Anthony Albanese may think he’s being smart by announcing the election the day after Peter Dutton’s reply-to-the-Budget speech, but because the decision has leaked, he’s handed the starters gun, and a lot of the advantage, to Peter Dutton.
Tomorrow’s agenda will be set by Dutton’s speech, not Albanese’s announcement. Albo will go to the election in Dutton’s shadow.
Dutton’s speech casts a huge working-class shadow, with pitches to the people who used to be rusted-on Labor voters, or so-called Howard Battlers.
Labor thought they had him when he rejected their tax cut, but he’s come out with a more tax-effective cost of living measure by halving the petrol excise.
This will go to the benefit of those who live in the outer suburbs, or who drive for a living. It will cascade through our manufacturing, retail, and transport sectors.
It is one in the eye to the inner-city latte sippers who prefer public transport and vote Greens or Labor and does nothing for those who’ve bought a Tesla or the latest Chinese BYD. It’s a sign to those frustrated by the botched energy transition that he is on their side.
Not only does it channel John Howard, who won an election off fiddling with fuel excise, but it even harks back to John Hewson’s radical Fightback plan which would have entirely abolished the fuel excise in favour of a GST.
And it can be delivered now, at a cost of $6 billion versus Labor’s $17 billion for a 70 cents a day tax cut.
Dutton’s pitch is to those who make things, those whose bodies are engaged in their work, and those who run the businesses they own or that employ them.
There’s $12,000 to support them to provide apprenticeships, and a target of 400,000 apprenticeships all up.
Some of this is to help fix the housing crisis. Dutton has two policies that could make a real difference here. $5 billion for infrastructure and a decrease in immigration.
The expenditure on infrastructure is supposed to unlock 500,000 new homes. I doubt it. Maybe a tenth of that, but he is heading in the right direction.
Dutton is too parsimonious on immigration – a drop of only 25 per cent is not enough when we’ve got the hangover of 1 million net immigrants in the system in just the last couple of years. But at least he’s talking about it.
We were barely building enough homes for natural increase, so the 400,000 or so homes these immigrants need is still sitting there and could take a decade to clear as natural increase will still happen.
The promise to shed 40,000 public servants will wear well with these groups. After all, with digitisation the administration side of their businesses is actually smaller than it was 20 years ago, so why should the administrative size of the Commonwealth government have grown even faster than the population?
Dutton doubles down on his nuclear promise, as he should. Australia is one of the few developed countries that either doesn’t have nuclear energy or doesn’t have plans to introduce it.
The future will be made everywhere but Australia if we don’t have a nuclear industry. Renewables have their place but they are not reliable enough, nor do they produce the quality electricity, that sophisticated manufacturing needs.
But he makes a mistake in insisting gas exporters must direct 10 to 20 per cent of their output to the domestic market at a price below the international price.
He wants Australia to be a minerals powerhouse, but it can’t be if this sort of sovereign risk is introduced. These companies built their businesses on contracts to sell gas overseas and without those contracts the gas would not have been extracted.
Other miners will be deterred from setting up in Australia if they think their investment can be pirated by feckless politicians.
If Dutton wants to do something about the domestic gas price he needs to fix supply. Speeding up gas projects in the Beetaloo won’t actually do anything for the domestic market because it is too far away and will be too expensive by the time it gets down pipelines to where it is needed.
He needs to lay down the law to Victoria, which has banned onshore gas exploration despite having plenty of gas. Only they can truly fix their own gas supply problem at a preferential price.
He should also be promising to fix the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act which is responsible for holding up minerals, including gas projects, by allowing busybody environmentalists to initiate nuisance legal actions.
Defunding the Environmental Defenders Office is one thing, but if the legislation was fixed, then the privately funded operations would cease to be a problem too.
I read Dutton’s speech-in-reply from last year before reading this year’s. It’s amazing how little has changed. Actually, I think last year’s was actually a better speech.
But in terms of this election, the themes, and some of the lines, were the same, and that is good. To cut through you have to be consistent, and repeat the same messages over and over again. It shows that Dutton has set his sights on the right targets, because his messages are still relevant.
He’s talking about the things that matter to Australians and he has an agenda that won’t scare them, but which is different to Labor’s, and will achieve.
It could have been bolder, and it could have been better, but Dutton is no Trump, or John Hewson, he’s a consensus politician, and he appears to be listening to electors.
He’s more like John Howard than anyone else and Howard got elected time after time not because of his policies per se, but because people knew he would be consistent, and that the decisions he made would head in the right direction.
When I poll voters, the word that most attaches to Dutton, apart from ‘nuclear’, is ‘strong’. In a dangerous world it could just be what voters are looking for and his speech emphasised those qualities where he concluded by talking about his past as a businessman, but also as a cop.
‘I will be a strong leader and a steady hand. I will make the tough decisions – not shirk them. I will put the national interest first. I will lead with conviction – not walk both sides of the street. And I have real life experience to demonstrate it.’