Dutton is courting the left-behind. Quinn Rooney/Getty Images
Where America goes, the rest of the world follows. Donald Trump has inspired copycats on just about every continent, politicians who frame their reforms as a crusade against a liberal establishment neglecting the country’s left-behind. As Australia’s 3 May federal election approaches, the country’s own “Trump lite” opposition leader, Peter Dutton, is riding high. His conservative Liberal and National Coalition is neck and neck with the current Labor government in the polls, while incumbent Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s popularity has plummeted in the past year.
While a hung Parliament and a Labor-led minority government remains the most likely outcome of the election, Dutton could well get into power sooner rather than later. This would be a stunning turnaround from the previous election in 2022, which ended nine years of conservative rule and delivered the Coalition’s worst result since 1946. Yet, less than three years later, the Liberals are back, in no small measure due to Dutton’s leadership.
Much of the commentary, at home and abroad, has put this down to Dutton’s embrace of Trumpian tropes — though local journalists tend to express the comparison in cruder, more Australian terms. Yet Dutton is no political outsider, having been an MP since 2001 and a minister in multiple Coalition governments going back to 2004.
Prior to entering Parliament, Dutton was a police officer in the state of Queensland, whose police force had a long history of brutality and systemic corruption. This past and his abrasive style quickly earned him a reputation as an enforcer for the Right-wing faction of the Liberal Party. In 2008, he boycotted the apology to the “Stolen Generations” of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their parents, theatrically walking out of Parliament and talking about child and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities instead. In 2015, he was voted the worst health minister in the last 35 years by doctors after he tried — and failed — to introduce a patient co-payment for doctors’ visits. As Immigration Minister, he gained notoriety for his tough approach to asylum seeker boats, while hiding behind the secrecy of “on-water matters” when more shady details, including allegations the government paid people smugglers to turn their boats around and return asylum seekers to Indonesia, came to light.
Dutton’s political persona as a bruiser cop from Queensland was established enough for his wife to feel the need to declare in 2019 that “he’s not a monster”. This occurred after he lost the previous year’s party leadership vote to Scott Morrison, who then proceeded to fumble pretty much every aspect of Australia’s Covid management. Having become a laughing stock, Morrison was unceremoniously turfed out of power in 2022. Dutton was elected unopposed to succeed him, but few gave the new opposition leader much hope of regaining power anytime soon.
Three years on, things look very different. Like Trump, Dutton has attempted to remake the Liberal Party by reorienting it around blue-collar, lower-paid voters on the outskirts of large cities, while abandoning its traditional constituencies of big business and affluent voters in the inner-city electorates. This was helped by the Liberals losing many such voters in 2022 to “teal” independents, who campaigned not just on traditional liberal values but also on tackling issues such as climate change, corruption, and women’s safety. Rather than trying to recoup these voters, Dutton instead took the Trumpian route, campaigning hard against the elite in Canberra in the name of the “forgotten people” in the suburbs, while taking down progressive causes with ruthless efficiency.
A turning point for his leadership came in 2023, when he decided to campaign for a “No” vote in a constitutional referendum to establish an advisory body on Indigenous issues called The Voice. While it earned him scorn from Indigenous activists and those who make up polite opinion, Dutton correctly sensed that this was not a priority issue for voters struggling with the cost of living. Instead, he framed the proposal as a progressive preoccupation that would create a “Canberra voice of academics” rather than improving conditions on the ground.
To further bolster his populist credentials, Dutton then got stuck into Australia’s corporations for donating to the “Yes” campaign, accusing them of “lacking a significant backbone”, and only supporting the cause because they were “craving popularity” from the Twittersphere. In the end, the Voice campaign was roundly defeated, with 60% of the country voting against it; afterwards, Dutton triumphantly cited this as proof of just how out of touch the political elite was with its electorate.
Since the referendum, Dutton and the Liberal Party have risen in the polls, while Labor has floundered. Here, too, there are analogues with the situation in the US. Just like Joe Biden, Albanese came to power after voters had become exhausted with an erratic and incompetent government that presided over a chaotic pandemic response. Following his victory, Albanese spoke of a two-term strategy to remake the country after nine years of conservative misrule.
Yet Labor’s victory was built on quicksand: its lowest primary vote since 1932, a non-existent policy agenda, and no organic links to the constituencies it claimed to represent. Once in power, it quickly became obvious that the party had no coherent plan to address pressing social and economic issues such as housing, stagnating wages and living standards, eye-wateringly high household debt, and insufficient infrastructure. Predictably, once inflation started to bite, Albanese’s response of tinkering at the edges while the country experienced the sharpest fall in living standards in the OECD turned the population against him.
