Can Peter Dutton actually win enough seats to form government?

Following the Liberal Party’s loss in last weekend’s Dunkley byelection, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton announced that nuclear power would be the centrepiece of the Coalition’s energy and climate policy.

His plan, says Tony Barry, is “the longest suicide note in Australian political history”.

Barry is a former deputy state director and strategist for the Victorian Liberal Party. A few weeks ago the consultancy where he is now a director, RedBridge Group, completed a detailed research paper on Australians’ attitudes to nuclear power.

Just 35 per cent of people support the idea of using nuclear to provide for Australia’s energy needs. Only coal was less popular. Where there is support, it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65.

If the Coalition is to have any hope of winning the next election, says Barry, it will not be with nuclear power. It needs to win more of the cohort of younger voters “that’s abandoning us in droves”. Only about one in five electors under the age of 42 now votes Liberal.

It also needs to win back at least some of the affluent, educated, socially progressive seats lost at the past couple of elections to a half-dozen teal independents – all women, backed by women, who ran hard on Liberal Party misogyny. Finally, it needs to pick up seats in Australia’s second most-populous state, Victoria, where it won just six of 39 seats in 2022.

“The Liberals simply cannot win, cannot get to 76 seats at the next election, without picking up seats in Victoria,” Barry says.

He doubts they can do it. He doubts it more following Dutton’s decision to advocate for nuclear power.

The “electoral arithmetic” is just too daunting, Barry says. Dutton’s positioning of the Coalition is all wrong and the party continues to play to what he calls “internal audiences” – the right-wing echo chamber typified by Murdoch’s “Sky after dark” – and remains “captured by internal contests instead of external contests”.

No question, the arithmetic is daunting. The Coalition won just 58 of 151 House of Representatives seats at the last election, and now, after defections, holds just 55.

Following the devastating loss in 2022, Dutton’s articulated strategy for recovery was to focus on outer metropolitan and regional electorates and less affluent voters: the working class and tradies, essentially.

Last weekend’s Dunkley poll was the biggest test to date of that strategy.

Dunkley, in Melbourne’s south-east, is defined by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) as outer metropolitan. Census data shows it has fewer university-educated voters and many more people with trade qualifications than the average seat. Its residents are a little older than the national average and it has fewer migrants than most electorates. Household incomes are just a little below the average although there are considerable wealth disparities within the seat.

On top of that the byelection came in exceptionally difficult economic times: 12 rises in official interest rates since the election of the Labor government, inflated prices for all manner of goods and services, mortgage payments sharply up. In Dunkley, 41.6 per cent of households have a mortgage, compared with the national average of 35 per cent.

If the Dutton strategy were to work anywhere, anytime, it should have been in Dunkley last Saturday. It didn’t.

The Liberal primary vote went up by about 6.8 per cent, but most of that, analysts say, can be attributed to the fact neither Pauline Hanson’s One Nation nor Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party fielded candidates. People who might otherwise have voted for the far-right parties went to the Liberals instead.

The conservative parties won no votes in net terms from Labor, which also saw a rise in its primary vote, albeit by slightly less than 1 per cent.

The AEC is yet to finalise the count, but at this stage it appears the swing to the Liberal candidate, Nathan Conroy, was about 3.6 per cent.

Currently Labor holds 15 seats on a margin of less than 3.8 per cent. If a Dunkley-sized swing were to occur uniformly across the nation in next year’s full election, the Coalition would still come up six seats short of government.

Of course, swings are never uniform, but the question remains: where could the Liberal and National parties pick up the seats they need to win the election and what sort of policies and candidates would they need to do it?

The reality is winnable seats for the Coalition are hard to find. In Queensland, says Kos Samaras, another RedBridge director, the Coalition already holds almost every winnable seat.

Of the 30 federal electorates in Peter Dutton’s home state, it has 21. Labor has five, the Greens three and Bob Katter’s populist right-wing party has one.

The only possible pick-up, says Samaras, is Blair, based in Ipswich, which Labor holds by 5.2 per cent.

It certainly fits the Dutton template of an outer urban or regional, working-class electorate. ABC election analyst Antony Green also rates it a chance to switch.

Green nominates Lingiari, in the Northern Territory, as another possible conservative gain. It sits on a very skinny margin of 0.7 per cent.

Green says this depends on Indigenous turnout. With a small turnout, the seat will go conservative.

Conservative prospects are greater in Western Australia. Tangney, near Perth, is “the seat that fell from the sky last time for Labor”, says Green. Labor’s Sam Lim, most notable for having previously worked as a dolphin trainer and speaking 10 languages, holds it by just 1.7 per cent.

Another vulnerable WA seat is Hasluck, held by 6 per cent. Samaras rates it a second possible Liberal gain.

The west is notoriously electorally volatile and the Labor vote in 2022 was historically large, so some swing back is expected, says Green, who also notes that a redistribution before the next election makes predictions harder. It would take large swings for the Coalition to take more than those two seats from Labor.

The next most vulnerable ALP seats are Swan and Pearce, on margins of 8 and 8.8 per cent respectively.

One Western Australian seat the Liberals would dearly love to get back is Curtin, won by the independent Kate Chaney, in the 2022 teal-slide, with just over 51 per cent of the vote.

However, history shows that once they are in, well-performing independents are very hard to remove.

