One of the privileges of journalism is bearing witness. It can be hard to get to the House of Representatives in time to watch treasurers deliver their budget night speeches because of logistics I won’t bore you with. But it’s usually possible to watch the budget reply in the chamber, so I wandered around on Thursday night to watch Peter Dutton deliver his first big set-piece as Liberal leader.
As I took my seat in the press gallery directly above Dutton, I drew a mental triangle in the chamber below. One point of my triangle was Scott Morrison. These days, Morrison sits over Dutton’s right shoulder, at the back of the chamber. I was conscious Morrison would have to sit and watch his former leadership rival characterise his legacy. That can’t have been comfortable. Dutton was generous to Morrison in the end, although he acknowledged mistakes had been made.
My eyes then wandered to the tip of my triangle. To the left of Dutton were the teal independents, representing the electoral territory the Liberal party lost in May. The group watched first with interest, then polite bemusement as the Liberal leader ploughed through his budget reply speech.
If you missed it, Dutton’s contribution was a generous slab of red meat for the conservative base – down with gas field-opposing green activists, down with “radical gender theory”, down with relativism in the classroom. Laced through this rage against modernity were personal anecdotes and cost-of-living empathy.
Doubling down on some of the crusades that estrange the Liberal party from its inner-city heartland would have felt pretty eccentric from the teal corner. Howard-era rinse and repeat has thus far cost the Liberals the seats of Warringah, Wentworth, North Sydney, Mackellar, Goldstein, Kooyong, Brisbane, Ryan and Curtin. But doubling down is what Dutton is doing.
Climate change was a significant issue in all of those contests. But Dutton’s position on the climate crisis and the energy transition has actually regressed, at least rhetorically, from Morrison’s stance. Morrison’s position was to do nothing but sound like you are doing something. Dutton’s position is do nothing, sound like you want to do nothing, and brand anyone who inhabits the world of evidence as a hippy, an ABC employee or a Labor stooge. This must be uncomfortable for the remaining Liberal moderates. Can they possibly ride these dirges out, waiting and hoping for the second coming of Josh Frydenberg? I guess we’ll see.
Completing my visual triangle on Thursday night were the victors – the Albanese government – arrayed across the chamber from Dutton, monitoring the opening sorties of the vanquished. Budget weeks have an iron-clad rule. There is no narrative without a counter-narrative.
This point might require some unpacking. Budgets are as much about narrative as they are about accounting. Governments spend the weeks leading up to budget night defining what their economic statement will be about. There are also those magical hours in the budget lock-up where the incumbent government seals the media off from the outside world so they can spend hours sequestered with the big egos of sideshow alley, massaging the initial coverage. The Canberra lock-up ritual is prized, because it is the only semblance of pseudo- control that remains in the rolling cacophony of modern Australian politics.
Going into the October budget, the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, framed the whole enterprise as delivering Labor’s election promises and beginning a conversation about how Australia actually pays for the empathetic government people want. (Hint: not with more borrowing). As narrative exercises go, this one was highly successful. Calm, orderly, clear – one of the better run-ups I’ve seen.
But the counter-narrative always begins the moment the embargoed budget papers are opened. Chalmers had acknowledged the primacy of the inflation problem during all the pre-publicity, so all eyes went to the inflation analysis in budget paper number one, which included a forecast that energy prices would be 56% higher over the next couple of years.
From that point in the proceedings, the budget was exclusively about energy and the cost of living, and what Labor was or wasn’t doing about it. Once the centre of gravity in the storytelling shifted, a lantern was hung over the only radical element of Labor’s steady-as-she-goes budget – the government’s decision to part ways with the cash support that became normalised during the pandemic.
When Dutton stood up on Thursday night, this was the seam he wanted to mine. Dutton’s counter-narrative to Labor calling time on pandemic fiscal habits was, This heartless government doesn’t care if your power bill goes up, and their green-left obsession about bolting more renewables into the system will drive your power bill up even further.
Dutton well understands that events – a war in Ukraine, a global recession, an inflation cycle that won’t moderate, a persistent shortage of labour and construction materials, the creaking mess of generation assets that the Coalition left as its legacy after a decade of lying about climate change – could well mean Labor is unable to move as quickly as it would like with the transition to low emissions. Election promises might get broken. Ambition could fall short.
Dutton’s narrative is Labor is ideological and incompetent. Even though all the experts – including the people who run Australia’s energy market – tell us the transition to renewables will deliver cheaper power and leave us less exposed to global shocks, the Liberal leader will claim the opposite is true, and weave Labor’s pre-election statements into a crown of thorns.
Dutton’s best means of breaking back into the contest from a position of near irrelevancy is to draw Labor into a bare-knuckle fight.
This drive-by politics might not work for a bunch of reasons. But there was one clear takeout from budget week. The climate wars are a long way from over at the political level.
Labor has a big explanatory task, and an even bigger managerial task, to ensure the national interest prevails in a renewed dog-fight with opportunistic hyper-partisanship. Rather than settling back in comfort on the government benches, imagining voters will see through the magical thinking and the mendacity, Labor has a staggering amount of work to do.
My impression over recent months has been the new regime is too grateful to be back in government and too frantic rolling out its agenda to project to the outside world as masters of the universe. But this week, there was an unproductive undertone.
At one point, Chalmers referred to Dutton as the “leader of the leftovers” – pithy, but pitiless. The energy minister, Chris Bowen, hit with a volley of tendentious questions, did nothing to hide his disdain – a response I find relatable, because veterans of the climate wars are sick of trying to be polite in this never-ending shit shower – but different versions of Screw you Angus Taylor across the dispatch box probably have less utility than cool, clear explanation of complex issues to disengaged voters. Anthony Albanese at one point chose to reflect on where Paul Fletcher was sitting in the chamber in order to highlight the diminished position for the manager of opposition business in the Liberal front bench firmament. Why? Albanese is the prime minister, not the opposition whip.
The braying does have a context. The new government is of the view that a number of its ALP predecessors didn’t spend enough time post-victory delegitimising their political opponents. Traditionally, the Coalition has been much better at this than Labor, and that’s part of the reason the Coalition has won more elections and remained in office longer. Focusing on deficiencies is thought to be a corrective.
But the skittish combativeness of the week was a diversion from one of Albanese’s mantras, which is Persuade, don’t polarise.
There’s a fine line between systematically delegitimising your opponents on matters of substance, and looking smug, arrogant or gratuitous. There was some wobbling along that line this week.
