Peter Dutton’s trainwreck defence announcement

If Anthony Albanese’s trainwreck moment came on day one of the 2022 election campaign, when he couldn’t recall the Reserve Bank’s cash rate, Peter Dutton’s media conference disaster has come late in this campaign, at his announcement of increased defence spending yesterday. And it exemplified everything that has gone wrong for the opposition leader.

It’s normal, both during campaigns and during normal political business, for parties to “drop” announcements or speeches to newspaper journalists, allowing them to be covered in the morning press ahead of delivery, when further detail is provided.

Thus, on Tuesday evening, the Dutton camp flagged to journalists a major defence announcement — 2.5% of GDP in defence spending by 2030, a national security strategy, and an “aspiration” to 3% of GDP defence spending by the mid-2030s. Yesterday at lunchtime, the actual policy announcement was distributed, which Crikey opened with the expectation that there’d be more details to parse. After all, if you’re promising to lift spending by $21 billion across the forwards, it’s standard to specify broadly where the money will go.

Except… there was no detail. The announcement was less than 600 words. A few minutes later, the announcement about a national security strategy arrived. It was barely 400 words. Crikey checked the emails again to see if we’d missed anything.

As became clear at the media conference for the announcement, we’d missed nothing. There was no additional detail about the spending — or where all the money would be coming from, or how to make sure the money wasn’t wasted by the Department of Defence.

People bag the press gallery — as we at Crikey do a lot — and mock the idea of reporters being “on the bus” with leaders during campaigns, but the transcript of yesterday’s media conference, snuck out by Dutton’s office late last night, is worth reading to see journalists actually doing their job of interrogating the alternative prime minister. And boy was it ugly. It’s worth reading the full transcript here.

Asked repeatedly about where the money was coming from, Dutton said cancelling Labor’s tax cuts would fund it. Now, credit where due, Dutton at least has the gumption to tell voters that we need extra defence spending, and they’re going to have to pay for it through higher taxes. Except, that clashes badly with the Liberals’ “party of lower taxes” creed, which Dutton fueled last week by referring to his “aspiration” to establish indexed tax thresholds. So, Dutton has two contradictory “aspirations” — massively increasing defence spending and cutting income tax.

“Doesn’t that undermine your aspiration for lower taxes over time?” he was asked. “A great Coalition government will always be better on national security and economic management,” he offered limply. He then got tangled up in the fact that he was proposing a permanent increase in taxes (remember, Labor immediately legislated those top-up tax cuts after the budget). “Are you going to rely on higher taxes to fund 3% of GDP by the end of the decade?” he was quizzed.

By that stage, defence shadow Andrew Hastie — in a rare media appearance — had already been hammered repeatedly over whether he stood by his 2018 comments about women in combat roles. Again, to his credit, he actually tried to explain why he’d felt that way in 2018, as opposed to supporting the Coalition’s non-discriminatory policy now. But his explanation only sounded to the journalists present like he was implying women aren’t strong enough to deal with combat.

Worse was coming from Dutton. Challenged repeatedly on why he wouldn’t commit to supporting Australian peacekeepers in Ukraine, the best Dutton could offer was to complain about an “ill-defined mission” and Labor’s cuts. He then tried to brush off further questions with “I’ve already dealt with that.”

He was similarly unresponsive to repeated questions on what the money would actually be spent on, relying instead on the asinine claim that that amounted to announcing defence contracts from opposition. “Don’t voters have a right to know exactly what that $21 billion is going to buy?” he was asked.

Indeed.

I’m now going to do something unusual and shocking: quote Greg Sheridan with approval. Sheridan, a reliable hawk who wants more defence spending, absolutely shredded Dutton today. “The press conference announcing the policy was bizarre. Dutton could barely bring himself to utter two cliches in a row about defence before desperately returning to his focus group talking points … Equally bizarre, there wasn’t even the most general outline of what military capabilities the Coalition wanted to acquire.”

Sheridan rightly made the point that it illustrated how defence was an afterthought, that Dutton actually admitted yesterday — in defence of not releasing this policy until less than a fortnight from the election — he’d wanted to wait until he could see the state of the budget (and, obviously, Labor’s welfare and health spending). In Sheridan’s words:

You should decide what you need to do to make the nation secure and how much that will cost. Then you make your other spending decisions.

But Dutton had zero detail on exactly what he thought we needed to do to make the nation secure.

All of the Coalition’s weaknesses were on display yesterday:

• Lack of policy work: Not even knowing broadly where more money needed to be spent was a staggering omission. Was this all cooked up over Easter? Well, according to Dutton, basically, yes.
• Poor frontbench: Hastie has the credibility for defence, but he has been underused during the campaign, and this was the first opportunity for senior journalists to have a crack at him over his 2018 comments — so they did. Ridiculously, he declined (or more likely was prevented by Dutton’s office) to discuss the announcement last night on 7.30. And Michaelia Cash standing in the background only served to remind us that this is the calibre of person believed to be up to the job of being Senate leader.
• Lack of media experience: Even during the campaign, Dutton and his frontbenchers still prefer being interviewed by mates like Sharri Markson on Faux News than facing actual journalists. And it showed yesterday in their limp performance in the face of sceptical questioning
• Failure to offer a coherent narrative: This was perhaps the biggest failing. The Coalition could have had a serious proposition to offer voters — especially if they’d made this announcement earlier in the year: “We’re in a much more unpredictable world, and that’s going to have a price in terms of the need for more defence spending, so we’re cancelling any planned tax cuts and prioritising spending in the following areas, reflecting our belief that our new environment requires x, y and z, and here are the industries and regions that the extra spending will benefit in terms of defence manufacturing…” It’s actually not difficult stuff.

Dutton could have won plaudits for being upfront with voters and addressing the big strategic challenges Australia faces. Instead, he turned his own announcement into a circus, with key details dragged out of him by unimpressed journalists.

It’s actually hard to believe Dutton’s campaign is this amateurish. But the evidence was undeniable yesterday.

Is Peter Dutton’s floundering campaign any surprise to you?

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