News
Attacks on big business have been part of the opposition leader’s strategy to broaden his appeal – now he is working to repair strained relations with the corporate sector that have raised concerns within his party. By Jason Koutsoukis.
Inside Peter Dutton’s quiet pitch to big business
In his pitch to ordinary, working Australians, Peter Dutton has done more than most of his predecessors to distance the Coalition from big business, picking conspicuous battles with some of Australia’s largest corporations. More quietly of late, he has been working to cement his relationship across broader swathes of the corporate sector.
“I think obviously there has been some strain with the Liberals and big business, but Peter hasn’t been afraid to take that on,” Nationals leader David Littleproud tells The Saturday Paper. “I’ve known three Liberal leaders, and he’s probably more different than the others in terms of breaking that stereotype that the Liberals are the party of big business.”
According to Littleproud, Dutton’s small business background, as well as his first career as a police officer in Queensland, has given him a different perspective to other Liberal leaders, especially when it comes to developing new policy positions that appear out of step with the party’s core economic beliefs.
“I think that’s demonstrated by the criticism that he’s received from some of the Liberal elders about some of the things that he supported the Nationals on that are about the little guy, are about the workers in the outer suburbs and in regional areas,” says Littleproud. “I think Peter’s intrinsically attracted to supporting those people because of that sense of justice that I think he’s had from his life experience. This is something that Peter has brought to the Liberal Party leadership, and I think it’s only since Peter’s been there that you could say that about the Liberal Party.”
Since his first press conference as opposition leader, when he evoked Australia’s “forgotten people”, Dutton has kept refining and repeating the line that “the Liberal Party is the party of the worker”.
“During the last 22 months, we’ve seen a government in lockstep with the interests of inner-city elites, big business, union bosses, industry super funds and woke advocates,” Dutton told the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia’s national summit this year.
The choice by some major Australian corporations to publicly align with the “Yes” vote in last year’s referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament played into Dutton’s hands, allowing him to paint big business and Labor as being out of touch with the interests of ordinary voters.
During the Voice campaign, Dutton took aim at mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto and conglomerate Wesfarmers after they each donated $2 million to the official Yes23 campaign. Other companies that backed the “Yes” campaign, including Qantas, Woodside Energy, Lendlease and Telstra, also drew criticism from the opposition leader.
Then in January, Dutton called for a boycott of Woolworths for announcing it would no longer stock Australia Day merchandise – a decision the company said was in part due to a lack of demand.
Months later, the opposition leader surprised many within the Liberals’ ranks with his support for divestiture laws that would allow the supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths to be broken up if they were found to have been abusing their power as a duopoly. The move elicited an alarmed editorial in The Australian Financial Review noting “Clear fault lines in the relationship between big business and the party of free markets”, and was described by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as the “Soviet” option.
Before long, Bunnings too was in the firing line, as the Nationals succeeded in their push for an inquiry into whether large retail chains not covered by the food and grocery industry’s code of conduct were unduly pressuring suppliers.
In June, peak business bodies were responding warily to Dutton’s declaration, via an interview in The Australian, that he would drop Australia’s target to reduce emissions by 2030 – a move that raised concerns among businesses, such as energy giant Origin, that bipartisanship on climate policy was necessary to create a stable environment for much-needed investment.
Despite his professed antipathy towards corporate elites, however, Dutton has cultivated his relationship with one of the country’s most powerful business leaders. In March, he paid his own way to fly across the country to pop into the 70th birthday party of Australia’s richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart. Taxpayers paid about $6000 for one staff member and one security person to accompany him. He took the stage in Perth for about 40 minutes before rushing to the airport to take a red-eye flight back to the east coast.
Now, in the year since the referendum, when the relationship between the Coalition and the big end of town reached its nadir, Dutton has quietly opened his door to those lobbying on behalf of corporate Australia.
“I think things were a little bit bleaker at the time of the Voice, when many ASX companies decided to donate millions to that cause, and it wasn’t really their core business,” said one Liberal Party adviser. “But while Peter was proved right on that, it would be wrong to say that Peter is anti-business, because he actually gets business in a way that I don’t think any other recent Liberal leader has.
“You saw that at the recent commissioner’s lunch at the AFL grand final, when a who’s who of corporate Australia were making a beeline for Peter,” the adviser said. “Not only has he dealt with many of them in government, but after so many years in parliament he knows them all personally, so I think today it’s true to say there is no angst at all in the relationship between Peter and big business.”
That relationship drew further strength in the months following the Voice referendum in the debate over Labor’s industrial relations reforms. The same Liberal Party adviser recalls the mood at The Australian Financial Review’s annual business summit in March.
“This was just after Labor had done the second tranche of their industrial relations changes, which was never on anyone’s agenda and appeared to come from a union wish list, and there was this deep pessimism in the room among those representatives of big business, who started looking to the Coalition to get the sector and their interests back on track,” the adviser says. “Now, Peter won’t be giving them everything they want, but Peter’s pragmatic, he understands that businesses employ a lot of people, and he’s been sending the signal that he understands the difficulties they’re facing.”
