Why Dutton's 'one tune' division and animosity didn't work for Australians

Dutton has always been a political hardman. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull once described him as a "thug" unsuited to being prime minister of a multicultural society like Australia.

After leading in the polls for months ahead of the election, Dutton hardly put a foot right during the campaign. Egged on and amplified by the Murdoch press and a host of right-wing lobby groups, Dutton's instincts to announce Trump-like policies to sack half of Canberra's federal public service, blame immigrants, delay climate action with his nuclear distraction and lean hard into the culture wars - decrying the need for Welcome to Country at Anzac Day, 'wokeness' in school curriculums and universities - led the Coalition to its worst defeat in decades.

Peter Dutton gave a gracious concession speech on election night. Several Liberal politicians remarked that those comments reflected the Peter Dutton they know in real life, with Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie calling Dutton a "good guy". But to the public, Dutton boycotted the apology to the Stolen Generation, whipped up fear campaigns against "African gangs" in Melbourne, accused pregnant rape victims in Nauru of "trying it on" by seeking abortions in Australia and said the Fraser government made a mistake by resettling Lebanese refugees.

Turnbull's assessment was spot on: "Peter's got one tune that he plays and it's been all his political life and that is division and animosity, generally targeted at immigrants."

Voters rejected it across the country, including in his own seat of Dickson. Dutton's legacy will be defined by two major defeats: his role in defeating the Voice Referendum in 2024, and his role in leading the Coalition to its biggest federal election defeat in decades in 2025.

As for what went wrong for the Coalition overall, well, what didn't?

Can they fix it? As a colleague of mine has said, who cares?

The Coalition has culture-warred itself into electoral irrelevancy. Canberrans turfed the Liberals out altogether at the federal level at the last election. This election, Tasmanians did the same. Women, young people and inner-city voters abandoned the Liberal party in droves (with the exception of Goldstein in Victoria), no surprise given the Coalition's obvious disdain for these groups in its threadbare policy platform.

Hopefully this devastating defeat renders the kind of fear-mongering politics that punches down on immigrants and minority groups to the margins, but I won't hold my breath. At least this election proved that Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin and their Sky News After Dark whacko-chamber are as impotent as their views are rancid.

Labor's majority in the lower house is absolutely enormous, the kind we haven't seen in decades. But the thumping seat result hides a more complicated picture. Labor's primary vote was 34.7 per cent, which means roughly two-thirds of the country voted for someone else. It is preferences that delivered so many seats to Labor, not primary votes.

If the last election wasn't enough to convince you that there's no such thing as a safe seat anymore, this election result should put it beyond doubt. Not only did Peter Dutton lose his seat, but so did Greens leader Adam Bandt in Melbourne (along with the Greens' other lower house seats, though the Greens' Senate vote was strong). Most of the community independents retained the seats they won in 2022 and 2019. But even amid the enormous two-party preferred swing to Labor, in the Canberra seat of Bean independent Jessie Price is ahead of Labor's David Smith by just a handful of votes. There really is no such thing as a safe seat anymore, and this is a healthy thing for Australia's democracy. Political parties, MPs and senators have a vested interest in being more responsive to their constituents and taking nothing for granted. If every seat is vulnerable, then every vote is valuable.

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Last term, Labor struggled to deal with internal divisions and with so many more MPs to manage, this task is likely to get more difficult this term. In future, the electoral threat to Labor's majority is likely to come not so much from the Liberals, but from the Greens and independents. With a large majority, Labor MPs and senators are likely to feel much more confident rocking the boat in caucus on a range of issues, now the Liberals aren't a threat. Labor has a lot of progressive policies in its platform that could pass through the Senate with the support of the Greens, who are likely to hold balance of power in their own right after July 1.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his first priority would be wiping out 20 per cent of student debt, one of Labor's key election promises. Other ministers have made it clear they don't want to act with hubris, which is fair enough.

But this is an unprecedented opportunity for Labor to be ambitious and to enact the kind of progressive changes that it has historically been defined by - like Medicare and the NDIS. Labor could make childcare universal and free, like public school. It could end native forest logging like Victoria and Western Australia already have. It could stop wasting billions of dollars subsidising the fossil fuel industry each year. Like the Morrison government during COVID, it could lift Australians out of poverty by increasing unemployment benefits. Or by ditching mutual obligations, first introduced by John Howard, which only serve to make people miserable and waste public money. Rather than warning the crossbench to "get out of the way" of the private construction companies, Labor could again get government involved in building the kind of public housing the Prime Minister grew up in.

One thing is certain, in this term of Parliament the only thing Labor has to fear is fear itself.