Dutton’s Last Stand? A Budget Reply That Echoes Defeat

Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton’s disjointed budget reply is emblematic of a problematic start to an election campaign, and a stumbling step toward electoral oblivion.

(Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s lacklustre, forceful and saccadic budget reply speech was emblematic of the problems with the Coalition’s wider election campaign. (Source: Twitter/X)

Coalition leader Peter Dutton addressed parliament for his budget reply speech on Thursday, outlining the opposition’s alternative vision to the Labor Government ahead of an election. Dutton’s budget reply speech was one of the most discombobulated and disengaging you could ever see, as the wooden, unpersonable and stiff-postured aspiring Prime Minister fumbled through his speech at times with an awkward forced intensity, trying to get the most expression out of his his monotone voice. The substance of the reply seemed more disjointed than the delivery, and with the nation watching him, the chance of a Dutton led Coalition government seemed further away than it has since Anthony Albanese’s Labor government took office in 2022.

In his budget reply, Dutton looked the opposite of confident, unconvincingly calling for more “confidence, resilience and self reliance”, virtues he claimed a government run by him could offer - but he only really offered a few lazy market tactics and bleak revisionism as disingenuous panaceas instead. His flimsy alternative equated to a fuel exercise to soothe the cost of living, a poorly pitched gas plan to lower energy costs by securing a reserve supply while ignoring the complex and fragile market position the Coalition created, and tens of thousands of public servant sackings at a time when people are in financial turmoil. The speech was undercooked, the delivery undesirable, and the laziness and revisionism that defined it had a profound effect on the polling that followed.

The YouGov Poll Seat prediction released days later reflected this effect. The budget reply speech culminated a few weeks of debacle-laden public displays from Coalition senior figures, who had enough difficulty speaking intelligibly with attention and focused eyes in front of camera, let alone able to articulate any cohesive plan for Australia as a viable and serious political alternative. This was no more evident than in the performance of Dutton. For someone who has previously seemed so confident in his position, insisting on bolting his imprimatur to the pillars of the LNP broad-church while expecting total fealty from his senior cabinet around his shade of party ideology, he didn’t look like a leader’s arsehole.

The former-policeman-cum-property-mogul has been unabashed in his approach to leadership, seeking to win government in his image, but now he looks more likely set to lose because of it. Propped-up, polished, and pandered to throughout the Albanese government’s term by a hyperactively subjective media apparatus, powerful Zionist lobby groups, and oligarchical industrial titans, in his first election campaign as Coalition leader, Peter Dutton and his senior election spokespeople like Angus Taylor, James Paterson, Jane Hume and Michaelia Cash have trudged out of the murky swamps of opposition into the visible fields of alternative government looking unkempt and unprepared for leadership, with stinky mud on their hands. Propped up by so many subjective outside forces and propelled forward by pure hubris, the Coalition looks like it can’t walk on its own, and its visible in the sorry excuse for an election campaign it is currently producing.

Loosely bound together around a motley grouping of policies, from the monumentally and consequentially incomprehensible nuclear energy policy, to the strangely incongruous and politically numb suggestion to grant free lunches for bosses, the Coalition policy offerings have failed to find traction with the electorate. They don’t even seem to have a functional purpose, and the press appearances are starting to reveal the true makeup of Peter Dutton’s version of the LNP.

Dutton lacks the ability to shit-talk his way over a press gang for seemingly unlimited amounts of time like his predecessor Scott Morrison, who had the emotional intelligence to regulate on the fly, allowing him to take a chameleon form and masterfully evade and flip the questions and lines of inquiry that might have revealed the shallowness of his party’s political platform and the evidence of his own self-centeredness. Whereas Dutton is rigid in more ways than one, appears frozen in the headlights when asked the simplest of objective questions, and looks a combination of bewildered and annoyed when challenged to produce the most rudimentary of logic behind his policies. He presents as short, frustrated, rude, and dismissive. He doesn’t look good on camera. And although he refuses to compromise on his strong (and controversial) set of rules and stances on issues, some of which will lose him votes, they don’t actually seem to be his ideas, nor his convictions. Aside from pandering to subjective outside influence, Australians wouldn’t know if you asked them what the values of Peter Dutton’s Coalition truly are.

