Since Australia’s general election was called by Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese at the end of March, the contest for the 3 May poll has been an uninspiring one. Voters must choose between a mediocre Labor government that overpromised and woefully underdelivered since coming to office in 2022, and an underprepared and underpowered conservative opposition.
Just two months ago, it seemed the electorate’s anger with Labor was going to do what has not happened in Australia since the height of the Great Depression: turf out a first-term federal government. Liberal opposition leader, Peter Dutton, effectively had set the national agenda since Dutton opposed Albanese’s 2023 divisive referendum to give Aboriginal Australians a constitutionally-guaranteed ‘voice’ in governing the country, while Albanese’s government floundered on cost-of-living and border security. He also fanatically pursued its near-irrational obsession to make Australia a ‘renewable energy superpower’, despite its impact on energy prices and threatening the jobs of hundreds of thousands of Australians dependent on the country’s abundant coal and gas resources.
But from early February, the Liberal-National party coalition has gone from almost unbackable favourite to likely losers. Albanese, tipped to be, at best, humiliatingly reduced to minority government propped up by the far-left Greens party, could well scrape a majority. Opinion polls show Dutton, and his coalition, have gone backwards in each week of the campaign so far.
Own goals, however, only partly explain why the conservatives are struggling. It’s no coincidence the tide started running out for Dutton only after the inauguration of the third leader in Australia’s election: US president Donald Trump.
Unlike Canada, also going to the polls next week, Australia has not been existentially targeted by Trump, but the ‘Orange Man’ is feared and disliked by most Australian voters.
During last year’s American presidential campaign, the Lowy Institute think tank polled on how Australians would vote if they could. Notwithstanding her patently obvious shortcomings, a whopping 73 per cent of respondents wanted Kamala Harris, and just 22 per cent preferred Trump. In a related annual poll, released last week after Trump’s inauguration, his tariff war, and his seemingly pro-Vladimir Putin intervention in Russia’s war against Ukraine, Lowy found just 36 per cent of Australians trust America to act responsibly, collapsing from nearly 60 per cent at the nadir of Joe’s Biden presidency a year ago.
Those polls highlight how Australians, including many conservatives, have never taken to Trump, loathe his character and behaviour, and agree with former prime minister John Howard’s likening Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 defeat to a dismissed batsman defying the umpire’s decision. Many welcome Trump’s determination to combat ‘woke’ at home, especially on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and their institutional champions like Harvard, and his support for biological women. But Australia’s conservatives have been appalled at Trump’s bombastic treatment of America’s allies, his tariff mania (including laughably imposing tariffs on the seals and penguin of Australia’s otherwise uninhabited Heard and Macquarie Islands), and the uncertainty his administration’s missteps and unpredictability have created worldwide.
Dutton is paying an unfair electoral price
Trump’s MAGA movement may have invaded and consumed its Republican party host, but the Republicans’ centre-right fraternal parties, including Australia’s Liberals and Canada’s Conservatives, are being blackguarded by association. Their incumbent centre-left opponents may loathe Trump, but paint themselves as being better able to ‘manage’ him.
Like Canada’s Pierre Poilievre, Dutton is struggling to deal with Trump and his baleful impact on Australia’s election. Dutton initially welcomed Trump’s return to the presidency. After the US president confirmed his intention to impose steep tariffs, Dutton said he would pick up the phone to Trump to defend Australia’s interests. Unlike Albanese, he said, his calls would be answered. Dutton also marketed his commitment to reducing government waste and civil service numbers by appointing his most effective retail politician, Jacinta Price, as a sort of shadow minister for DoGE.
When Trump rhapsodised about making Gaza ‘the Riviera of the Middle East’, Dutton commented that the president is ‘a big thinker and deal maker’, and that ‘he hasn’t become the president of the United States by being anything other than shrewd’. Dutton may have been speaking with a heavy dose of Aussie irony, but his critics instantly flung it back.
By last week, however, Dutton was galloping away from Trump at top speed. In a TV debate with Albanese, he refused to say he trusted the president and expressed disgust at the heavy-handed public bullying of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Instead, Dutton said he didn’t know Trump personally and reserved his judgment on whether they would get on as fellow leaders.
Dutton wasn’t helped, however, by standing behind Price a few days earlier, when she unwisely talked about the coalition ‘making Australia great again’. A recent photo of Price and her husband decked out, albeit jokingly, in MAGA baseball caps, has also emerged. It reinforced what Labor and its left allies wanted Australians to believe while not saying it themselves: that Dutton is a Trump mini-me, and his Liberals are Australia’s MAGA.
That Dutton is an economically liberal and socially conservative mainstream centre-right leader, a loyal and decent family man who treats others with respect, is ignored: in Australia’s election campaign, truth was an early casualty and Dutton is paying an unfair electoral price.
If Albanese wins an election that seemed all but lost two months ago, he has Donald Trump to thank. As with Pierre Poilievre and Canada’s Conservatives, Trump is upending the electoral hopes of Peter Dutton and the Liberals in Australia, and could well knock off both Dutton and Poilievre in the same week. Instead of the changed direction Australia and Canada desperately need, both likely will be saddled with continuing centre-left mediocrity, thanks to the toxic, insensitive, America-first myopia of The Donald and MAGA. Not that the president seems to care.
