If there was a moment that set the course for the 2025 electoral contest, it was the Liberals’ defeat in the Aston by-election on April Fool’s Day 2023. When his party became the first opposition in a century to lose a seat to a government at a by-election, Peter Dutton’s immediate response was to change the narrative and pull his team in behind him. Within days, he called a snap parliamentary meeting and locked the Coalition into opposing a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
Dutton certainly opposed the Voice personally, but his decision was at least as much about shoring up his own leadership as about what the proposal would mean for the country. Focus group research had identified community confusion about the concept along with a simmering resentment at what the opposition leader calls “wokeness,” especially on the fringes of Australia’s big cities. He set about drawing those groups together and amplifying both sets of concerns.
This approach to policy-making became a pattern for the Liberals in the two ensuing years: taking a position more for political reasons than because it’s necessarily the best thing for Australia.
It may be a pollyannaish reflection in these social-media times, but good governments and oppositions have generally done it the other way around. They’ve decided what they believed was best for the country and then worked — hard — at taking the nation with them and turning the politics to their advantage.
Two years on, as the Liberals now contemplate snatching electoral defeat from genuine hopes of victory — hopes still not quite extinguished with just a day to go — this abandonment of values-based political practice is what has many long-time party members and supporters in despair. More than a few traditional Labor types are disillusioned with their own side for similar reasons, especially on environmental matters.
Still, that is only part of the story of the legacy of Aston.
Peter Dutton tapped into a widespread reluctance about the Voice that was ripe for reinforcement. And when voters overwhelmingly rejected the idea at the October 2023 referendum, he took it as vindication of his approach. He had correctly read that people were hesitating about the Voice. What he misread was why.
While some opposed the Voice because it represented “wokeness,” a good many voted No because it wasn’t clear to them how it would work and what it would do. They wanted more detail. Despite their own role in bolstering that sentiment by urging “if you don’t know, vote No,” Dutton and his staff and confidantes didn’t heed the message in their own success.
The referendum result convinced them they could beat Labor simply by continuing to amplify the resentment of those outer suburbs. There was little emphasis on reclaiming the blue-ribbon seats that had turned teal in 2022, the seats that had produced party luminaries past and whose donors had filled the coffers for decades.
Their assumption appeared to be based on the referendum victory alone, not on any previous election campaign experience. Dutton and his staff didn’t have any.
The referendum affected the political landscape in a couple of other ways that added to their confidence. It helped activate hardline conservatives and the extreme right who would ultimately lean their way. It also badly damaged prime minister Anthony Albanese, sapping both his political capital and his confidence and sending the government into a defensive spiral.
Never the clearest public communicator, Albanese got wafflier. His government was caught seemingly unprepared for the High Court’s curveball overturning indefinite detention of asylum seekers, which became a rolling political disaster, and he lost momentum — even after regaining some through unexpectedly reshaping the Morrison government’s stage three tax cuts in January last year.
Buoyed by Albanese’s plunging poll ratings, Dutton and co shunned the strategy — successful for most of the Howard years — of setting and explaining policy well ahead of an election, always pairing negative political messages with positive ones about the economy and starting to hammer those themes early. Howard’s approach, premised on his oft-repeated doctrine that “you can’t fatten the pig on market day,” was jettisoned.
The Dutton opposition didn’t set about designing and outlining a suite of economic policies to explain how a Liberal government would turn the economy around and make people’s lives better. Instead, they concentrated on seeding and feeding the doubt about their Labor opponents and reinforcing the anxieties and resentments that are always exacerbated in times of economic stress.
The one signature early policy was the plan to establish nuclear reactors at seven sites around Australia. Again, that had its genesis in imperatives of politics rather than energy efficiency. Dutton realised he couldn’t afford to stand against the weight of public opinion on climate change and would need to commit to getting emissions to net zero by 2050. He also knew the Nationals would resist strongly, risking a potentially fatal Coalition split. The solution was to adopt a policy that seemed to solve both problems at once: embracing a baseload power source that didn’t contribute to carbon emissions and one that the Nationals had long supported.