In this context, there’s a real possibility of a re-run of the American script, with voters turning out with their baseball bats on election day to punish those in power and giving someone else a go, especially a character like Dutton who, as one voter observed, “doesn’t sit on the fence […] he says as it is. There’s no wokeness in it.”
Even if that were to happen, the comparisons with Trump only go so far. The American President is not at all popular in Australia, with twice as many Australians preferring Kamala Harris at the last election, so there is little to be gained from embracing Trump and Trumpism wholeheartedly. Indeed, Dutton has rejected the comparison, claiming his role model would be the former Liberal prime minister John Howard, who last year said Trump was “not compatible with democracy”.
What’s more, while Australians are frustrated about the state of the nation, there is little appetite for a Trumpian revolution. A Dutton government would likely implement cuts to the public service, but an Elon Musk-style tearing down of the state is less desirable. Indeed, while Dutton appointed Liberal senator Jacinta Price to be “government efficiency” spokeswoman in January, she has rejected comparisons with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), arguing instead that her lodestar is Margaret Thatcher and promising to give “power back to the people by implementing small government”. Likewise, despite his broadsides against big business, Dutton last year quietly walked back his plan to slash permanent migration by 25% after a backlash from the big end of town.
Given the country’s compulsory voting and preferential electoral system, Australian elections are not won by appealing to the base, but instead require parties to convince undecided voters to give them a go. This generally mitigates against insurgent political projects, something which Dutton knows well.
Similarly, while he’s praised Trump for his “gravitas” and “bold thinking” on international issues such as Gaza, Dutton has also criticised the US President’s proposed tariffs on Australian aluminium exports. Dutton presents himself as better placed than the weak-willed Albanese to pursue an Australia-first policy and stand up to Trump in the national interest. He has no doubt also noticed how Trump’s trade spat with Canada has only benefited the ruling Liberal Party there, as voters rally around the flag and take a second look at the Trumpian Conservatives.
In short, while Dutton may liberally borrow from the Trump playbook, this only translates so far in Australia. Were he to become the next prime minister, he would largely continue previous Coalition policies, only this time with more culture wars thrown in. The Coalition’s campaign has so far been largely free of actual policy proposals, excluding an expensive and unrealistic plan to establish a nuclear power industry, which seems to have been drawn up on the back of a napkin.
Instead, Dutton used a headline speech unofficially launching his campaign to take aim at the proliferation of DEI initiatives in Australia’s public service, claiming they “do nothing to improve the lives of everyday Australians” and promising to fire bureaucrats responsible for them. This might be enough to get him into the prime ministerial Lodge, but it’s unlikely to prove sufficient to govern effectively and address the country’s problems. On this, at least, Dutton is similar to Trump.
Tom Chodor is a Senior Lecture in Politics and International Relations at Monash University.
TomChodor 
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Subscribe“… the state of Queensland, whose police force had a long history of brutality and systemic corruption.”
Nice one! Associate Dutton with the worst perspectives of the Queensland Police – and then associate him with Trump. Your bias is palpable.
I expect better journalism of Unherd.
I’m an Australian and a life long Labor voter This article is rubbish. Dutton is a pretty standard conservative. The comparison with Trump is ridiculous.
There wasn’t a more loaded version of the headline to consider? I’ll post this again for the slow kids in the class, such as the author: play the ball, not the man. That means the issue is not and never has been Donald Trump; the issue is the political conditions that made such a candidate possible.
While Mr. Chodor is busy condemning Dutton and anyone like him, the emergence of outsider candidates is exclusively due to the failure of the entrenched professional class of politicians who have done more to create problems than fix them, and often make existing issues worse. The issue is not whether a policy was sketched out on an envelope; it’s whether the policy is an improvement over the status quo.
People did not vote for Trump so America could have more of the same. This is being reflected across the West with the emergence of candidates who are giving the old guard the vapors. These interlopers are never debated, just insulted with the transparent attempt to marginalize their candidacies by dismissing them as “far” or “extreme” right, as if the same ole, same ole is something to be desired.
