Peter Dutton, the man who would be prime minister of Australia, is one of the hard men of the country’s politics.
So, with Australia facing a federal election now set for 3 May, it was not a huge step for him to start road-testing some of the language and policies of Donald Trump after his win in the US last November.
The burly former Queensland policeman courted controversy more than once during his spells as immigration, home affairs and defence minister, none more so than when he wrongly claimed in 2018 that Melbourne residents were too terrified to go out to dinner due to African gangs in the streets.
Since becoming leader of the opposition after the last election in 2022, Dutton has taken the once-broad church of the Liberal party – the larger of the two parties that make up the conservative Coalition – further to the right.
The cost-of-living crisis has taken the shine off Anthony Albanese’s Labor government. It has given renewed force to the Coalition’s mantra that they are better economic managers and taxes are always lower when they are in power.
But Dutton has added red meat: campaigning on migration and crime, big cuts to the “wasteful” public service, an end to “indoctrination” of schoolchildren, and attacks on renewable power in favour of his landmark election promise to add nuclear power to Australia’s energy mix.
In late 2024 it looked as though the strategy was working, particularly following Dutton’s success in campaigning for a no vote in the 2023 referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament.
But Dutton’s nods to Trump since the US election are now looking like a liability as Australians, like the rest of the world, worry about Trump’s unpredictable tariff policy imposed on friends and enemies alike and the economic chaos it has unleashed.
“Perhaps it seemed like smart politics to attempt to emulate the success of Trump and other conservative leaders,” says Peter Lewis from Essential, the Guardian’s pollster in Australia, which also conducts qualitative research for the governing Labor party.
“The whole strategy of this term was to protect his right base and ensure it didn’t splinter out and go elsewhere. It worked so well for him – he got 60% of the population agreeing with his proposition – and he thought: this can work.
“And it was working overseas. It was kind of a logical conclusion to draw, particularly if you have lost all your progressive base.”
Dutton’s borrowing from the Trump playbook hasn’t been subtle.
In January he announced that Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the senator who spearheaded the no campaign on the voice referendum, would take on a new “important role”: shadow minister for government efficiency.
Sound familiar? Dutton stopped short of proposing an agency similar to the Doge in the US, headed by Elon Musk. But the message was the same.
He promised big cuts to Australia’s federal public service: 41,000 out of a total bureaucracy of 185,000, excluding the defence forces.
“With Australians sick of the wasteful spending that is out of control under the Albanese government … Jacinta will be looking closely at how we can achieve a more efficient use of taxpayers’ money,” Dutton said.
He singled out positions such as “culture, diversity and inclusion advisers, change managers and internal communication specialists” as ripe for the axe.
“Such positions, as I say, do nothing to improve the lives of everyday Australians.”
It’s true that the public service has grown by 16.8% in the past three years, but that’s partly because Labor took a hatchet to the Coalition’s massive spending on private sector consultants over the previous decade.
In further echoes of Trump, Dutton said the 41,000 “Canberra public servants” had been added in the nation’s capital.
The only problem was that only about 7,500 of the new hires were actually in Canberra, with the rest scattered across the country, including in outer suburban and regional areas Dutton was hoping to woo.
Labor gleefully attacked, asking daily for detail on where the cuts would fall and what services would be cut.
Last week Dutton changed his tune, saying the cuts would be achieved gradually by “natural attrition” and a hiring freeze, and that undefined “frontline” services would be protected.
For his part, Albanese has been quick to link Dutton to Trump at every opportunity.
“We don’t have to adopt all of America’s policies,” he said.
“[Dutton] is so policy-lazy, him and his team – if they hear something on the news, an announcement from overseas about sacking public servants, or people working from home, or DEI, the dreaded inclusion policy they’re so worried about, they say, ‘yeah, I’ll have some of that’.”
He was labelled “Temu Trump” by a Greens MP in parliament, but the nickname hasn’t stuck, despite his party’s Trumpian “Let’s get Australia back on track” slogan.
On energy policy, Dutton has not gone as far as Trump’s call to “drill, baby, drill”, but he has enthusiastically embraced expanding gas exploration to fill Australia’s energy needs in the interregnum before the Coalition’s planned nuclear plants come on line by around 2040.
Dutton has vowed to cancel offshore windfarms because they are “a scar” on the landscape and, like Trump, he has suggested they may harm whales, despite the lack of scientific evidence.
As concerns about immigration have helped propel right wing parties governments around the world, Dutton has proposed reducing legal migration to Australia despite concerns from the business community and universities, which depend on overseas students.
Lewis says the polls suggest Trump-style language and policies appeared to be working until Trump took power and just started governing.
“They clearly thought they were on a winner and this would be the horse that would get us across the finishing line. But now it’s jumping and bucking and they are struggling to hang on,” Lewis says.
An Essential poll of 2,000 voters in March – before the tariff announcements – showed 62% thought Trump would be negative for the global economy compared with just 24% who viewed him as a positive. About 61% said he would be a negative for the Australian economy.
Guardian Australia’s poll tracker – which averages out the main published polls over time – shows Labor has been steadily gaining ground since mid-February, due less to any great fervour for Albanese’s government and more to an alarming slump in support for the Coalition.
Lewis has been sitting in on focus groups during the first few weeks of the campaign.
“President Trump’s decision to impose world-wide tariffs – including 10% on Australian exports to the US – has created a very negative reaction among many Australians, and to the extent Dutton is associated with Trump, this is a clear negative for the Coalition,” Lewis says.
Separate focus group research revealed by news.com.au, a News Corp publication, found voters reaching for words such as “extreme”, “creepy”, “aggro”, “charmless”, “scary” and even “evil” to describe Dutton (they were not much more flattering about Albanese). But above all they found the opposition leader was “too much like Trump”.
Lewis says: “For Dutton to win he now has to convince people that he is the best way of protecting Australia from the craziness of Trump and that’s hard.”
It hardly helped when Price, who had been touted as one of the Coalition’s star campaigners, blurted out at the weekend that a Dutton government would “make Australia great again” and then accused the media of being “obsessed with Donald Trump”.
Coalition representatives rushed to hose down the comments as “inadvertent” and “a slip of the tongue”, but images then emerged of the senator explicitly endorsing the US president in December.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
