Two campaigns and absolutely no winners

Regardless of the outcomes tomorrow, the turnaround in federal politics since January has been remarkable. Peter Dutton looked like the next prime minister back then, while Labor looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

But Anthony Albanese charged out of the blocks in early January, catching Dutton napping, and implemented a basic but effective strategy that has delivered a big lift in Labor’s primary vote and a big drop in Dutton’s comparative appeal.

The strategy was to bribe the electorate — to convey that the government felt its cost of living pain and was prepared to do something about it. A key focus of the bribes would be Labor’s strong suit of health, an issue it owns. That presented Dutton with an invidious choice: either back Labor’s big-spending health plans, or risk Mediscare 2.0.

Dutton opted for the former, but failed to forestall the latter: Labor has hammered Dutton on his performance as health minister a decade ago, and for the threat posed to recurrent spending by his deeply unpopular nuclear power plans.

Crikey criticised the Labor health spending at the time, but that missed the point — the spending was intended to bring diffident voters back to Labor. And so it did.

Scroll forward to the budget in March, and Labor wrongfooted Dutton again: after suggesting the budget would be nothing to see here, a Cyclone Alfred afterthought, it unveiled a tiny top-up to the stage three tax cuts Labor had wrested ownership of from the Coalition. Another invidious choice for Dutton: back tax cuts — the Liberal thing to do — or refuse?

He tried to have his cake and eat it too — he rejected the tax cuts, but offered a fuel excise cut instead. Problem was, with petrol getting down to around $1.50 around the country, no-one was begging for relief at the bowser as much as they once were. So he had to back that up with another version of the infamous temporary low- and middle-income tax offset. That didn’t catch fire either. Dutton now leads the party of higher taxes, while promising a bigger deficit for the next two years if elected.

By the time the campaign proper began, Labor had thus rebuilt its standing with voters. What no-one expected was just how bad a campaign Dutton would have. Albanese was on his second election, and his performance was out of sight compared to his 2022 campaign. Relentlessly focused on cost of living, disciplined, with a clear strategy, Albanese displayed the benefits of incumbency.

Dutton was in his first campaign, and oh, how it showed. Albanese was no longer the rabbit in the headlights. It was Dutton instead who looked uncomfortable in the spotlight, and he eventually began lashing out at the media.

The great mystery of 2025 will remain how the Liberals, capable of brilliant campaigns like 2019, could produce such an amateurish effort. There were backflips, shadow ministers contradicting the leader, basic omissions from policies, and missing frontbenchers. The opposition appeared surprised to find themselves in an election campaign after the long, phony war that began in early January.

And what was the strategy? We can say what it wasn’t: to regain teal seats, or to convince Australians of the need for nuclear power, or to exploit the Liberals’ traditional strength on the budget and economic management. Was it cost of living or culture wars? Dutton gave the impression he knew he had to stick to cost of living, but the moment a culture war dangled in front of him, he would drop everything and chase it like a dog going after a stick.

Not helping was his awful frontbench. Even Liberals are now starting to work out what Crikey was pointing out back in the Morrison years: Angus Taylor is a dud. If, by some miracle, Dutton pulls off a victory tomorrow, there’s doubt about whether Taylor would be treasurer. Only the lack of an alternative would guarantee him keeping the gig. Michael Sukkar — if he holds his seat — or Sussan Ley are the only other options. Jane Hume, architect of the working from home disaster, is even worse.

The only positive is that, a couple of times, good policy leaked through. Good policy has been almost entirely absent from the campaign, leaving taxpayers the losers from a spending spree that will only increase our interest bill in the decades to come. Bridget McKenzie is right that we need to impose a road user charge on electric vehicle users, and her suggestion of cabotage on the route to Darwin is a good one — in fact, it should be expanded to other major cities, to disrupt the costly Qantas/Virgin duopoly. We also need to increase defence spending, and it needs to be paid for with higher taxes. Dutton commendably committed to that — even if he couldn’t say where the money would go.

And then there was Trump. We can revise the comparison after tomorrow if the polls turn out to be wrong, but 2025 feels a lot like 2001. That year began with John Howard badly trailing Labor, but he rebuilt the Coalition vote, bribe by bribe, targeting key segments of the electorate. By the time external events — Tampa, 9/11 — intruded, Howard was able to exploit them from a competitive position, not from one of desperation.

Trump is the external event this year. The transformation from avatar of a right-wing renaissance to hated source of disruption has been high-speed. But this transformation was always highly plausible. Dutton evidently concluded that Trump’s tariffs either wouldn’t be as disruptive as they turned out to be, or that it would be simple to sell the narrative that the more Trumpian leader in Australia would be better at dealing with Trump. All that did was convince centrist voters that Dutton was too like Trump, while Trump fans think he isn’t Trump-like enough.

In a two-horse race, you can’t rule out a surprise win for Dutton. But based on his errors of judgment over the last few months, a Dutton prime ministership would be a rocky ride indeed.

Is there any chance of a Coalition upset tomorrow?

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