Possibly one of the most ill informed and biased articles so far on Unherd. The author falls into the progressive fallacy that any leader to the right of centre is both ‘populist ‘ and ‘Trumpian’ and intimates both are equivalent and bad for Australia. Australia has a border policy which is the envy of the world and yet has anaemic productivity growth due to green and red tape and out of control unions. The only GDP growth is from the expansion of a bloated government bureaucracy which is neither efficient nor delivers the services Australia wants. 70% of public servants earning North of $150k could be fired and the system would run better, particularly in health. And that most already copay to see a doctor shows how much this policy was required to support the system. A system which works perfectly well for social democracies like Norway which has copayments for hospital visits too. The author commits the same idiocy of the US elite in being blinded by their personal dislike of someone, thereby declaring any sound ideas which they put forth ‘toxic’. The parallels between Howard & Dutton are the most accurate, although the latter still lacks a big vision to push Australia forward. Which is a shame considering the bland offerings of both parties.
My friends, older women all, have the following worries:
1. Homelessness, especially for those on aged pensions who cannot find affordable places to live.
2. Climate change and the threat of human extinction which neither major party wants to talk about.
3. The Prime Minister’s sidelining of Tania Plibersek, our Environment Minister, whom most of us admire. He has undermined her attempts to protect threatened species and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. This is because he bows to the power of the Premier of Western Australia, a state devoted to mining.
4. The war in Gaza, the horror of it and our government’s apparent support of Israel’s onslaught.
5. The strong US military presence in our land, especially at Pine Gap and Darwin. We think they make us a target. We would feel safer if they all went home.
6. The fate of the young of our country, who seem to be wallowing, anxious and depressed, without any visionary leadership.
7. The way gender ideology is entrenched in our law and institutions, strongly supported by Labor and Greens.
I, and others I know, will not vote Labor, Liberal-National nor Green. We will look to indepenents. None of us can stand Peter Dutton.
UnHerd. All this verification and flagging really gums up the works.
Until it went down a wormhole, my comment had rebutted four points from this author. The two central points I made myself which I can be bothered typing out again are that: whether or not Dutton wrote a nuclear power policy on the back of an envelope (even used figuratively this is stupid), it remains an actual plan to get costs of energy down. Obviously, I mean over time. Our current Energy Minister did not know that standard practice in the United States for building a solar or wind farm includes building gas generation at the same time. Canberra is now quietly instructing the Labor state governments to extend the life of to-be-shuttered coal generators; last November S.A. chose to underwrite gas to firm its renewables. By building nuclear and further opening up gas for the domestic market while capping its price, Dutton does provide a clear distinction. This, one of a group of the author’s points, strikes me as having nothing whatsoever to do with Trump. And, next point, that the Australian public’s thraldom to impersonal bureaucratic authority continues apace. I recall the early 2000s before DEI practices began to come in or before middle management numbers climbed with a related climb in turgid and unnecessary professional development and ‘awareness’ drives. It was a gloriously liberated time in the best sense of freedom from impersonal coercion. I don’t know if Dutton will be able to do anything about this by cutting public servants. Probably, since the Liberal Party is wedded to uncounted Public Servant contractors just as much as Labor is, the answer would be no. There is no evidence that DEI expansion in Australia would fall, second-order-derivative-like, following retrenching. People latch on to hokum, doting on it like its their pet rock or a Tamagotchi. Thus, I’m with the rationalist movement on a topic such as self-ID.
Finally, I’ve never found Peter Dutton appealing. However, I will be voting for him May the third. Dutton and Albanese are like Australia’s crap uncles at a crapper family function. One seems never to have heard a word you’ve said in conversation, wears jeans and a normie shirt, has squirreled away a rumoured fortune through tax concessions and small business subsidies, and doesn’t seem to have entered the world with a pair of hips. The other also ‘gets in your ear’ but arrives via ricochet, seeming to have jumped on every bandwagon with his star secured, cross-sold and upsold, on the wagon-side; every next new thing will be the thing, a clueless mimic of Toad of Toad Hall. By stating I will vote for Dutton, I don’t gainsay this reality. I just deal with it how I can.
“Fall for” Trumpism.or “choose” it? The author shows his true colours.
I think quite a few people in the US who “chose” Trumpism in November might be having second thoughts.
Most of my American friends vote blue and I am surprised that some of them quietly like Trump at the helm. Most Americans would disagree with you.
Marty, I know that’s what the media is telling you to think. You must go with it.
Oh, UnHerd, we hardly know ya.
The “teals” do not represent true liberal values as the author claims. They are nothing more than the political wing of the renewable energy industry and have voted with the Greens on legislation around 70 per cent of the time, including on an anti-Israel motion in the parliament.
Unherd really shouldn’t do articles about Australia.
Would you like to explain why not?
He only wants Trump articles, as long as there’s nothing at all critical in them
Ok, I’ll have a crack.
Isn’t the rhetoric and flounce of this pitched more at The Conversation?