The nuclear absolutism that started with a bang and is currently in the whimpering stage seems to be about aping into all things nuclear as cover for the fossil fuel industry and blind zeal towards AUKUS, and not a genuine will to solve Australia’s energy woes. The pledges to the mining giants about being the partner of choice come at a time that many Australians are questioning the free ride for the rapacious resource sector and critical of a lack of sovereign wealth fund, and seem to be about leaning into the donor class more so than providing a long lasting sustainable resource sector that benefits Australians. The talk of absolute support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his genocidal nation of Israel—despite the last eighteen months of what the world has witnessed—is abominable to many secular Australians who have never witnessed such a controversial stance from a major party leader in this country.

Adding to the electoral king-tide rising against the LNP is the unlikeability and visible incompetence emanating from the current cohort of senior figures, and the loss of the voices of reason and logic that were once supplied by moderate voices in the party. The Coalition walked into the last election with the last of the somewhat capable (and palatable) moderates (Sharma, Frydenberg, Birmingham, Falinski), and walked out with the loss of the blue ribbon heartland that defined the party. Dutton’s election team returned from the drawing room with a hardened stance on an already failed political philosophy, rather than a viable political alternative that has done its homework and listened to its base.

Over in Canada, Pierre Poilievre is just as blustery as the best wannabe neoconservative demagogues of the five-eyes political landscape. He is just as pro-Israel as Dutton, but even he has not gritted as many of the ground teeth of the Dutton Coalition, offering substantially more honey to the wider Canadian public than the vinegar that flows from the opposition leader. Over in the UK, Rishi Sunak’s substantial defeat to Kier Starmer in 2024 has forced the UK Conservative movement back to the drawing board to produce something that appears to be more palatable, and both the Canadian and UK Conservative entities have engaged tentatively with Donald Trump 2.0, while taking care not to block out the sun completely with overt and disproportionate prostration to Israel at this genocidal juncture in its history. But not Petter Dutton.

Duttons self-proclaimed strength and determination on his policy position, regardless of how unpopular and delusional it may be, is starting to look like belligerence. His strong man approach that his party thinks everyone needs lacks the charisma and the intent to be an authentic populist right-wing movement, and is coming across as disingenuous, ghoulish and entitled, even to the increasingly disenfranchised Australian conservative base. All the vinegar drowning out the honey, the sticks breaking the carrots, and all the stubborn immovable positions aren’t working, revealing an alarming lack of awareness, and the political intelligence of this iteration of a LNP opposition is being revealed as close to laughable.

Dutton is a man of his convictions, and since taking the reigns of the Coalition in 2022, he has been unabashed in his leadership style, bending the political apparatus of the Coalition around his ‘tough guy’ persona, and succeeding in coordinating his message among senior party members. But it’s his message that is the problem. Although he has whipped his party into a particular shape, losing the last of its blue-ribbon legacy in the process, the broad church of the Coalition has narrowed its gaze under Peter Dutton, looking isolated in its ideas and detached from political reality in its misguided belief that it can impose them on Australians who aren’t impressed. But it doesn’t work like that here.

There must be an unavoidable panic setting in at the LNP after the disastrous polling result, highlighting its lack of popularity among the voting base, and the woeful perfomances by a shallow and stagnant talent pool that has been revealed under the election lights. After floating in a false engineered environment mollycoddled, evangalised and humanised completely by the concentrated subjective press apparatus and the vested interests of the disproportionately powerful in industry, the Coalition looks in la-la-land trying to communicate to ordinary Australians in the real world, appears to be in dire trouble trying to win their vote, and it is looking to be be a long election campaign for Peter Dutton.