Given Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are very different characters, it’s easy to overlook their similarities, or at least the commonalities in their circumstances.
They are both factional powerbrokers. Neither would top a list of people most likely to lead their respective parties but both have found their way to the top. Both have counselled prime ministers, and also risen up against them when it has been judged necessary by them for whatever reason. And both have taken over their party’s leadership after a catastrophic electoral defeat – Albanese in 2019, and Dutton in 2022.
Having established those baselines, let’s walk back in time, briefly, to 2020. This is all long forgotten now, but when Scott Morrison created the national cabinet on the hop in a football stadium in Parramatta in March 2020, Albanese put his hand up to join the group of leaders.
This wasn’t some arbitrary gesture on the Labor leader’s part. Obviously Albanese wanted to keep himself in the political game at a time when opposition leaders in all jurisdictions were fading into obscurity or flaming out in notoriety. But the request also reflected Albanese’s judgment that the gravity of the moment required confrontation only when necessary, and collaboration whenever possible.
Morrison rebuffed Albanese’s request. For a while saying “no” didn’t matter, because the national cabinet was the national unity gesture, with or without Albanese. Morrison had folded the premiers – a number of them Labor – into his emergency government of nine. Initially that group collaborated and prospered, and voter approval of all the leaders ticked upwards.
But when the second Covid-19 wave hit, triggering fresh lockdowns and border closures, comity fractured. The Morrison government picked fights with Daniel Andrews and took potshots at Mark McGowan and Annastacia Palaszczuk.
Politics-as-usual reasserting itself was the beginning of the end for Morrison. Performative brinkmanship became the signature of a prime minister who was more interested in wedge politics than the national interest – a trope that Labor was able to weaponise.
While Morrison was setting his prime ministership on a path to destruction, Albanese was making the strategic judgments that would set Labor up to win the 2022 election. Most of these judgments were made very early – in the opening months of his opposition leadership.
Back at that time, Albanese was getting a lot of free advice. Progressives energised by the policies for the 2019 contest were telling him to stick with the program because the only reason Labor lost was because voters didn’t care for Bill Shorten. Commentators were telling him Labor couldn’t win by being a small target. Some colleagues felt the only way to defeat Morrison was to shirt-front him at every turn.
But Albanese ignored the static. The whole Labor operation was reset – policy substance, tone, emphasis. Even before the pandemic hit, Albanese and his key strategists believed voters would have no tolerance for cheap ambulance-chasing politics.Long before parliament was engulfed by the #MeToo moment that became the apotheosis of Morrison’s self-destruction, Albanese was speaking to women, a persistent foil to Morrison’s hard-wired habit of only speaking to blokes who might vote Labor.
When Albanese stood at much the same political crossroads Dutton is standing at now, his call was: Big Opposition will kill us.
The belief was Australians don’t want tactical carping in the middle of bushfires, a pandemic, an economic slowdown and escalating geo-strategic competition. Carping might win the day, it might get us in the TV news package, but it won’t get us to the government benches. That’s why Albanese asked to join the national cabinet when Morrison set it up. That’s why he supported as much of Morrison’s initial agenda as he possibly could without sparking an open revolt in his own ranks – he was creating and curating a prime-ministerial vibe.
The backdrop hasn’t changed much over the past three years. Uncertainty persists. Some factors are receding and others intensifying. It’s possible the national anxiety of 2020 has now ebbed into impatience and frustration. Dutton likely senses he can set political fires that will be hard for Albanese to control.
Perhaps he’s right about that. But I think it’s equally possible the Albanese zeitgeist diagnosis remains the correct one and that Australians are sick to the back teeth with opportunistic politicking. If the core judgment that propelled Albanese to the Lodge remains correct, then Dutton is ignoring all the lessons the Liberals could usefully learn by shadowing the methodology of their successful opponent.
Let’s stocktake the opening months of opposition leader Dutton. He’s appointed a shadow cabinet that is more praetorian guard than frank advisory council, and surrounded himself with mini-me advisers who tell him what he’s already thinking. Right now, he looks like a politician who fancies he can win an election by saying no to everything Labor suggests - and by not being Morrison.
Dutton shunned the opportunity of a substantial reboot on climate policy to force Albanese into doing a parliamentary deal with the Greens – which is a Queensland strategy, not a southern states strategy. Trouble is it’s not even a Queensland strategy any more, given the only two seats the Liberals lost in Dutton’s home state went to the Greens. Rejecting Labor’s targets legislation after watching Liberal progressive heartland turn red, green and teal in May looks like the act of a tone-deaf smart arse, not a potential prime minister.
Then Dutton punched himself in the head about Labor’s jobs and skills summit. Unlike Morrison and the national cabinet rebuff in 2020, Albanese actually opened the door for his opponent by inviting him. Just to be clear – attending the jobs summit does not require the Liberal leader to: 1. Join a union; 2. agree with any ACTU proposal; or 3. agree with any Labor proposal. It just requires him not to be a man-baby. Used judiciously, a cameo there would have lent Dutton status as alternative prime minister, rather than his current presentation, which is a caricature of Tony Abbott circa 2009-13 – minus the knights and dames fetish.
To get back into majority government, Dutton has to execute a capital R reset. He has to court the cohorts that abandoned the Liberals in May: urban professionals, and women. Common sense says men and women in the labour market want jobs and opportunity, and would view the looming summit as entirely anodyne at worst, and possibly even helpful.
A range of published polls tell us women are worried about climate change, and Dutton will never be prime minister if he can’t reverse the gendered electoral bloodbath at the May election.
I’m told the Liberal party’s post-election research shows the party failed to win a majority of female voters across all age cohorts in 2022. Only 25% of female voters aged between 18 and 34 voted Liberal on 21 May. (Give yourself a minute to absorb that particular stat, bearing in mind this is a party of government.) While the Liberal party held a majority of male voters over the age of 50, and a majority of homeowners, it also lost inner-city renters and urban professionals.
“I’m not Morrison – but I’m still Dutton” is not a strategy to fix these problems.
Ask the Nationals leader, David Littleproud, who evidently felt zero pressure to mirror Dutton’s strategic self-harm on the jobs summit, or mollify the opposition leader’s political ego by expressing reflexive fealty.
Dutton didn’t tell the Nationals he was going to say no to Labor’s invitation to attend the jobs summit (frequent captain’s calls is another habit that spells trouble if the Liberal leader doesn’t course-correct).
Without missing a beat, Littleproud said he’d be delighted to attend the event if someone asked him because he wanted to be there to represent regional Australia. That being his job.
He’s going. At least someone seems to get it.