I’ve never found Dutton appealing. But I will be voting for him May the 3rd. Several ironclad reasons: 1) whether or not they were drawn up on the back of an envelope (which I doubt), Dutton’s nuclear and gas energy plans will reduce consumer bills over time. The Australian Energy Regulator states costs have risen between 49% and 134%. That would be sustainable if there were a plan. However, it’s been clear for a few years that Australia’s current Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, did not know – I repeat, did not know – that baseload gas and fossil fuel energy are required to firm up renewables. Because he did not build any Canberra now quietly instructs our state Labor governments to keep coal online pending power outs. 2) if the author can live with these energy hikes, then he lives above Australia’s third-tier tax bracket, or else above what James Marriott (citing a tech blogger) called the API (“application programming interface”); i.e., we either command or take orders according to a technological class divide. This new ‘weightless’ economy (‘pointless’, would be a jaundiced view) has attained force multiplication in Australia; taking me to 3), the outrageous salaries possible in construction and trades. In 2014, author Christos Tsolkias asked the identitarian ALP Whatever happened to the working class? 4) Because, much like our 1-public-servant-to-every-10-people bureaucracy, the focus has shifted from the Aussie battler to impersonal, or ‘dividual’, forms of identitarian authority, seized on by the ALP as the new fruitful electoral tilling fields. Hence, our Minister for the Environment, downs tools on any project facing cultural protest; projects that the old dispensation would trumpet to “bring jobs” back! Hence, also, Sall Grover’s endless day in court.
Are Dutton’s Libs the panacea to all our woes? Probably not. But they’re a damn sight closer.
UnHerd. All this verification and flagging really gums up the works.
Until it went down a wormhole, my comment had rebutted four points from this author. The two central points I made myself which I can be bothered typing out again are: that, whether or not Dutton wrote a nuclear power policy on the back of an envelope (even used figuratively this is stupid), it remains an actual plan to get costs of energy down. Obviously, I mean over time. Our current Energy Minister did not know that standard practice in the United States for building a solar or wind farm includes building gas generation at the same time. Canberra is now quietly instructing the Labor state governments to extend the life of to-be-shuttered coal generators; last November S.A. chose to underwrite gas to firm its renewables. By building nuclear and further opening up gas for the domestic market while capping its price, Dutton does provide a clear distinction. This, one of a group of the author’s points, strikes me as having nothing whatsoever to do with Trump. And, next point: that the Australian public’s thraldom to impersonal bureaucratic authority continues apace. I recall the early 2000s before DEI practices began to come in or before middle management numbers climbed with a related climb in turgid and unnecessary professional development and ‘awareness’ drives. It was a gloriously liberated time in the best sense of freedom from impersonal coercion. I don’t know if Dutton will be able to do anything about this by cutting public servants. Probably, since the Liberal Party is wedded to uncounted Public Servant contractors just as much as Labor is, the answer would be no. There is no evidence that DEI expansion in Australia would fall, second-order-derivative-like, following retrenching. People latch on to hokum, doting on it like it’s their pet rock or a Tamagotchi. Thus, I’m with the rationalist movement on a topic such as self-ID. Thus, I have no hopes for any change to current practice here in Australia.
Finally, I’ve never found Peter Dutton appealing. However, I will be voting for him May the third. Dutton and Albanese are like Australia’s crap uncles at a crapper family function. One seems never to have heard a word you’ve said in conversation, wears jeans and a normie shirt, has squirreled away a rumoured fortune through tax concessions and small business subsidies, and doesn’t seem to have entered the world with a pair of hips. The other also ‘gets in your ear’ but arrives via ricochet, seeming to have jumped on every bandwagon with his star secured, cross-sold and upsold, on the wagon-side; every next new thing will be the thing, a clueless mimic of Toad of Toad Hall. By stating I will vote for Dutton, I don’t gainsay this reality. I just deal with it how I can.
It’s highly unlikely the Conservatives will pick up enough seats to form government. But Dutton has done very well for a leader of a first term opposition with a large deficit to make up, and the government has pulled out all stops to take him down. The biggest disappointment is that Labor had hidden its liabilities, especially the hapless goblin with the energy portfolio Chris Bowen. And Dutton seems to have taken his foot of the accelerator such that Labor has inched ahead. Hopefully he’s got some gas in the tank, but like I said, a Conservative win is a long shot. I’d settle for a spanking of the revolting Greens and the smug Teals.
