Dutton needs a Plan B. It involves going where few Liberals have gone before

It’s hard to overstate how much the Liberals had going for them in Dunkley. Historically a Liberal seat, in a cost of living crisis, a candidate with name recognition as a local mayor, the absence of right-wing parties like One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia, top spot on the ballot paper, far-right billionaire-funded attack machine Advance publishing xenophobic ads, no change of government riding on the results. How could it go wrong?

Victorian Liberal Senator Jane Hume told her News Corp handlers there was “white hot anger” in the electorate. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton even felt relaxed enough, according to the Financial Review, to put in a sneaky trip to Perth to bend the knee to mining heiress Gina (do we need a ™ for that?) Rinehart on Thursday.

As it turned out, there wasn’t even mild annoyance in the electorate. Labor’s Jodie Belyea lifted the party’s proportion of the primary vote a tad. The primary vote “swing” to the Liberals, currently 6.58%, is less than the combined Hanson/Palmer vote in 2022 (on the other hand, the Greens vote fell in a heap, and it seems little of it went to Labor either). The net result is a bog standard by-election swing. Maybe all the white hot angry voters were too enraged to fill out their ballots properly.

So much for Dutton’s Plan A. His Plan A has been to sell grievance and resentment to the electorate, telling them whom to blame for their problems — chiefly, migrants and foreigners and Labor. Conspiratorial whispering about “Labor’s secret agenda for a big Australia” has become a shouted narrative of foreign rapists and criminals assailing Aussie women. “Rapists, paedophiles and murderers” shouted the Advance attack ad, straight from the US Republican playbook. “If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor,” deputy leader Sussan Ley tweeted before that blew up in the Liberals’ face.

Even after that, Dutton persisted. “The prime minister has taken a decision, his government’s taken the decision, to release 149 hardened criminals, including people who have poisoned Australians, including people who have raped and sexually assaulted children and women,” Dutton said on the eve of the by-election. “They took a decision to release those people into the community … if people here in Dunkley are worried about law and order issues, if you’re worried about crime, the last person you want to vote for is Anthony Albanese, because the prime minister spent his entire adult life arguing against strong border protection…”

“People are sleeping with weapons next to themselves,” the Liberal candidate Nathan Conroy chipped in.

As it turned out, the voters of Dunkley weren’t buying the Blame the Foreign Rapists shtick. Which leaves Dutton — where?

The complaint, even from within the Liberals now, is about the lack of policy from Dutton. At no stage has Dutton explained in detail how he’d address the cost of living, or housing, or energy. True, the Liberals have retained their 2022 election commitment to allow people to access their super for housing, which would pump tens of billions into an already crazy housing market, benefiting baby boomer Liberal voters and merely pushing prices up for everyone else. And we’re now told the opposition leader will unveil details about his nuclear power plan. But nuclear power is a culture war, not a policy — a culture war in support of coal-fired power because it requires us to prop up coal-fired power stations decades beyond the end of their lives.

This is Dutton’s, and the Liberals’, big problem. They don’t do policy. They do favours for mates, attack enemies or engage in culture wars designed to engender and exploit grievance. Super-for-housing is about destroying the evil industry superfunds as much as looking after the Liberals’ retiree base. Nuclear power is about delaying climate action to prop up fossil fuels.

The idea that Dutton and the Liberals can now transform from culture warriors into serious policy salespeople for the next election defies history. The last Liberal to campaign on policy was Malcolm Turnbull, who went to the 2016 election on an optimistic policy of embracing innovation and digital technologies, only to be undone by the Nationals complaining it upset the farmers, and Labor’s appalling Mediscare lie. Before that, you have to go back to 1998, when John Howard took a GST to an election.

In between 1998 and 2016, and in 2019 and 2022, all the Liberals have offered are scare campaigns, with the exception of 2013, when they just had to let the electorate cast judgment on Labor’s Rudd-Gillard antics. They find it particularly hard to do policy in opposition — remember the policy costings debacle of 2010? What experience do they now have to devise and sell policy that isn’t just another culture war or weapon of resentment and victimhood?

Maybe Dutton will stick with Plan A a bit longer.

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