Every year, Crikey hands out awards to our best and worst politicians. The guide for determining the best politician is simple (and subjective) — it’s the person who we think has been most effective in influencing politics and using power to achieve results. Many readers think it should be a popularity contest; many object if we suggest someone they dislike. But in 2024, with politics dominated by cost of living issues, the Reserve Bank’s ongoing war on households, and migration, it’s hard to avoid the obvious conclusion that the 2024 politician of the year is:
Peter Dutton
Half of you are already preparing a subscription-cancellation email, but it’s the same as when we named Tony Abbott a decade ago. Peter Dutton is a devastatingly effective opposition leader. Sure, he has no credible policies, his political persona is one steeped in racism and hatred, and his primary business model is about fostering division and grievance. But that has left him with, according to the estimable William Bowe’s BludgerTrack poll compilation, a big primary vote lead over Labor, a small two-party preferred edge, and the momentum strongly in the Coalition’s favour.
It’s well short of an election-winning lead, of course — especially if all of the teal independents hold their seats and Bradfield falls to Nicolette Boele. But it sets Dutton up for next year’s election campaign in which, with the backing of News Corp, he can bid to become the leader with the largest party in the Parliament and first choice for independents to negotiate with. If he develops real momentum in the campaign, he might even sneak to 76 or 77 seats.
That’s the political side of things. Where Dutton is genuinely interesting is in relation to a theme I’ve developed throughout the year: Dutton is no Liberal, and certainly not a Sydney Liberal. He’s from Queensland, where government ownership, interventionism and regional rorts are embedded in the state DNA.
Dutton promised on his first day as opposition leader that he would be no friend to big business and that has increasingly proven to be the case. He is part of an international reaction among right-wing parties to neoliberalism (the neoliberalism those very parties fostered for so long), which sees the once high-minded parties of free markets and globalism reject migration, free trade, small government and laissez-faire industry policy, often picking up the very economic tools abandoned by managerialist progressive parties.
Donald Trump is the archetype of the phenomena; Dutton is the local version of it. Dutton likes to use the Trump playbook, but more importantly, he’s an agent of a similar ideological shift we’ve seen in the US Republican Party.
What will happen next year? Dutton will face his first campaign as leader, and he’ll be up against a more seasoned Anthony Albanese (who at least has now worked out what he should have known years ago — that News Corp despises him). If Dutton wins, he’ll undergo the same trajectory as Tony Abbott: his lack of interest in policy, his lack of competence, and his reliance on a limited bag of tricks will turn a brutally effective opposition leader into a poor Prime minister. Once you’re actually in charge of a country, voters expect more than just being told whom this week’s hate figure is. We’ll see.
Honourable mentions
Jim Chalmers
Last year’s winner ended the year appointing new members to his dual board Reserve Bank, delivering the biggest shake-up in monetary policy since the 1990s, ushering in major competition policy changes and unveiling a deterioration in the budget deficit. But Labor made the right call back in May to launch into a substantial deficit this year. Chalmers is the reason why so many Australians still have jobs and the economy isn’t mired in a recession caused by the Reserve Bank’s malignant hostility to workers. But as Wayne Swan discovered after Labor’s response to the global financial crisis, voters are never especially grateful for not losing their jobs, since most of them will never know how close they came to losing them.
Matt Keogh
After years of wilful neglect by the Coalition, this government has decided to start treating our veterans properly. It has invested the large amounts required into the Department of Veterans’ Affairs to deliver the sorts of services veterans are entitled to expect and to pay them what they’re owned (and credit to Nine’s Shane Wright for reminding readers that the government is unambiguously doing the right thing here). But Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh has also led the government’s response to the defence and veteran suicide royal commission. It’s very early days, but it appears Keogh is pursuing the right institutional framework that will maximise the chances of real, long-term change. Sadly, with inertial institutions with poor cultures like Defence involved, “maximising the chances” is probably the best that anyone can do.
Bridget McKenzie
Again, unlikely to be a popular pick with readers, but at Crikey we respect politicians who stand up for good policy (and pay a price for it). That was McKenzie’s fate in September when she rightly urged divestiture be part of the suite of competition powers governments wielded in relation to the gouging scumbags of Qantas, then was ordered out to reverse herself by the Coalition leadership. It’s the Nationals who have pushed the Coalition hardest on competition; with any luck, McKenzie will be able to announce next year that the Coalition, definitively, wants to be able to break up Qantas if the airline continues to treat us all like garbage.
Dud of the year
Tempted as we are to give a send-off to Paul Fletcher, who’s not even sticking round to face up to losing to Boele, we can’t go past Crikey favourite Richard Marles. Marles’ ineptitude would be hilarious if it didn’t come with a price tag in the tens or even hundreds of billions as his rotten, incompetent department lurches from disaster to disaster across contract management, major projects, the treatment of its own personnel and basic accountability. And in AUKUS, it now has a truly vast canvas on which to paint a portrait of how terrible it is. And you’re paying for every single cent of it. If Labor loses the election, the best part will be that we no longer have to put up with Marles wielding power.
Agree or disagree with our picks? Who else deserved a nod? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
