism.

"In recent published research, 48 per cent of Australians said we were on the wrong track and only 30 per cent said we're on the right track," Barry tells The Canberra Times.

And, he says, warning voters that a vote for the Coalition means going backwards will not be effective.

"People do want to go back to what they consider more prosperous and financially secure times," Barry says.

The theory behind Dutton's tactics isn't exactly new, and it's not ripped solely from Trump's playbook.

"What Peter Dutton's doing is pretty well-established conservative politics," Australian National University senior politics lecturer Jill Sheppard says.

"He wants to go back to some more glorious, more stable, more comfortable time."

While it can be tempting to call this Trump-style populism, she says, it is actually on par with the last century of conservative political messaging.

Dutton and former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott are "very similar in lots of ways, and perhaps chief among them is that they're quite popular with their colleagues -even though voters may sometimes be a bit affronted by how conservative they seem," she says.

But ANU political campaign expert Dr Andrew Hughes describes Dutton's campaign messaging as "very Trumpian."

However, he says, the playbook that worked in the United States may not be as effective in Australia where voting is compulsory.

"Trump was only after engaging enough of those people he needed to win, [with] very targeted, very specific messaging," Hughes says.

Barry says the trend sweeping the globe over conservative governments taking power is largely about voters being frustrated with the status quo.

"It's not a great time to be incumbent government," he says.

"Because there's a lot of grievance in the electorate, a lot of pain, a lot of hurt ... [Voters] are looking for something different."

While key Dutton policies - such as building nuclear power plants - are criticised for not stacking up, the Opposition Leader forges ahead without flinching, giving the impression that details don't matter.

So what's Dutton playing at, and does he have a real chance at the prime ministership?

Here are the central themes that are emerging in Peter Dutton's election campaign playbook.

There's one word that Dutton seeks every opportunity to lob at Albanese, no matter what the context: "weak".

From his handling of the major supermarkets' duopoly to relations with China, the Opposition Leader has jumped every mishap and event to make the accusation.

"This Prime Minister, who's the weakest that we've seen since Federation, is leading in a way that makes Gough Whitlam look like a competent leader of our nation," he told reporters on Thursday.

Albanese's response is to paint Dutton as the villain, this week calling him "cold-hearted, mean-spirited, just plain nasty."

Sheppard says the dichotomy risks missing the key attribute voters wanted from their leaders: competence.

"What competence looks like changes drastically depending on whether someone is more left or right-wing," she says.

Dutton's approach parallels that of United States President-elect Donald Trump, who spent years calling outgoing President Joe Biden "weak" before defeating him to secure a second term in the Oval Office.

Both right-wing leaders have seized on the Israel-Hamas conflict to accuse their rivals of being "weak" on the Middle East and failing to offer fulsome enough support to Israel or to tackle rising antisemitism.

Dutton has given the Australian public service a kick as he vows to crack down on "waste", echoing Trump's war on the US bureaucracy though his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), co-headed by billionaire SpaceX and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk.

He's specifically referenced the DOGE when criticising the Albanese government, which has funded an additional 36,000 public service jobs since being elected.

"When you look at what Elon Musk has been tasked to do in the United States, why are we tolerating money being wasted when people are working harder than ever for their wage, they're paying taxes at a higher rate than they've ever paid and they want to know that money is being spent efficiently?" he told 2GB radio.

Dutton has linked government spending with cost-of-living woes, blaming it for inflation while capitalising on entrenched pessimism among voters about their living standards.

Dutton, who last year called for the visas of pro-Palestine protesters who mouthed anti-Semitic chants to be cancelled, used his campaign launch last weekend to pledge to "keep Australians safe".

The approach is a no-brainer, Sheppard says.

"We've got pretty good evidence from decades of the [ANU] Australian election study that says voters trust the Liberals on law and order."

For Dutton, a former Queensland cop, law and order is a vital pillar of his campaign messaging, particularly after the issue was central to the Liberal National Party and Country Liberal electoral wins in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

After criticising bail laws - which are under state and territory jurisdiction - as being too lenient, he pledged an extra $7.5 million in funding to Crime Stoppers if elected.

"If there is no consequence, if there is no red line, if there is no ability for the police to have an enforcement mechanism, then these people will continue to commit crimes and the crimes will escalate," he told reporters on Monday after using his weekend campaign launch to say Australia was "less safe ... less cohesive" under Labor.

The Coalition has relentlessly pursued the Albanese government over last year's High Court decision that forced it to release dozens of immigration detainees with criminal records, on the basis that detaining them indefinitely was unlawful.

No matter how many times the government points to previous decisions when Dutton was immigration minister, the saga weighs heavily in favour of the party known to be tough on arrivals.

The opposition has been so successful at blaming migrants for Australia's expensive property market that the Albanese government quickly followed suit after Dutton announced his plan to cut net overseas migration.

Even shadow treasurer Angus Taylor's fumbling of the numbers cited did not tank the idea of pushing down migrant numbers to enable the property market to cool off.

But Dutton is always careful to talk up the positive benefits brought to Australia by migrants, praising the contribution of those who already live here.

Dr Sheppard says this highlights a "tension between being anti-immigration generally and trying to talk nicely to potential migrant voters."

Dutton has gone so far as to declare that the national science agency - whose analysis found nuclear energy would be 50 per cent more expensive than renewables - is wrong, calling its report "discredited" and sparking outrage from CSIRO chief Doug Hilton.

He's promised to ramp up domestic gas production to get power prices down and restore stability to the grid, and to get rid of environmental "red tape".

"It means more digging," he said last weekend, echoing Trump's "drill, baby, drill" refrain.

