Peter Dutton’s budget reply sets the Coalition up for an election campaign focused on migration and law and order. At least, that’s the election he wants because it’s one he thinks he could win.
But Dutton’s policy-lite speech contains the seeds of campaigns that will inevitably be deployed by the progressive side of politics: on nuclear and wages.
The nuclear debate has been a train wreck in slow motion for months now.
So many front page stories in the Australian promised the policy before the budget with such juicy details as the type of technology, the number of reactors, their putative location.
Then, a deferral. All in good time.
In Thursday’s speech, Dutton made the case that nuclear is popular. Bob Hawke supported it, so does John Howard, the Australian Workers Union and “65% of Australians aged 18 to 34 years of age”.
One couldn’t help but wonder: if it’s so popular, why not make it the centrepiece of the speech and actually announce the policy?
Perhaps because it’s so expensive that it completely fails the Coalition’s new test for Future Made in Australia projects – that they must be commercially viable without taxpayer support. Perhaps because the friendlier-sounding small modular reactors are not commercially available.
Or perhaps because it is not, in fact, that popular.
Labor are increasingly cocky that the nuclear thought-bubble is an exploding cigar for the opposition. On Thursday the energy minister, Chris Bowen, gleefully cited choice anonymous quotes from Coalition backbenchers in question time that the policy is “madness on steroids” and within the ranks there is “a sudden sense of bewilderment” about the idea.
A few months ago I wrote a slightly trolling column about the possibility of a plebiscite on nuclear power to accompany the next election. Labor see Dutton doing everything in his power to turn the next election into a straw poll on his big bad idea anyway.
The attack ads write themselves. I can see the bunting wrapped around schools on election day already, with nuclear cooling towers, yellowcake, plutonium rods and Dutton’s face.
In his post budget reply press conference the education minister, Jason Clare, said simply: “If he won’t tell you where he’s going to put all the nuclear reactors, why would you vote for him?”
This is the obvious scare campaign. Let’s also look at the slower burn issue: wages.
An easy win – but not for him
In his speech Dutton promised to “remove the complexity and hostility of Labor’s industrial relations agenda, which is putting unreasonable burdens on businesses”.
“For example, we will revert to the former Coalition government’s simple definition of a casual worker and create certainty for our 2.5m small businesses.”
For example. Or, to be more accurate, for starters.
Dutton is dribbling out policy at such a slow rate he has left open-ended which other bits of Labor’s workplace reforms the Coalition would tear up. He has already vowed to repeal the right to disconnect.
It’s absolutely fine for Dutton to create some policy differentiation with Labor, but if he doesn’t set out chapter and verse what’s in and what’s out, the unions will paint him as against all of it.
The president of the ACTU, Michele O’Neil, said: “Dutton committed to getting rid of the workplace laws that are finally seeing real wages grow, after 10 years of wage stagnation by the last Coalition government.”
Dutton “told workers that if he is elected, he will again commit the Coalition to running an economy based on low wages” and “turn secure jobs into casual jobs”.
Unions are regularly among the biggest non-political party spenders in election campaigns. Even with union membership at historic lows, they are still the largest social movement in Australia.
Of course they would be out fighting the Coalition regardless of what Dutton said in his reply, but he has made it that much easier.
On Saturday Anthony Albanese gave a speech to the Victorian Labor conference, at one point harking back to his finest moment of the 2022 campaign.
“I was asked if I would support an increase in the minimum wage of one dollar an hour,” he said. “I gave a one word answer: Absolutely!”
This routine of Albanese’s, waving around the dollar coin, should be old news by now. Instead, Dutton keeps giving him an excuse to reach for that coin.
If you think the prospect of an extra dollar for every hour a minimum wage employee works sounds like an enticing prospect, wait until you see how motivating it is when an election campaign is run on the premise that the opposition leader will take it away.
Dutton’s reply grabbed a few headlines on migration for measures that mostly don’t work or aren’t as effective as they sound.
But the minor themes of the speech have the greatest potential to develop into major problems for him.
