Peter Dutton's campaign woes were planted a decade before this election

The weird thing about election campaigns is the way they sometimes take on a life of their own.

One thing goes wrong, and that thing exacerbates an existing weakness, and in rushing to fix that, you create another problem and before you know it, you're sitting down to the full English breakfast at the Clusterf**k Café.

Once you're in this phase, even tiny debacles assume a sort of grim, superstitious significance, usually because they are symptoms of a much deeper problem.

Confusion in Whitlam

An example: in the week before Easter, householders in the New South Wales electorate of Whitlam received direct mail outs from the Liberal Party's candidate, introducing himself and inviting voters to complete the enclosed application for a postal vote.

Only, the smiling face atop the letter was that of Ben Britton, the candidate the party sacked a fortnight earlier for his views that when women serve in military combat roles, they put the security of the nation at risk, as well as their own hip joints on account of having to lift heavy items.

Peter Dutton — already in the deep-freeze with women over his airy observation that women forced to return to the office could "always job-share" — crisply took Britton out to the barracks and gave him the full Breaker Morant.

But this reminded everyone that Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie had also expressed the view that women shouldn't serve in combat roles. Was he still of this view?

Hastie suddenly became extremely busy in his seat and was not available for comment on the matter for several weeks.

Britton, meanwhile (perhaps sensing uncharted pockets of support among the Illawarra's military conservatives and hobby orthopaedists) is now running as an independent against the Liberal Party. The party which has accidentally mailed every household in Whitlam a lovely letter explaining how wonderful he is.

The new Liberal candidate, Nathaniel Smith, is not featured in his party's expensive campaign mailout. His Liberal campaign signs appear around the electorate, in some cases next to Liberal-looking campaign signs for his predecessor, whose name — Sod's Law strikes again — was drawn randomly by the AEC to appear in the spot right below his on the ballot paper.

Sending out expensive campaign literature in one seat promoting the embarrassing candidate you've just tried to scrape off your boot is — in the scheme of an 150-seat campaign — a small, if discordant note.

But for the NSW Liberal Party — the recording artists whose 2024 hit We Forgot To Put The Candidate Applications In still rather rings in the ears, as does its B-side And Now They're All Suing Us, During The Actual Campaign — it's starting to look like the makings of a studio album.

The visual metaphors don't stop

Meanwhile, in Melbourne, a truck towing a Liberal mobile billboard warning motorists against the "DOUBLE TROUBLE!" of Anthony Albanese ("More Debt!) and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen ("More Crime!") — got itself stuck under a low bridge.

This was a visual from which even the Metaphor Gods averted their eyes; ditto the moment on Monday when the Dutton campaign bus got stuck in Sydney and had to be pushed free by volunteers.

Dutton's poker face is pretty good, and he keeps stolidly showing up, but there's no denying that some days he must absolutely feel like skipping the dawn meditation and staying in bed with a bag of corn chips and season three of Yellowstone.

When things go wrong, it's very tempting to blame the media, and there was a fair bit of this going on in the Albanese biosphere last year, when everything seemed to be going wrong for him and he regularly bemoaned to associates that he had — unlike Dutton — no cheerleaders in the media. At a Melbourne Liberal rally on Sunday, the opposition leader blamed the "hate media" — under which umbrella he grouped the ABC, the Guardian Australia "and others" — for distorting his campaign, which he assured his followers he was capable of winning.

The Coalition's recovery

Let's remove media commentary from the equation, then, and take a glance at what the sentiment of the people seems to be.

As referenced by my colleague Jacob Greber on Sunday, the aggregation of polls by the psephologist William Bowe at Poll Bludger tells a graphic story of what seems to have occurred over the course of this year.

Its shape is a kind of horrendous hockey stick, bearing out the view that things have not gone well for Dutton, after a year and a half of things going very well indeed for him.

Of course, anyone who recalls the 2019 election in any detail must always be cautious about the reliability of polls, and to allow for the possibility that a messy national campaign doesn't necessarily preclude a goat track to victory built on the stepping stones of individual local seat campaigns.

But if you have a look at Bowe's tracker for 2019, it's a different story. You can see the fracture point in August 2018 — the messy juncture at which Dutton challenged Malcolm Turnbull for the leadership and the party, after a week of street violence — ultimately compromising on Scott Morrison. You can see the instant boost Labor — and its leader Bill Shorten — enjoyed from the confusion of its enemy.

You can also see that the trend, thereafter, was the Coalition's recovery. The polls got this right, but not in sufficient quantum to pick the election result accurately. Subsequent analysis concluded that most polls overstated Labor's support. So, in 2019 and in 2025, the aggregate of polls is showing the same trend. An incumbent government — though not necessarily warmly loved — is making up ground against an opponent to whom voters gave serious consideration for a while, but then decided to stick with the devil they knew.

A wave of 'soft' voters

The wild card in this scenario? It's the high level of "soft" voters, and the large swing to One Nation in published polls. The party is currently hovering about 8 per cent nationally (double its vote in 2022), and higher in some outer metropolitan, stressed, commuter belt electorates where cost of living and immigration are particularly front-of-mind.

