Where America goes, the rest of the world follows. Donald Trump has inspired copycats on just about every continent, politicians who frame their reforms as a crusade against a liberal establishment neglecting the country’s left-behind. As Australia’s 3 May federal election approaches, the country’s own “Trump lite” opposition leader, Peter Dutton, is riding high. His conservative Liberal and National Coalition is neck and neck with the current Labor government in the polls, while incumbent Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s popularity has plummeted in the past year.
While a hung Parliament and a Labor-led minority government remains the most likely outcome of the election, Dutton could well get into power sooner rather than later. This would be a stunning turnaround from the previous election in 2022, which ended nine years of conservative rule and delivered the Coalition’s worst result since 1946. Yet, less than three years later, the Liberals are back, in no small measure due to Dutton’s leadership.
Much of the commentary, at home and abroad, has put this down to Dutton’s embrace of Trumpian tropes — though local journalists tend to express the comparison in cruder, more Australian terms. Yet Dutton is no political outsider, having been an MP since 2001 and a minister in multiple Coalition governments going back to 2004.
Prior to entering Parliament, Dutton was a police officer in the state of Queensland, whose police force had a long history of brutality and systemic corruption. This past and his abrasive style quickly earned him a reputation as an enforcer for the Right-wing faction of the Liberal Party. In 2008, he boycotted the apology to the “Stolen Generations” of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their parents, theatrically walking out of Parliament and talking about child and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities instead. In 2015, he was voted the worst health minister in the last 35 years by doctors after he tried — and failed — to introduce a patient co-payment for doctors’ visits. As Immigration Minister, he gained notoriety for his tough approach to asylum seeker boats, while hiding behind the secrecy of “on-water matters” when more shady details, including allegations the government paid people smugglers to turn their boats around and return asylum seekers to Indonesia, came to light.
Dutton’s political persona as a bruiser cop from Queensland was established enough for his wife to feel the need to declare in 2019 that “he’s not a monster”. This occurred after he lost the previous year’s party leadership vote to Scott Morrison, who then proceeded to fumble pretty much every aspect of Australia’s Covid management. Having become a laughing stock, Morrison was unceremoniously turfed out of power in 2022. Dutton was elected unopposed to succeed him, but few gave the new opposition leader much hope of regaining power anytime soon.
Three years on, things look very different. Like Trump, Dutton has attempted to remake the Liberal Party by reorienting it around blue-collar, lower-paid voters on the outskirts of large cities, while abandoning its traditional constituencies of big business and affluent voters in the inner-city electorates. This was helped by the Liberals losing many such voters in 2022 to “teal” independents, who campaigned not just on traditional liberal values but also on tackling issues such as climate change, corruption, and women’s safety. Rather than trying to recoup these voters, Dutton instead took the Trumpian route, campaigning hard against the elite in Canberra in the name of the “forgotten people” in the suburbs, while taking down progressive causes with ruthless efficiency.
A turning point for his leadership came in 2023, when he decided to campaign for a “No” vote in a constitutional referendum to establish an advisory body on Indigenous issues called The Voice. While it earned him scorn from Indigenous activists and those who make up polite opinion, Dutton correctly sensed that this was not a priority issue for voters struggling with the cost of living. Instead, he framed the proposal as a progressive preoccupation that would create a “Canberra voice of academics” rather than improving conditions on the ground.
To further bolster his populist credentials, Dutton then got stuck into Australia’s corporations for donating to the “Yes” campaign, accusing them of “lacking a significant backbone”, and only supporting the cause because they were “craving popularity” from the Twittersphere. In the end, the Voice campaign was roundly defeated, with 60% of the country voting against it; afterwards, Dutton triumphantly cited this as proof of just how out of touch the political elite was with its electorate.
Since the referendum, Dutton and the Liberal Party have risen in the polls, while Labor has floundered. Here, too, there are analogues with the situation in the US. Just like Joe Biden, Albanese came to power after voters had become exhausted with an erratic and incompetent government that presided over a chaotic pandemic response. Following his victory, Albanese spoke of a two-term strategy to remake the country after nine years of conservative misrule.
Yet Labor’s victory was built on quicksand: its lowest primary vote since 1932, a non-existent policy agenda, and no organic links to the constituencies it claimed to represent. Once in power, it quickly became obvious that the party had no coherent plan to address pressing social and economic issues such as housing, stagnating wages and living standards, eye-wateringly high household debt, and insufficient infrastructure. Predictably, once inflation started to bite, Albanese’s response of tinkering at the edges while the country experienced the sharpest fall in living standards in the OECD turned the population against him.
In this context, there’s a real possibility of a re-run of the American script, with voters turning out with their baseball bats on election day to punish those in power and giving someone else a go, especially a character like Dutton who, as one voter observed, “doesn’t sit on the fence […] he says as it is. There’s no wokeness in it.”
Even if that were to happen, the comparisons with Trump only go so far. The American President is not at all popular in Australia, with twice as many Australians preferring Kamala Harris at the last election, so there is little to be gained from embracing Trump and Trumpism wholeheartedly. Indeed, Dutton has rejected the comparison, claiming his role model would be the former Liberal prime minister John Howard, who last year said Trump was “not compatible with democracy”.
What’s more, while Australians are frustrated about the state of the nation, there is little appetite for a Trumpian revolution. A Dutton government would likely implement cuts to the public service, but an Elon Musk-style tearing down of the state is less desirable. Indeed, while Dutton appointed Liberal senator Jacinta Price to be “government efficiency” spokeswoman in January, she has rejected comparisons with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), arguing instead that her lodestar is Margaret Thatcher and promising to give “power back to the people by implementing small government”. Likewise, despite his broadsides against big business, Dutton last year quietly walked back his plan to slash permanent migration by 25% after a backlash from the big end of town.
Given the country’s compulsory voting and preferential electoral system, Australian elections are not won by appealing to the base, but instead require parties to convince undecided voters to give them a go. This generally mitigates against insurgent political projects, something which Dutton knows well.
Similarly, while he’s praised Trump for his “gravitas” and “bold thinking” on international issues such as Gaza, Dutton has also criticised the US President’s proposed tariffs on Australian aluminium exports. Dutton presents himself as better placed than the weak-willed Albanese to pursue an Australia-first policy and stand up to Trump in the national interest. He has no doubt also noticed how Trump’s trade spat with Canada has only benefited the ruling Liberal Party there, as voters rally around the flag and take a second look at the Trumpian Conservatives.
In short, while Dutton may liberally borrow from the Trump playbook, this only translates so far in Australia. Were he to become the next prime minister, he would largely continue previous Coalition policies, only this time with more culture wars thrown in. The Coalition’s campaign has so far been largely free of actual policy proposals, excluding an expensive and unrealistic plan to establish a nuclear power industry, which seems to have been drawn up on the back of a napkin.
Instead, Dutton used a headline speech unofficially launching his campaign to take aim at the proliferation of DEI initiatives in Australia’s public service, claiming they “do nothing to improve the lives of everyday Australians” and promising to fire bureaucrats responsible for them. This might be enough to get him into the prime ministerial Lodge, but it’s unlikely to prove sufficient to govern effectively and address the country’s problems. On this, at least, Dutton is similar to Trump.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
