For a long time, opposition leader was the worst gig in Canberra. But with no policies and polls climbing, and with help from most commercial media outlets, Peter Dutton appears to have cracked the code.
For a very long time, the worst job in federal politics has been opposition leader immediately after the fall of a government. Take that gig and you won’t become prime minister. The losing streak goes back more than 50 years. Billy Snedden, Andrew Peacock, Kim Beazley, Brendan Nelson, Bill Shorten – none made it to the top job.
The instant view was that the Morrison government lost due to getting the politics wrong, not because it became a directionless, gimmicky mess. Once the Albanese government was sworn in and the new parliament got going in mid-2022, the Dutton opposition engaged in full-scale rhetorical combat against the new administration. In other words, it set about getting the politics right.
How has Dutton done it? For one thing, he got lucky by having Albanese as an adversary. Albanese overestimated the durability of his popularity and blew a massive hole in it by embarking on the Voice referendum too soon. Should the government fall next year, history is likely to judge that decision as the greatest error by any newly installed prime minister.But there’s far more to it than that.
Dutton’s policy has been made up on the fly. When first proposed, it was based on small modular reactors. When the business and technical case in favour of that technology started to falter this year, the policy switched to a mixture of older-style large reactors with a few smaller ones. The plan is to establish an entire new industry on the public purse. No costings have been provided, but the price tag has to be in the tens of billions of dollars.
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