If preferences flow back to the Coalition at a higher rate than has been observed in past elections (65 per cent in 2019, and 64 per cent in 2022) — well, then there might be some interesting scenes in "safe" Labor seats. This is why Dutton has spent time in Gorton and Hawke in Victoria, for instance. And it explains why the Liberal Party has poured resources into postal ballot mail outs in the campaign-cursed seat of Whitlam, which has never been held by the Liberal Party, but whose resounding "No" vote at the referendum signalled that its long-term devotion to the ALP was conditional. At the 2022 election, One Nation and Clive Palmer's UAP and the Liberal Democrats — all minor parties of the right — logged more than 15 per cent between them.

When you read about Coalition sources talking mysteriously of narrow goat tracks to victory, these are the tracks and goats of which they speak.

Could they be enough? If you had a hundred bucks of someone else's money, you'd say probably not. Mainly because if you step back from the campaign detail and ephemera canvassed above and view things in the context of our electoral history, it tells you that first term oppositions hardly ever win elections. Even when things go reasonably well.

Dutton would no doubt have preferred a campaign where his state party organisations held together, Donald Trump didn't blow up the global trade system and the pope held on for another fortnight. But that's how the cookie crumbles.

Which ads are working?

One more thing, though — if you can stand to read any more words at all on an election campaign so uninspiring that record numbers of voters have lodged pre-polls just to secure merciful release.

Pollsters at Redbridge — whose principals Tony Barry (ex-Liberal) and Kos Samaras (ex-Labor) will feature on the ABC's election night broadcast — asked respondents earlier this month what campaign messages they found most convincing.

The stand-out — by a country mile — was Labor's assertion, in its wall-to-wall droning red-and-black campaign ads, that "Peter Dutton's nuclear plan will cost $600bn, and he will need to make cuts to pay for it".

This ad is reinforced by other ads reminding voters that as health minister in the Abbott government in 2014, Dutton "ripped $50bn out of health".

Labor here has lashed together two things that worry people (expensive nuclear reactors, cuts to health) and then staple-gunned the lot to Dutton.

A glossy booklet plays a starring role

It's been very successful, and it's utterly shameless on two grounds.

The first is that Dutton didn't "rip" anything like $50 billion out of health. The figure comes from a single chart in a single glossy booklet published alongside the 2014 Budget, in which Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey made much of their fiscal prudence by showing that their projected spending on health over the ensuing decade would be $50 billion less than that forecast by the previous Gillard government.

Real life swiftly took over, of course. The Senate blew a hole in the 2014 Budget and then the Liberal Party blew a hole in Abbott, and everything changed, which is what happens when governments change.

But Jim Chalmers and Albanese never forgot that glossy document, and 11 years later it's playing a starring role in their campaign. Here's the second reason why the attack is shameless: governments amend future spending projections all the time. This government has done this exact thing in its current term! In the 2023 budget, Albanese and Chalmers committed to carving $79 billion out of the NDIS over the next decade. And last year, the pair signed off on an aged care plan which reduced government spending by $12.6 billion over 11 years.

Whhhhaaattttt? Sound the klaxons! Gather the Coalition foot soldiers!

Campaign Attack Ad Jackpot! Angus Taylor to the Situation Room! Fire up the Reverse Scare-A-Tron! Labor's ripped $80 billion out of the NDIS and $12 billion out of aged care, and we have the budget papers to prove it! All is not lost! We shall ride to victory upon the backs of outraged carers! Even though they are already very, very tired!

But silence reigns. The opposition hasn't made one ad attacking the government for "ripping $80bn out of the NDIS" or "ripping $12bn out of aged care". Why? Why are we not seeing revenge attack ads from the Liberal Party making the perfectly reasonable point that Chalmers has yanked more out of the NDIS than Dutton ever managed to from Medicare?

This is where Sod's Law — settling around Dutton's shoulders now like a clammy mantle of doom — strikes again.

Opposition leader forfeits his scare campaign

Dutton cannot accuse the government of heartlessly dudding older Australians and those with a disability, for one very good reason.

And that reason is that those cuts to aged care and the NDIS were made in formal deals after significant negotiation, behind closed doors, between the government and the opposition. His signature was on the manifest. His party voted with the government. He is a registered co-owner of those cuts.

At the time, Dutton was warned that signing up to aged care cuts would rob him of the ability to run an anti-Labor scare campaign among older Australians.

But these deals were done last year, when Dutton was riding high, the government was floundering, and the unthinkable possibility of returning to government after just one term in opposition seemed, for a halcyon moment, thinkable.

As Michelle Grattan wrote at the time of the aged care deal: "Essentially the Coalition has sacrificed a possible short-term political advantage for a longer-term budgetary gain for a future conservative government."

Looking back, Dutton might ruefully reflect that a savage aged care scare campaign might have come in handy right about now.

But let's not be so relentlessly cynical.

The truth is that budgets do need to remain faintly affordable. Sometimes you do have to cut your coat according to the cloth available. And if you find a juncture at which a majority of parliament's elected members agree on when and how to do that, well, isn't that the one job we elect politicians to do? To make hard decisions in the long-term interest of the nation, even when we don't much like them?

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