A demonstration of that strengthening alignment between big business and the Coalition came last month at the Business Council of Australia’s annual dinner in Canberra, with chief executive Bran Black taking aim at the Albanese government’s industrial relations laws, saying they were already acting as a deterrent to employment.
“It was a bit of a seismic shift in their tone and their approach, and I think they realised they didn’t have anything to lose,” the Liberal adviser said. “So I think all of that is stemming from IR, particularly the more recent tranche of changes, which no one knew was coming and has created this feeling of despondency among big business groups.”
One risk for Dutton in unwinding Labor’s industrial relations changes is that many of the new measures are popular with voters. Dutton and his ministers have already committed to reviewing new IR laws that require companies with more than 15 workers to pay labour hire staff the same wages as workers engaged under enterprise agreements. Dutton has also vowed to revoke the laws that provide for multi-employer bargaining, the “right to disconnect”, and further adjustments to the definition of a casual worker, which Dutton says have proved a red-tape nightmare for small and family businesses.
Stephen Bell, emeritus professor at the University of Queensland’s School of Political Science and International Studies, says this focus on small business is in keeping with Liberal values, and Dutton’s recognising that the party’s traditional proximity to the top end of town is unappealing for voters.
“Not only does big business not have many actual votes, but another key factor influencing political relationships is that big business doesn’t seem to have much legitimacy with a lot of people, and that feeds into what’s happening today under Dutton,” adds Bell. “Populist attacks on big business are a vote-winner, or can be, and that is what’s driving policies like we’ve seen with the supermarkets.”
Dutton’s earlier attacks on big business also omitted as targets some of the Coalition’s largest recorded donors. The Coalition, which has outspent Labor at every federal election since 2007, declared spending of $132 million in the year leading up to the May 2022 election, compared with Labor’s $116 million.
Among the biggest donors to the Coalition were Anthony Pratt’s paper and packaging company Pratt Holdings, which gave $3.7 million each to both major parties, with $1 million from Sugolena Holdings, a company linked to Sydney businessman Isaac Wakil, and $900,000 from private company Jefferson Investments. The biggest Liberal donor was the Cormack Foundation, a conservative fundraising vehicle funded mainly through donations from wealthy private individuals.
Increasingly, it seems, Dutton is working on lifting his corporate profile. Unlike last year, he has lately maintained a busy schedule of public appearances at a range of business leaders’ summits, giving keynote addresses for events hosted by peak bodies from the Australian Energy Producers to the Property Council of Australia and the Australia China Business Council, among others.
Representatives from leading lobbyists such as Australian Industry Group, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the BCA – all three headed by former senior advisers to former Coalition government ministers – have also forged closer ties with Dutton’s office.
Last week, Dutton moved to improve relations with a sector that has not been close to the Coalition in recent years, inviting Tech Council of Australia chair Robyn Denholm – her other hat is chair of Tesla, Inc. – and Tech Council chief executive Damian Kassabgi to a meeting at his Parliament House office in Canberra. With Liberal MPs Paul Fletcher, a former senior Optus executive, as well as David Coleman and Simon Kennedy, both former McKinsey executives, also in attendance, the meeting was to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing the sector.
“We discussed the vital role of Australia’s tech sector and the need for increased investment to keep pace with global competitors,” a spokesperson for the Tech Council of Australia told The Saturday Paper.
Mindful of pushback against its policy on broadening access to superannuation, the opposition has also improved its outreach to the financial services industry. Cutting red tape is an area in which the Coalition has sought common cause, says Financial Services Council chief executive Blake Briggs.
“The opposition remains open to credible, evidence-based policy to bolster economic growth and reduce unemployment, with deregulation of the financial services industry offering an opportunity to promote growth and expand Australian exports,” he says.
“There is fundamental disagreement with the opposition and business community on some policies, however, such as super for housing in the financial services sector, where the industry is united that the principle of preservation is sacrosanct, but the Coalition is pressing its advantage on opening the superannuation system to purchase a home.”
While Dutton may well be working behind the scenes to build stronger relationships with the big end of town, in public he will continue to zero in on outer-suburban seats such as Lindsay, in Western Sydney, home to those forgotten people that every Liberal leader since Menzies has tried so hard to win over.
“John Howard used to call my electorate a microcosm of Australia,” Melissa McIntosh, the current Liberal member for Lindsay, tells The Saturday Paper. “Because it’s got families, it has young people, has small business owners and people working really hard to get ahead, and it’s those people that are working really hard to get ahead that have never worked harder than they are right now.
“I know Peter has a similar electorate to mine, and what he’s doing is demonstrating a really strong understanding of the aspirational, working Australians. I think this government has lost sight of the everyday Australian, and that’s why we are seeing Menzies’ forgotten people being resurrected.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 19, 2024 as "Inside Peter Dutton’s quiet pitch to big business".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