Dutton has some big problems when trying to convince people to support him. He has been caught out very publicly as a hypocrite when he broke his own ‘hard man’ rules.Two instances immediately come to mind. Firstly, the au pair scandal. Whilst ruthlessly sending refugees ‘back to where they came from’ (including those who had acted as interpreters and support staff to Australian troops in the middle east), he made an unexplained and incomprehensible exception for two young au pairs in Brisbane, who escaped deportation and were granted a visa even though they were clearly going to work here, against their tourist visas’ restrictions.The story bounced around for a while, supposedly these young women were working for friends of his, there were denials and reframing of very obvious facts, but the optics were extremely bad.
Another example that comes to mind was the tendering process where he awarded a huge government contract to Paladin, a company that was working out of a shack on Kangaroo Island, with little working capital.
Peter Dutton and his Department paid Paladin a total of $532 million for a contract that lasted 801 days – that’s equivalent to $664,169 per day.The value of contract was 35 times the company’s 2016 revenue and Home Affairs labelled the Overall Financial Risk assessment as “moderate to high”.
For a man who frames himself as a small government economic rationalist, this was another case of inconsistency and blatant hypocrisy.
Apart from his hypocrisy, which is a character flaw that Australians particularly hate, (attached as we are to the notion of being ‘fair dinkum’ and ‘true blue’), Dutton is also known for being particularly cruel. He refused to allow female refugees who had been raped to come to Australia for abortions. He claimed that women were using ‘rape and abortion claims as ploy to get to Australia’. He said ‘some people were trying it on in an attempt to get to Australia from refugee centres on Nauru.
For someone to deny that women escaping from war were not genuine victims of rape was seen by many as a new low.
I think examples such as these make Dutton unelectable as Prime Minister. He has a very slim margin in his electorate, and there are strong candidates running against him. I hope I am right. Australia deserves better.
Much of the ‘populist’ movement developed in Europe long before Trump took office. He and his strategists have been influential, and surely they have added their own flavor, but many of these ideas and strategies were already around.
The combination of compulsory voting, a preferential electoral system and executive governance via parliamentary Westminster cabinet makes any kind of systemically radical disruption along MAGA lines unlikely. The imported US ‘Culture War’ stuff both Left/Progressives and Right/Reactionaries pretend to play politics with is an almost exclusively media-politics-academe navel-gazing pantomime. Not to mention a massive exercise in wishful thinking and self-aggrandisement.
No-one else really cares about it.
And we can only support/sustain such a tiny and incestuous media-politics-intelligentsia professional gene pool that I reckon if you could somehow shut up no more than about 50 or so of The Usual Blabbing Suspects down here in the Australian ‘public debate’ – the most repetitively-vocal&visible media, academic and Culture War Talking Heads and Bylines, of all sides – …there would be no more talk of ‘culture war’ here, at all (it would lose its daftly try-hard Capitisation, for starters.) It really is that pathetic a projected obsession, farting forth from a tiny cohort of over-amplified and unrepresentative narcissists: the Battle of the Self-Important Few, facing each other off from their US-plagiarised ‘Culture War’ (woo-woo, meme me, Uncle Sam!) sides, hogging the miniscule public space our denuded legacy media ecosystem here affords us, re-fighting the same old banal and cliched imported fights, again and again and again.
Juvenile Social Media shit-posting and thread wars, basically. Except with the added joyful bonus of all the stylistic creakiness and extreme moral pomposity that only a broadsheet Op Ed page or an insanely-expensive and resource-sucking piece of public broadcaster ‘investigative journalism’ (AKA taxpayer-funded moral vanity publishing) can vomit forth. Drowning out the rest of us – and/or putting us off participation in public debates and politics altogether – while deluding themselves that their endless projected anxieties/careerist axe-grinding is the kind of ‘pluralist public debate’ that is ‘vital’ to ‘Australian democracy’, etc etc blah blah. Most of us get, and do, our politics and policy debates strictly locally and pragmatically – that is, usefully – well under/off the ‘national debate’ radar.
The Albonese government will probably be re-elected, maybe on a tighter margin, maybe even needing to lean on some minority deals. But there won’t be any great disruptive or radical change to the way we govern ourselves. That of course won’t stop the increasingly desperate and irrelevant mediocracy/commentariat here from continuing to shriek as if there has been/needs to be/will be next time, etc etc.
We Australians mostly ignore their increasingly redundant grandstanding nowadays, and get on with democracy quietly, sensibly and, generally, effectively enough. The rest of the world should, too.
Australia already is a mini-me USA. They can’t even spell “labour” correctly!
He didn’t need to do the Trumpian stuff. Now he’s lost a poll edge because he has turned off moderates.