We asked an debating expert whether Dutton or Albanese won

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton faced off in the first leaders’ debate of the election campaign on Tuesday night (of which there will be four, for some reason).

To analyse the leaders’ performances on the night, Crikey enlisted a debating expert to adjudicate the result independently of the spin (indeed, both parties claimed victory on social media).

Charlie Ryan is director of debates at the University of Sydney Union, was a finalist at the last World Universities Debating Championship, and is the reigning best speaker at the Australasian championships — a title previously held by the likes of Labor frontbencher Tony Burke and former Liberal MP Christian Porter.

The debate, run by Sky News Australia and moderated by the network’s chief anchor Kieran Gilbert, was held at the Wenty Leagues Club in Western Sydney, a couple of stops past Parramatta on Sydney’s T1 train line. Western Sydney, home to around one in ten Australians, has a number of key marginal seats. The upcoming election is also a hotbed for an influx of independent challenges to typically safe Labor seats.

Following the debate, the audience, made up of 100 undecided voters selected by Q&A Market Research, voted 44% in favour of Albanese, while 35% were in favour of Dutton. 21% remained undecided following the debate.

A spokesperson for Sky News Australia told Crikey that neither Gilbert nor Sky knew the questions being asked in advance of the live broadcast, and were not involved in the question selection process.

Ryan told Crikey that they were “not very surprised that neither candidate was able to sway a majority of undecided voters in the audience”.

“It seemed like both of them rehearsed very, very heavily a series of explicit policy lines, and a lot of facts and figures,” Ryan said.

“Each time they were asked a question, they searched essentially in their brain for which policy line connects to that and which series of facts and figures they need to explain. And I think that kind of arguing probably went over the heads of a lot of people in the audience, particularly because they couldn’t agree on basically any of those facts.”

Ryan suggested the numbers-heavy approach was a response to increasing voter distrust in politicians generally.

“It’s certainly not a common trope usually of political debates — I think it’s an overreaction to the fear that voters are distrustful of them and that they won’t believe political spin,” they said.

“The problem is when neither of them agree on what those facts are — most people, even if they’re a very discerning person who cares about facts, can’t figure out which set of facts to believe.

“Did Dutton cut health and education spending? Did he try to abolish bulk billing? Has the nuclear plan been costed? These are fact-based claims that they both make and then both disagree on … unless you are openly fact-checking each claim or [otherwise] know what the truth is, it’s basically impossible to tell who won, just from listening to the debate.”

Despite this, Ryan said they found Albanese did a marginally better job of “explaining the intuition behind those facts”.

“I think Albanese won very marginally … I think he benefited a lot from the consistency of his platform when discussing these kinds of claims about the track record and credibility of each candidate — calling Dutton out on things like walking back the work-from-home ban, or adopting a lot of Labor policies throughout the campaign.

“Being pushed on that undermines the credibility of [Dutton’s] claims that Labor would do nothing to help Australians with cost of living, and [makes him] concede quite a bit that Labor policies can be good, which made the attacks on other Labor policies a little bit more difficult.”

Ryan also noted that Albanese and Dutton both had particular mannerisms that came out when they were speaking off-the-cuff, compared to when they were producing rehearsed lines, and that the difference was more distinct with the prime minister.

“He [Albanese] kind of leans back, he speaks a lot faster, and he enunciates the syllables much less, and that’s when he’s speaking off the top of his head. Whenever he gives a policy line or something he’s rehearsed, he speaks about five times slower. He enunciates his syllables, and he chucks in like three or four different slang or jargon terms to try and make himself sound more Australian,” they said.

Comparing Albanese’s mannerisms to Dutton, Ryan said it was “much less obvious, but similar sometimes as well”.

“Speaking a little bit faster, sometimes he [Dutton] changes the way that he’s standing. Whenever he’s giving a rehearsed line, he leans forward and uses a lot of hand gestures, and he’s almost labouring the point. I don’t think it’s as obvious as Albanese, but I can see that he’s doing it.”

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