The nuclear policy allowed the Coalition to shift the focus from the process of reducing emissions gradually to what the figure would be in 2050. Never mind that the whole point of a net-zero target is to start reducing emissions now by winding back reliance on fossil fuels. Under the on-paper Coalition policy, that phase-out need not ramp up seriously for at least a decade, maybe two. Political problem solved — sort of.
Talking up an interim reliance on gas then required a gas policy, preferably one that might help win back support from teal-inclined wanderers and emphasise driving down cost. So “gas reservation” was adopted as policy yet only unveiled in the budget reply speech on the night before the election was called — and it managed to enrage some traditional corporate backers who didn’t welcome what would amount to more government regulation and a curb on their potential profits.
Some further populist last-minute offerings, in the shape of a promised temporary 25c-a-litre cut to fuel excise and a $12,000 tax concession for some mortgage holders, plus some housing infrastructure measures, rounded out the key economic offerings, all unveiled at the eleventh hour.
Rather than engaging in serious economy policy development, Dutton and his colleagues spent many months attacking Labor and its leader for failing to ease the cost-of-living crisis. They zeroed in on focus-group research highlighting impressions of Albanese as “weak.” They pushed hard onto the historically fruitful ground of immigration and floated ideas aimed at reinforcing negative sentiment about Indigenous people — what Albanese, Greens leader Adam Bandt and, privately, the odd Liberal described recently as “punching down.” Policies such as the doomed work-from-home restrictions, urgently reversed, and shambolic proposed public service cuts gave the impression of policy on the run designed to pick off some groups and punish them. And they didn’t think they needed to lay the groundwork with the media, either. Aside from a few friendly outlets, the stance towards the news media ranged from cool to hostile.
All of this worked pretty well for about eighteen months, when the election was a way off. But then, as polling day approached, people who were jack of the government and thinking of voting against it started looking at the alternative. They wanted to know what was on offer. They wanted to know the details.
Instead of reinforcing a clear set of Liberal values and leveraging an historical reputation as the better economic manager, the Coalition had a whole lot of messages to sell. Mid-campaign it rolled out more policies that looked half-baked, including a promise to outlay $21 billion on defence without saying what it would be spent on and how it would be funded.
Dutton ramped up his attacks on journalists, lambasting some organisations as “hate media.” But even those he might call the mutual-admiration media haven’t been satisfied with the paltry detail in his offerings.
As support for Labor started increasing again in recent weeks, the Liberals struck a deal with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation that each would print how-to-vote cards encouraging their supporters to give the other their second preference. The contrast with the put-them-last approach of the Howard years could not be more stark.
If Hanson’s voters follow her advice, their preferences could help elect Liberals in some tight lower house seats and the move will be seen as a success. If Liberals do likewise on their Senate ballot papers, Hanson could increase her numbers there — including getting her daughter into parliament in Tasmania at the expense of current independent Jacqui Lambie.
The preferences-swapping deal has seen the Liberals produce a how-to-vote card for moderate incumbent Tasmanian MP for Bass, Bridget Archer — who opposed her own party on a range of social issues in the last two parliaments — that recommends putting the One Nation candidate ahead of all others after a right-leaning independent. It’s hard to believe that was Archer’s choice.
Some Liberals are asking why political expediency has been allowed to obscure both the party’s traditional values and its proven traditional policy approach and, as Dutton continues to rail about Indigenous welcomes and acknowledgments, why their campaign isn’t just all about the economy.
This grab-bag approach could still work for Dutton because of strong local candidates and ground-game campaigners and could sneak him into minority government. But some Liberals worry about how he would interpret the result if it does. One frontbencher even observed privately last week that a Labor majority government would be better than any minority version, including their own.
Increasingly, Liberals have been fearing that the Dutton strategy has failed and Anthony Albanese will be returned — even though they’re likely to regain the seat of Aston.
And if that’s the case, Labor would do well not to ignore the lessons of their wild electoral ride either. Albanese can’t afford to just campaign well. He needs to govern well too. Maybe that’s Aston’s ultimate legacy. •
