News
As Labor confronts Peter Dutton’s success in the polls, research is shaping how they will characterise him – from his police career to his investment properties to his time as health minister. By Jason Koutsoukis.
‘An unusual chess player’: How Labor is approaching Peter Dutton
After two years as opposition leader, qualitative research from both parties suggests people have a superficial impression of Peter Dutton as a negative person. He is someone prepared to use language that is nasty and narrow-minded.
Another word cluster that has formed around the Coalition leader is the opinion he is combative, arrogant, harsh, aggressive and hard-headed.
There is, however, a flip side to being seen as a bit of a bastard. It may not be the quality most people look for in a spouse or a son-in-law, but it can comfort people who are worried about their country in difficult times.
Dutton is a cannier politician than he seems to be. He is not just mean and aggressive: he is effective.
“His Question Time prep is probably as good an indicator as any of his ability to think not just outside the square he’s in but right beyond the outer reaches,” says one confidant.
“He’s a chess player with a very unusual strategy of attack. Where [Tony] Abbott was always storming the beaches, attacking directly, Dutton prefers to parachute behind the lines and try to pick off the less obvious targets.”
In all the research done so far by Labor, two clear lessons have stood out. These are to do with issues on which Labor will not attack Dutton.
The research shows voters do not want to hear criticism of Dutton’s decade as an officer in the Queensland Police Service. Nor do they want criticism of his success as a property investor, which has enabled him to build significant wealth outside of politics.
In place of this, Labor has found success focusing on Dutton’s poor record as health minister and his rhetoric on China. Then there is his character.
When nominating for the Liberal leadership after the 2022 election loss, Dutton acknowledged the need to soften his image, saying he wanted people to see more of him.
“Not just what they’ve seen through sound grabs when I’m talking about boats or all sorts of different issues,” Dutton said. “You’ve got to be a tough person to be the defence minister in this country, you have to be a tough minister to be in charge of ASIO and the Australian Federal Police and Border Force.”
Dutton ignored easy characterisations of him as a stopgap leader and made himself available to media organisations outside his comfort zone.
“Why have you decided to do this interview?” reporter Sean Nicholls asked Dutton when he sat down for an extended interview with the ABC’s flagship current affairs program, Four Corners.
“I think it’s so important to be able to tell more of my story and allow Australians to see a little bit more of my background,” Dutton said. “Sometimes the public only see a snapshot of you through a very quick grab in a news package or during Question Time.”
Appearing later on the ABC’s Kitchen Cabinet series, Dutton cooked a seafood chowder for the show’s presenter, Annabel Crabb, provoking fury from ABC viewers who objected to any attempt to humanise the opposition leader.
That – along with Dutton’s work behind the scenes to unite the party Scott Morrison left behind, as well as his highly effective campaign to scuttle the Voice to Parliament referendum – has helped him steer clear of the traps that befell other first-term leaders such as Billy Snedden, Andrew Peacock, Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull.
The Peter Dutton who stands up in parliament today has more breadth than the brawler he presented as when he was minister for health, home affairs and defence.
His eulogies for Labor heroes, such as former governor-general Bill Hayden, have displayed a political maturity that few critics have credited him with, showing an ability to not only stand in the shoes of his opponents but also exhibit respect for Australia’s most important institutions.
He has at times been able to show emotion, warmth and humour. On the day Anthony Albanese announced his Valentine’s Day engagement to partner Jodie Haydon, Dutton drew genuine laughter across the House of Representatives.
“We look forward to our version of the royal wedding sometime in the near future,” said Dutton. “I’ll be throwing roses out in front of you, Prime Minister; whatever it takes to get an invite.”
Recent public polling shows Dutton is winnowing Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister.
According to The Australian Financial Review’s latest Freshwater Strategy poll, conducted in April, the gap between Albanese and Dutton has narrowed to 6 percentage points, with Albanese on 45 and Dutton on 39.
Still, in the two direct match-ups between the two major parties since the May 2022 general election, the first in the Aston byelection in April last year and the second in Dunkley in March, Dutton left the field with his nose bleeding.
In Aston, where Labor opened its Dutton playbook for the first time to road test what the party’s research was showing, voters were reminded of Dutton’s record as health minister.
They focused on a 2015 poll, where doctors ranked Dutton the worst health minister in 35 years after he oversaw the introduction of the $7 Medicare co-payment and cut $20 billion to hospital funding. Then there was his involvement in establishing the Medicare Privatisation Taskforce, which cost the Liberals so dearly at the 2016 election.
Not only did Labor insiders on the ground in Aston believe it drove Dutton crazy, it also turned away voters from the Liberal candidate.
