Peter Dutton, the former policeman and rightwing politician campaigning to “Get Australia back on track”, had bet that anti-woke sentiment would help him prevail in May’s election.
The leader of Australia’s largest opposition party has criticised large companies over “woke” policies, threatened to break up powerful supermarkets and insurance companies and pledged to remove indigenous flags from government press conferences if elected.
Yet, over the past month, his Liberal party has suffered a dramatic reversal of fortune, as US President Donald Trump’s aggressive policies on trade, tariffs and allies have alarmed Australian voters and bolstered support for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
With the Australian public largely concerned about the cost of living — both parties have set out plans to reduce pressures on households — and alarmed by Trump, Dutton’s strongman image has become a liability, handing ammunition to Albanese’s administration.
“This is ‘Doge-y Dutton’ taking his cues, his instructions and his policies from the US in a way that would make Australians worse off,” said treasurer Jim Chalmers this month, suggesting Dutton’s plans to cut public service jobs had been inspired by Trump and his “Department of Government Efficiency” headed by Tesla chief Elon Musk.
Dutton had sought to make a cultural appeal to blue-collar voters, accusing Albanese’s Labor government in a speech last year of being “in lockstep with the interests of inner-city elites, big business, union bosses, industry super funds and woke advocates”.
Yet Labor is now polling only one seat shy of a majority in the May 3 election and Dutton’s Liberals are rapidly falling behind in 10 marginal seats they looked on track to win at the start of the year, a YouGov poll showed.
The steely and straight-talking Dutton spent nine years as a policeman in his native Queensland, where he worked in the National Crime Authority and drug and sex offenders squads. He left the force following a high-speed car crash in which he was pursuing a fugitive.
Dutton entered parliament in 2001 at the age of 30 on a law and order platform, and gradually built a support base of rightwing “Duttonite” MPs. He served as health minister, home affairs minister in charge of the country’s “Operation Sovereign Borders” programme to stop boats with refugees from landing on Australian shores and defence minister.
He first tried to become prime minister in 2018 when he challenged Malcolm Turnbull to become leader of the then-ruling Liberals. Dutton managed to unseat Turnbull, who later derided him as “a thug”, in a brutal “spill”, or challenge for the leadership, but lost out to Scott Morrison as party moderates refused to back him.
The Liberals lost the election in 2022, with the party’s stance on gender and climate issues alienating socially liberal voters. But Dutton secured the party leadership.
He tried to find a new locus for the party in blue-collar suburbs that were once Labor strongholds, capitalising on Albanese’s risky bet to front the unsuccessful “The Voice” referendum on indigenous rights. Dutton’s hardline stance against the prime minister earned him the nickname “Dr No” in Canberra, a sobriquet inherited from the adversarial former Liberal leader Tony Abbott.
But in recent weeks, it had become clear Dutton had lost momentum, said Paul Williams, a politics lecturer at Griffith University in Queensland.
A series of gaffes have undermined his position. They include criticising Albanese’s response to live fire drills by Chinese warships as “limp-wrist”; leaving his Queensland electorate for a fundraiser ahead of a cyclone hitting the state; and saying he would live in Sydney rather than Canberra if elected, despite telling public sector workers he planned to force them back to the office.
“He’s lost focus and the ability to get under Albanese’s skin,” Williams said.
Yet the problems could run deeper.
One former Liberal party adviser said Dutton understood that the party needed to appeal to both aspirational upper middle class voters and disgruntled blue-collar workers, but said the opposition leader had yet to strike a “magic formula” to achieve that aim.
“There’s been no big realignment like the Republicans in the US. The lessons of the last election are still being worked through,” the person said.
Zareh Ghazarian, a politics lecturer at Monash University, said clawing back the ground lost in 2022 was a “tough ask” for the Liberals.
“The risk for the [Liberal-led] coalition is that it is unable to present a clear set of alternative policies for the government to voters,” he said, adding that Australia’s mandatory voting makes campaigning on “hot issues” more difficult compared with countries such as the US, as there is no need to inflame tensions to get people out to vote.
Dutton last week laid out big-spending policies, including a substantial one-off tax rebate for low- and middle-income earners and a tax break for first-time home buyers aimed at younger voters, to get his campaign back on track.
He has also tried to paint himself as a tough leader capable of standing up for Australia’s interests — whether against either China or the US — at a time of global uncertainty, and accusing his counterpart of lacking “backbone”.
“If I needed to have a fight with Donald Trump or any other world leader to advance our nation’s interests, I’d do it in a heartbeat,” he told Sky News, vowing to “put the Americans on notice”.
“Peter Dutton will always dial things up to 11,” said Albanese, who questioned Dutton’s diplomatic nous and described his approach as “aggro”.
Ultimately, said three current and former senior Liberal party members, the opposition was failing to convince the electorate that it would be better at managing the economy than Labor.
“You can’t fatten a pig on market day. If the party can’t find an economic narrative during a cost of living crisis, then they have no hope of winning,” said one former politician.
