PVO: The TWO high-profile Liberals being blamed for Peter Dutton’s spectacular WFH fail – and what he can do to turn his flailing campaign around

Peter Dutton and the Coalition’s fall from grace has been swift. Plenty are starting to ask the question: is he a goner?

With voters focused on the two party contest now that it is officially underway, the opposition leader (so far at least) isn’t convincing enough voters that he’s a viable alternative PM.

Prior to the campaign voters, when polled, registered a protest vote against Labor and the PM. But those results didn’t assume the need to embrace the alternative party on offer. 

Put simply, they weren’t truly indicative of a two horse political race. 

This was just one of the reasons I was saying at the time that Labor remained favourites and therefore on course to win the election, albeit reduced to minority government. 

In the first week and a half of the campaign Newspoll has seen the Coalition’s vote fall back to roughly where it was at the 2022 election that Scott Morrison lost.

In response to the decline Dutton has now dumped his policy limiting public servants capacity to work from home, a sure sign that it went down like a lead balloon in focus groups. Such a shift mid-campaign is a bad sign. Indicative, perhaps of wider dysfunction. 

The policy was seen as a direct attack on working women, who disproportionately take advantage of WFH provisions – and by an opposition that has long had a problem with women, starting with a lack of gender balance in its ranks. 

Which is why it’s so ironic that shadow finance spokeswoman Jane Hume was a key architect of the policy. Having pushed hard for it, she has seen a backlash internally at her judgment. 

However, don’t expect to hear too much about that from the opposition. Blaming one of the few female frontbenchers for the policy mistake is a bad look. 

Besides, as Opposition Leader, Dutton takes all the blame as well as kudos for how his campaign plays out, and he enthusiastically embraced the policy as a chance to take aim at a bloated bureaucracy when it was put to him in the first place.

It backfired and the policy has now been jettisoned. What does the chaos of the process say about how the Coalition’s campaign is tracking and any chance of recovery?

Liberal strategists weren’t all that concerned with the pre-campaign tightening of the opinion polls. It was the sort of correction they were happy to lean in to – to shut down hubris in party ranks and manage expectations. They hoped to thereafter use the next four to five weeks to claw back.

Now the first target to be locked back in is denying Labor a majority. That remains the most likely outcome of the election, but if the Coalition continues to slide off the back of a messy campaign, even reducing Labor to minority government might become a bridge too far.

While there is a clear lack of depth in Coalition ranks, were Dutton to fail, any hopes of him spending another three years as opposition leader to get a second chance to become PM, would quickly fade. Also-rans would rise to challenge his authority, if Dutton even tried to stick around. 

But that moment in time remains over the horizon. This campaign will largely be won and lost in a series of individual battleground marginal seats up and down the country that the leaders will visit in the coming three and a half weeks.

Dutton needs to quickly arrest his declining fortunes before hoping to regain momentum. That needs to start tomorrow night when he squares off against Anthony Albanese in the first of the campaign leaders debates. 

Few might watch the actual showdown on pay TV, but how it gets reported and mentioned on social media and in office tea rooms will matter. 

Albo wasn’t a strong performer in last election’s leaders debates, and that was against a deeply unpopular incumbent. Having said that, he managed to do well enough in debate number one to overcome what had been a shaky start to his 2022 campaign, which included forgetting the cash rate when quizzed what it was on day one.

(As a funny aside – he’s now hired the journalist who asked that question as his press secretary, so hopefully he’s properly briefed to avoid something similar happening again.)

Voters are dissatisfied with Albo’s performance and priorities as PM over the past three years, even if they remain unconvinced by the alternative on offer.

Tuesday night is a chance for Dutton to reinforce doubts about Labor as well as present a viable alternative, if he’s good enough to shine.

A positive debate performance can turn his campaign around, the same way it did for Albo three years ago. Dutton doesn’t need a resounding victory, he just needs to match up to the PM and not be seen to fail.

But the next steps from there need to include an alternative vision to replace the Labor approach. Liberal ads are spruiking that the nation ‘can’t afford three more years of Labor’. 

That strikes a cord with mainstream voters, which Liberal focus groups no doubt discovered. 

But to tempt voters into switching allegiances they need to believe there is an alternative that’s worth risking. 

So far, there is no such alternative on offer, and after just three years of Labor in government, without a compelling case for change, merely blasting Labor’s performance might not shift enough votes to oust a one term government.

As I have often written, no first term federal government has lost a re-election in this country since 1931.  

Major party strategists know that this year’s election contest will really heat up the other side of the Easter long weekend. But momentum before then still matters, in part because there is little time left afterwards, given the campaign is broken up by another long weekend for ANZAC Day.  

Former Liberal Party polling guru and strategist Mark Textor used to say in campaigns you want to be the underdog as long as you don’t just become a dog.

Unless he can start the rebuild and quickly, the risk for Dutton is that his campaign looks like it might be going to the dogs, and with that, so are his chances of one day becoming PM.

Tomorrow night’s leaders debate could be the moment the Coalition regains its competitiveness.

Or, it will feed a perception in people’s minds that is already starting to take hold: That the opposition isn’t quite ready for a return to power, despite the not insignificant inadequacies of the Labor government and PM.