Labor also had success focusing on Dutton’s hyping up of security concerns around China in the lead-up to the 2022 election, which included the claim Albanese was the preferred candidate of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Aston was a big win for Labor because they took what was once a safe Liberal seat, but I didn’t think too much of it because the government was very much still in its honeymoon phase,” says one seasoned political pollster. “Dunkley, on the other hand, was a different story altogether.”
There, in a seat located in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs, badly affected by the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation, Labor’s attacks on Dutton had a significant impact. As did Labor’s revision of the stage three tax cuts, unveiled in January.
The Liberal Party’s focus on law and order, in the midst of such a devastating cost-of-living crisis, also puzzled Labor strategists on the ground in Dunkley.
“We should have won the Dunkley byelection, there is no question about that,” says a Liberal pollster. “The Liberals in Victoria keep banging the drum on law and order, but it just doesn’t work for them. An opposition that can’t win a seat like that in these economic circumstances suggests that there is a problem.”
Yes, the same political observer confided, some of the public polls are showing Dutton narrowing the gap when it comes to preferred prime minister. However, the most consistently reliable of those stretching back to the 1980s – Newspoll – shows very little movement at all in Dutton’s favour. He has hovered steadily at 35 per cent compared with 48 per cent for Albanese.
“He’s been opposition leader for two years now, and there is no sign at all of it changing,” says this pollster. “Conversely, Albanese’s 48 per cent rating also appears to have stabilised. That’s not good news for Peter Dutton.”
Labor insiders believe they know some of the reasons for that.
They concede Dutton campaigned very well during the Voice referendum and the overwhelming “No” vote cemented his place as opposition leader until the election.
The downside for the Coalition is it underscored Dutton’s propensity to say no, reinforcing the perception of him as a negative leader, an attribute most opposition leaders try to avoid.
Knowing what they know about voters’ opinions of Dutton, it’s not obvious to Labor insiders how the Liberals will deal with Dutton’s record.
Another thing puzzling Labor strategists is Dutton’s failure to act on one of the key conclusions of the Liberal Party’s own review of the 2022 election, authored by former federal director Brian Loughnane and Victorian Senator Jane Hume. The report noted clearly “the Party’s standing with women was an important factor in the Party’s defeat”.
“If the Party is to fully reflect the Australian community, the objective must be to improve the level of female members, particularly younger women, and to increase the level of representation of women as successful members of parliament, not just as candidates,” Loughnane and Hume wrote.
The review recommended a target of 50 per cent female representation in parliament within a decade, and a national women’s network to support that effort, but the Liberal Party continues to fail to preselect women in the run-up to the next election.
Of the 25 Liberal candidates currently selected for non-sitting or retiring MPs in the House of Representatives, 18 male candidates have been preselected, with no women candidates even nominating in 12 of those 18 seats.
In the Senate, Marise Payne was replaced by Dave Sharma. In South Australia, Alex Antic knocked off Anne Ruston from the top of the Liberal ticket, with Antic dismissing concerns about the party’s failure to preselect women as nothing but a grievance narrative constructed by an activist media.
Two men have been preselected to top the Liberals’ Western Australia senate ticket. In Queensland, the only woman preselected in the top three spots on the state’s senate ticket is incumbent Senator Susan McDonald, who held on to the No. 2 slot.
Labor is aware this is an issue for the Coalition but is cautious in how it approaches it.
The party is also deciding how to approach Dutton’s embrace of large-scale nuclear reactors as a way of lowering Australia’s carbon emissions.
On this issue, strategists across both major parties are scratching their heads. Why would Dutton gamble on a policy fraught with so much political risk, seemingly in defiance of a lesson the Liberals learnt the hard way under John Hewson at the 1993 election?
That lesson is that an opposition should try to seize momentum where it can, but not in a way that will expose it to a lethal scare campaign.
“I cannot think of a policy better suited to the mother of all scare campaigns than nuclear power,” one senior Liberal backbencher told The Saturday Paper. “I think I know how we got here – and I commend Peter for having the courage to start a national conversation about nuclear energy – but it’s a bit like the Voice. Only possible with bipartisan support, and the only sensible thing to do right now is bring that conversation to a very abrupt and forceful halt.”
Or, as someone on the Labor side of politics observed: if Peter Dutton really is going to try to thread the needle of sticking with nuclear power and keeping faith with Australia’s commitments to reduce carbon emissions by 43 per cent by 2030, that means building large-scale nuclear power stations quickly.
“I know of only one nuclear power plant in the world that was built in five years,” the Labor insider says. “It’s in Chernobyl.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 4, 2024 as "‘An unusual chess player’: How Labor is approaching Peter Dutton".
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.