In South Australia, where the only marginal Labor seat is Boothby, on 3.3 per cent, the Coalition will also struggle to find wins. Indeed the state’s tightest seat is a Liberal one: Sturt on 0.5 per cent.

In Tasmania, says Samaras, the Coalition’s chances are better. Labor is in trouble in the state. “We did a statewide poll there this week,” he says, “and Labor’s primary is in the 20s.”

It bodes poorly for the perennial swing seat of Lyons, and for the ALP incumbent, Brian Mitchell, who holds it on 0.9 per cent.

In the ACT, the Liberals hold no seats, and there is little prospect of that changing.

The point here is the Coalition would have to look well outside the bounds of what is usually considered marginal to win more than a handful in these states. Thus its hopes must rest on the two big states.

In New South Wales there are 10 Labor seats that might fairly be called marginal, although a number of those are unlikely gains.

Reid, for example, was formerly held by the Liberal moderate Fiona Martin, who, notes Green, “was the only losing MP Morrison didn’t ring to commiserate with, because she crossed the floor on the religious discrimination bill”.

The outcomes in several others – Bennelong being one example – could depend on how their boundaries change in the impending redistribution by the AEC.

In general, says Green, there are a number that fit Dutton’s template in Sydney’s west, in the Hunter region, and on the NSW Central Coast.

He ticks off some: Werriwa, Shortland, Paterson, Hunter.

They tend to be the sorts of electorates heavy with tradies, light on migrants, insecure about their futures.

The same applies to a few seats on the outer edges of Melbourne, such as McEwen and Hawke.

In Green’s view, however, there just aren’t enough such seats for the Coalition to win.

The reality is, there are long-term political and demographic shifts that are eating away at support for conservative parties.

About a third of voters now prefer minor parties and independents to either of the major parties – which is a big problem for both Labor and the Coalition, but a bigger one for the Coalition.

Labor, says Barry, can “get away with” a lower primary vote, because it gets a much greater flow of preferences from minor parties, particularly the Greens.

On the basis of current polling, the Coalition is “at least seven points off being competitive”, says Barry.

“We need to be 45 primary, realistically, to win government. We’re certainly not doing it at 38.”

The prospect of minor party and independent preferences helping Labor is not the only threat such candidates pose, either. There is also the possibility some might take Coalition seats, as seen with the teal wave at the 2022 election.

In Dan Tehan’s seat, Wannon, an independent challenger got more than 46 per cent of the vote after preferences. In Bradfield, it was almost 46. In Nicholls more than 46. In Cowper, nearly 48.

In all likelihood, those independents will have another go at the next election, with the benefit of experience and the ability to point to the precedent of those teals already in the parliament.

The next question is whether the Coalition can tap the right issues and people to appeal in the electorates it needs to win.

How is it going to stop affluent, formerly safe electorates from falling to progressive candidates, particularly the teals?

Tony Barry notes that while Dutton has “acknowledged publicly that we need to win back at least some of the teal seats, there’s no evidence a year out that we are positioning ourselves to do that”.

John Black, a former Labor politician who now runs a company doing demographic profiling, also believes the Coalition’s current approach is a recipe for failure.

“They’re picking up blue-collar blokes. They are, there’s no doubt about that. But the point is, are they in the right seats? And I think the answer to that is ‘no’. And it’s also a declining demographic, whereas the teals’ support is based on a female professional demographic, which is getting bigger.”

The Dunkley loss, he says, was an example of that failure.

Following the death of the well-regarded local member, Peta Murphy, Labor selected her friend, a well-connected local woman and self-declared non-career politician, Jodie Belyea. The Liberals’ candidate was an Irish expatriate businessman and mayor of Frankston.

“I couldn’t believe that they selected yet another big boofy male to seek to replace a deceased woman,” says Black.

“I heard an excerpt of him in a thick Irish accent complaining about the number of migrants to Australia.”

It’s not that migration is not a big concern for voters – polling consistently shows strong majority support for much lower numbers – it’s that the Liberal campaign sought to frame it in a nasty way, says Samaras.

“Culturally, really stupid,” was his judgement. “They brought out the campaign manual that belongs in Australia 20 years ago. Crime and boat people...”

Zoe Daniel, the independent member who won the Melbourne seat of Goldstein from the Liberals’ Tim Wilson, agrees.

“The politics of fear and loathing did not work in Dunkley. They didn’t land in Goldstein in 2022 and they won’t at the next election,” she says.

“People see straight through it. They’re interested in reasonable conversations about the issues affecting our nation.”

Right now, the main game is the economy. It’s cost of living and the housing crisis. To this, the Dutton-led opposition is offering nuclear power.

“Nuclear power is not going to help you win back the teal seats or help you trying to talk to Millennials,” says Samaras.

“It gifts Labor an unbelievable scare campaign over where they are going to put reactors.”

Only a fool would make a firm prediction of the outcome of the next election this far out. Australian politics over the past decade is rich in examples of leaders imploding and internal warfare destroying governments.

Right now, however, Labor is cohesive. Before the election, economists predict, interest rates will come down.

In the view of the experts, the chances of the Coalition grabbing 21 seats are remote.

On the other hand, there’s a strong chance Labor will lose at least a few seats, and with them its parliamentary majority.

“So,” says Samaras, “the likelihood of a Labor minority government is extremely high.”

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