Is Peter Dutton blowing his chance as he flip-flops on key policies?
Peter Dutton is a hard man, a man of firm beliefs; you may not like what he stands for, but at least you have to respect he stands for something, even if it’s unfashionable.
That’s the image on which Dutton is building his pitch to throw out the Albanese government: like Donald Trump, he’s the kind of tough man prepared to make hard decisions, whether the chattering class and the media agrees or not. Indeed, we were told by Michaelia Cash this week that Dutton intends to govern in the same way as Trump.
Except, the hardness is a pose. Dutton assiduously avoids being questioned by the media — this week was a rare venture before the Canberra press gallery after spending 2024 avoiding them — and vanishes altogether when under pressure. Those are political tactics, of course — and fair enough, however little journalists might like them. Voters don’t worry too much about the number of media conferences you hold.
But it’s now a recurring feature of Dutton’s leadership that he is unable to maintain a policy position for, in some cases, even a matter of days.
Last Sunday, on Insiders, Dutton was asked “so we may not know until after the election where you’d cut?” about his budget plans — after, inevitably, talking tough about all the cuts he’d make. “We need to sit down and look through an ERC process, which would be the normal course of things. We’ll do that in government,” Dutton replied. He didn’t just agree with what David Speers said, he fleshed his answer out to note that it would require a process that occurs within government, the Expenditure Review Committee.
But Dutton saying he was going to make big spending cuts but not tell voters what they’ll actually be gave the government a perfect opportunity to start talking about Dutton’s plan for secret cuts. So he backflipped yesterday. Asked “will Australians have those costings before the election?”, Dutton didn’t talk about ERC or what he would do in government. He merely said “of course, of course they will.”
Except there was no “of course” four days earlier.
If that was his only backflip, fair enough. You’re allowed to change your mind. But it’s a pattern with Dutton. He backflipped on his signature policy — cuts to migration — abandoning his promise to cut net overseas migration and more recently promising to increase skilled migration. That follows last year’s spectacular reversal on Labor’s changes to the stage three tax cuts (remember those?), which Dutton insisted had destroyed the prime minister’s credibility and required an election to endorse, only for Dutton to end up backing them. He then promised that he would present voters with “a significant tax policy which will reduce taxes” before the election, with shadow treasurer Angus Taylor promising tax cuts for high-income earners. That, too, was ditched. The only tax policy we’ve got so far is the restoration of the long business lunch.
Dutton’s inconsistency extends beyond major policy areas like tax, migration and spending. This week in Parliament was supposed to be all about the cost of living “and nothing else” as far as Dutton was concerned. That day, question time was indeed dominated by cost of living questions. On Wednesday, however, it was all about the Dural caravan, with inflation relegated to a distant second. On Thursday, we were back to cost of living again, with nary a mention of national security.
The penny might have dropped within the Dutton camp that voters don’t decide who they vote for based on national security, but on their economic welfare, jobs and health services, with everything else just making up the numbers.
True, Dutton got the media to follow his narrative about the Dural caravan — that the only interesting aspect was when the prime minister was told about it — when the important issue was exactly what the intention behind the caravan was and who was responsible. Was it a planned mass casualty attack that was only foiled by accident? In which case, it’s the biggest failure of counter-terrorist intelligence since only sheer good luck prevented the Khayat brothers from blowing up an Etihad airliner out of Sydney in 2017. Or is it something quite different? And how much has the leaking to the media, and the subsequent political pointscoring over it, undermined the investigation by police and intelligence services?
Crikey understands from a figure with extensive intelligence community connections that agencies are unhappy with Dutton’s handling of the issue, with the word “reckless” being used. Of course, intelligence and security agencies generally prefer politicians to stay out of their business altogether. But will we now ever learn exactly what the intent behind the explosives was?
Dutton went on to suggest that security agencies thought the prime minister was a security risk, for which he could furnish no evidence — but lack of evidence doesn’t hinder employment of the technique famously christened by Steve Bannon “flooding the zone with shit”. Indeed, the less evidence for the shit, the better. The media duly lapped it up.
Dutton began the year with huge political momentum, admittedly off the back of Labor’s poor performance rather than any policy offering. But as voters contemplate the chaos on offer in Washington from Trump 2.0, and Dutton flip-flops on key policies and struggles to keep his eye on economic issues — economics is where Dutton is weakest and least experienced — that momentum may be beginning to fade. Polling over the next couple of weeks will indicate if that’s true or not, before we enter the campaign proper.
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