My fellow Australians, 50 years ago the Leyland Brothers showed the Australian spirit at its best; adventurous, bold, willing to take on risks. At the same time, we in the Liberal Party honour our Anglo heritage of knowledge and invention. That is why I am pleased to announce that, in combining the two, our country’s new energy initiative will be named, British Leyland Nuclear…
Peter Dutton (not really), speech to Esk Kiwanis, April 31, 2024
God knows politics is a thing for the professionals these days. So I presume that Labor’s response to Peter Dutton’s announcement of seven state-funded nuclear power plants was a finely crafted exposition of meme warfare, avoiding taking the thing head on, talking to slivers of voters and the kidz, etc.
Because from the cheap seats, well, it looked like a huge disaster, in which a government utterly unprepared for an initiative they knew for months was coming, scrambled to pull a response together and made Dutton look like the prime minister in exile.
By this account, Labor and the union movement had defaulted to a natural opposition status, allowing the “natural party of government” to re-assert itself, and its chorus in News Corpse to sing its praises. Its meme war — the unions’ “this will be your dog” tardigrade picture; the snow white and the seven reactors — were funny but flippant, guerilla war, instead of a frontal assault.
By that account, things had got so bad, that, by Monday, Paul Keating felt it necessary to weigh in, with a statement that did not integrate critique and insult as effectively as he once might have. It was only by Tuesday, a full five days after Dutton dropped da bomb, that Labor’s response began to cohere.
But this, as I say, is the outsider’s account. The professionals’ version would be that Dutton had exposed a huge flank as he sought to firm up internal support for his leadership among the resources right within, and with Big Gina and others without.
In this analysis, the entire proposed redirecting of our nation’s energy and safety policies is the projection outward of internal party politics — a mirror of Labor’s 2019 election kludge, in which Bill Shorten had to sell a left greenish renewables policy he didn’t believe in — and Dutton knows he has to do it to secure his position.
He must also know that it further damages any chance he has of taking back the teal seats. Kooyong aside (if Higgins is sashimi’d), this surely depended on the Liberals’ getting back some of the old money votes they’d lost, and gaining newer arrivals to those seats whose salaries were going up. Both sets of voters rely on the Liberals becoming a rational centre-right party.
Strategic genius Rowan Dean says that the Coalition doesn’t need those teal seats. Those of us with a less planet-sized brain say that five or six seats is five or six seats, and wonder where the seventeen seats the Coalition needs for a majority (and the dozen seats it would need for a plurality with even a chance of forming government) would otherwise come from.
There’s a couple to come back in WA. Queensland is saturated. NSW is fought to a draw. In Victoria, Sweden of the Pacific, Menzies may go because of the Higgins distribution, and that’s the Libs almost totally out of Melbourne. In Tasmania, hitherto a total swing state, the Coalition will never get Clark (ex-Denison) or Franklin again. And in the next election, there will be another dozen teal and rural independent campaigns to fight off. Is Norfolk Island liable to acquire seat status?
The Coalition’s nuclear policy may have been the projection of internal politics outwards, but the means of selling it was culture war. Labor was cautious, greenie, wanting to touch the earth lightly. The Coalition was audacious, bold, Promethean.
There was a pretty crude soyboy-feminine/real-man masculine division being set up quietly. Then Dutts went and called Albanese a “child in a man’s body”, which ruined it, not only cos the comment was weird and a bit ew but because it only worked as a connotation, to communicate the utterly unsayable: that Albanese is not a real man.
Trouble is, once you say that, or anything like it, you become the whiny, needy one. Was Dutts feeling the pressure? Did he know what was about to happen, or merely sense it? Whatever the case, Labor turned the tables with the announcement of Matt Kean’s appointment as head of the Climate Change Authority, leaving Libs fuming and the government looking like it had got one up.
God knows how many people beyond the Canberra light rail catchment area care about this stuff. It feels crappy just talking about it. But it’s real in terms of how the government and opposition then speak and act. What was missing from the main act was a denunciation of how cynical and desperate you had to be to use nuclear as a flim-flam political culture war.
Also lacking — though the memes expressed it in humorous form — was an expression of the categorical shift that nuclear represents. Yet that is the only point upon which Labor can base a ban on nuclear (as opposed to a mere unwillingness to fund it). That is going to have to come, a point I’ll return to. Meanwhile, rejoice as the “Morrison Minor” boutique reactors roll off the line. What a time to be three-eyed! It could be an opportunity for Labor to advance a broader idea of government, society and policy and why we… nahhhhhhh.