The Opposition Leader says power bills will be 44 per cent cheaper under his $331 billion nuclear energy plan, but experts say his modelling is flawed, underestimates growing demand and would simply prop up the coal industry for years to come.

Surely, if the policy is a dud, the voters will walk?

But while the Coalition nuclear energy policy has sparked countless Labor memes, from three-eye koalas to Dutton as snow white, it's not that clear-cut.

"No voter trusts any institution," Barry says.

After being told their energy bills were cheaper when they clearly weren't, Barry says, cynicism in the electorate is high, meaning the government's arguments about science and costings can only have limited effect.

"If Labor's strategy is to say 'our costings on energy is better than your costs on energy', they are going to lose that debate."

Dutton, this week, reignited the debate over Australia Day, which has become a divisive topic that raises the hackles of voters on both sides of the political spectrum.

The Opposition Leader, who campaigned against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, now gets to remind voters of Albanese's failure and seize on identity politics.

Announcing a policy to force local councils to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day within 100 days if elected, the Opposition Leader used a hot-button issue to bolster his tough image and stoke divisions that could be blamed on the government.

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https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8869720/mark-kenny-australias-political-evolution-the-lefts-uncertain-future

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The world has become more hard-edged, more right-wing.

Social democracy seems lost in the storm, its outlines blurry and indistinct.

Across the West, the political right speaks to the hot viscera of disgruntled human bodies while the left mouths the cold abstract language of markets, fiscal discipline and economic indices.

When was the last time you heard a Labor Party figure make a major speech calling for transformative government interventions to rescue those left behind?

More often, its suited technocratsia explain to voters who feel pessimistic and unheard how much better off they really are.

This is a politics of disconnection. And disaffection.

Around the globe, established parties of the centre-left are waning, usually following periods in power in which they have failed in their core aims of materially improving the lives of working people, protecting the poor and ending environmental rapaciousness.

Economies have become harsher as companies have replaced governments in many services.

The richest have become richer. Living standards have stalled and often slipped back. Education has become less affordable, less enjoyable, more narrowly instrumental.

Health insurance is prohibitive and a trip to the dentist, potentially ruinous.

Home ownership is a pipe dream. Some reforms have been implemented but voters view them mostly as tinkering.

The left, long-accused of virtue-signalling, is now trapped in the middle and losing the values fight.

The question is not merely what does it stand for, but with whom does it really stand?

Is it the tuxedo crowd or the homeless?

While the current shift is electoral in form, it may turn out to be epochal in nature.

It is not just swinging voters in the middle who are shifting rightward, but core supporters - blue-collar communities and even unions who have long made up the bedrock of parties like the US Democrats, British Labour and the ALP.

Once unbolted, these voters may never return.

Peter Dutton is onto this and has been speaking to these voters in soft breakfast TV spots for three years.

Around the world, the message from voters has been the same. Incrementalism has failed.

Centrism has failed. Internationalism has failed. Multiculturalism can become a negative.

Resurgent nationalism is in vogue. The people lust for sharper turns, radical shifts - mostly inwards and backwards.

They hanker for disruption of a system that no longer offers the credible hope of continuing improvement for all.

Declarations consistent with this new philistinism - even when plainly cruel or idiotic - attract supporters where previously they would have been laughed at. Like annexing Canada or invading a European ally.

In the quickening run-up to a state election in WA, the once more sensitive Liberal Opposition Leader, Libby Mettam, has suddenly announced she would not stand in front of an Aboriginal flag if elected premier on March 8.

This calculated nastiness mimics the harsh stance recently taken by Peter Dutton.

Capitalising on a latent racism successfully fanned in the Voice referendum, both argue that they are virtuously pro-unity.

The country, they say, can have just one flag.

Mettam had supported constitutional recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty as recently as 2023 but now calibrates her political presentation to a harsher Australia.

The gestural mediocrity aside, it eludes both leaders that almost uniquely in the world, Australia's "one flag" features another country in prime position. Now that is laughable.

What genuinely self-respecting nation would put up with this? But then, consistency is irrelevant in emotion-based politics.

Invariably, these abdominally aimed pitches animate two intertwining measures of identity: nationalism and nostalgia. That is, they speak to an inchoate sense that things used to be simpler and better before multiculturalism and woke politics, before the international interference of the UN and multinational finance.

Consider the market-tested themes punctuating the democratic world's hardening nationalist sentiment.

In Brexit in 2016, British voters were urged to take "back" control. In Donald Trump's unlikely run that same year, the impudent outsider promised simply to make America great "again".

His plagiarised Reaganite slogan worked so well, he used it again. Indeed, so in tune was it that after four managerialist years of Bidenomics, Trump's "make America great again" even facilitated a bizarre nostalgia about his first shambolic term. MAGA voters recalled how rosy the economy had been under Trump the first time.

The Harris campaign protested that the numbers told a starkly different story but nobody cared.

America was "on the wrong track" voters kept saying and media kept reporting.

In that vein, is it any surprise that Dutton's working slogan going into the looming federal election is "let's get Australia back on track". Once again we see this unquantifiable notion of a previous golden age to which he promises return. It is an attractive idea and one hard to meet on its own terms, precisely because it is not a fact but a feeling.

Even more so in the digital communications age, emotion beats fact, and subjective perception - often called "lived experience" - leaves objective evidence writhing in the gutter.

At the core of the crisis gripping the cosmopolitan left, is its own timid failure to conduct politics and policy in this light.

A reluctance to confidently assert that the state has a role in social and environmental problem-solving and a refusal to demonise social division, widening inequality and galloping corporate profits.

• Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.

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