(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)
(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Who is Peter Dutton and how on earth have he and his crew stuffed up his launch so absolutely? For there isn’t much doubt that they have. Let’s review.

The opposition leader was presented as a man who’d done hard jobs in the Morrison government, but who was now going to show another side of himself — “I won’t change who I am, but you’re going to see another side of me”, as fawning reports in News and beyond showed him as a family man.

The idea seemed to be to present Dutton as a true conservative, but not as a junkyard dog; a right-wing alternative to the compromises of Scott Morrison, but ready to reveal some surprising maverick views.

Yeah, that was the problem right there for much of the electorate. The notion that Morrison was, what, a compromiser, ’scuse us? Here we all are thinking that Morrison is an aggressive, literalist Christian, utterly lacking in compassion, willing to spend 10 days dying on Bellevue Hill to defend Katherine Deves and her wacko act. The revelation in launching Dutton that there was a conservatism beyond ScoMo was news to a lot of people.

The double act got tied up in knots from the start. When the new Albanese government released the Nadesalingam family back to Biloela, Dutton the family man gave an agitated, aggro response that contradicted the “family man” pitch. After that outburst, he tacked back to Mr Compassion, apologising for walking out of Parliament during the apology to the Stolen Generations, and for making a joke about Pacific islands drowning (!) because of climate change.

Had they been given before he became leader, these might have meant something. But that would be impossible, because a) he isn’t sorry for a second, and b) it would also have damaged Dutton’s credentials as the “right” candidate. Being given now, they sound craven.

So by now Dutton has been the principled conservative against the “woke”, and also the guy who apologises about apologies. He capped that off by saying that the Liberal Party didn’t need big business, and that he would be turning to small and micro business as a base.

The most delicious possibility is that they really believe this propaganda, in defiance of all maths. The hard right — UAP, One Nation and the Lib Dems — stood in all 151 seats, and pulled out all stops to do so. Its performance was pathetic in all states but Queensland, and there it had big numbers in only firmly held LNP seats. In the outer-suburban Labor seats in Melbourne, the right parties gained some impressive numbers, getting up to 15% of the vote — but Labor won easily in all of them, and half of their preferences went to Labor. Which suggests a protest vote that was always going to come back to Labor.

That is confirmed by the very awkward fact that the Liberals and the commentariat right do not want to acknowledge: the “hard-right” parties are not uniformly so in their policies.

Both One Nation and UAP were unashamedly economic nationalist, wanting big government to step in and build dams, rail lines, etc, through old-fashioned public-owned projects. Moreover, they were also pro-tax. Pauline Hanson made attacking the zero-tax pay of mining companies one of her key platform points; the UAP proposed a 15% “licence” on iron ore, which would be a huge multiple on existing government royalties. That is going directly against the Liberal pitch.

The Labor voters who gave their first preferences to those parties were at least in part supporting those policies, as well as those around lockdown protests — as is easily seen in the derisory vote for the Liberal Democrats, who manifestly don’t believe in tax hikes and public works and who badly trailed other members of the (haha) “freedom front”. Even AFR hack Aaron Patrick doesn’t believe there’s a winning voter stock here.

Dutton and the right are giving out obvious mixed messages as they talk up a fantasy “forgotten people” to provide a majority. These “forgotten people” are working-class and on low incomes and precarious employment, but they’re also lower-middle-class employers. The belief seems to be that their economic priorities can be disregarded, and that they can be unified and gained on cultural issues.

All this seemed to be capped off by an interview with Andrew Bolt on Sky Pravda after dark, which was a bit of a shemozzle. Bolt spent most of the interview berating him about the apologies, and Dutton’s pro-forma “wait and see” what the government’s proposal on the First Nations Voice to Parliament would be. “You don’t compromise,” Bolt said, “but that’s just me, I’m not a politician. Now climate change …”

Here it got really weird. Bolt was asking Dutton to denounce climate change “making children cry”. Dutton wanted to avoid that, because the party won’t be going into denialism. He turned the question round to one on teachers and the history curriculum: “I could talk all night about this.” People who have picked up on this moment believe it to have been another outbreak of a right obsession. It was actually a desperate attempt to have a confrontation with the right-of-right-of-right about climate change.

This really is turning into an impressive screw-up. Dutton is the guy who doesn’t need big business, but doesn’t want the woke inner city; stands up for the average Aussie, but will consider a Voice to Parliament; is going to be straight-talking, but won’t give his views on climate change; is a family man, but is angry that a family is no longer being used as anti-refugee hostages.

He will never convince a huge number of southerners that he’s a nice and normal guy. But he might convince a few erstwhile supporters that he’s just another two-faced politician. When you work out who Peter Dutton is, tell Peter Dutton.