On Sunday,Peter Duttonboasted of his plans to visit 28 electorates by election day.
Come Monday morning, the campaign bus carrying some of Dutton’s staff and his travelling media pack hit a kerb and got stuck instantly after takeoff.
Potentially the most widely seen image of a rather listless Dutton campaign – the Liberal leader’s bus in trouble, in awkward public view, and needing an arduous rescue as the media watched – is almost a lazy piece of symbolism at this point, such was the level of virality the photos achieved in social media memes.
But whatever the metaphor, it was pretty close to the truth of being on the road with Dutton this week, as his campaign lurched to Saturday’s polling day: a failure to launch, a false start, spinning wheels.
In a word: underwhelming.
Days out from election day, when conventional logic would have been to relentlessly sell your key policies, press the flesh and woo undecided voters, Dutton spent most of his time in his media safe spaces in the conservative bubble, talking to people already voting for him,complaining about the press gallery, and gettingdistracted by culture war sideshows.
While Dutton has mastered the art of criticising Labor, only in occasional flashes did he effectively prosecute the positive alternatives he’d offer.
While Anthony Albanese was out at polling booths and schools and shopping centres, wandering through diverse crowds and high-fiving crowds of kids, Dutton cut a more solemn, low-energy figure.
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Multiple “campaign visits” this week consisted of him sitting in a deserted cafe, having a quiet coffee with his own local candidate. There was a low-key “rev-up” for 20 volunteers at a pub in the crucial seat of Bennelong. And then there was a closed-door lunch with Chinese community leaders in Chisholm, right at the moment Albanese was addressing the Canberra press club in a nationally televised speech.
A positive local announcement with junior footy players was gatecrashed by anti-nuclear union protesters; he later crankily cut short a hastily arranged replacement press conference, in the parking lot of a car yard, amid a tense standoff with journalists.
The game of “who has the best pictures” doesn’t mean the winner gets to be PM – just ask Scott Morrison. And to be fair, by late Thursday, Dutton had got out of his comfort zone, attending an agricultural show in Tasmania, before visiting an Adelaide fruit market. His campaign clearly found second gear.
Dutton travelled a lot, covering a lot of ground. But across a dozen electorates, from Sunday to Thursday morning when we left his campaign bus, it’s unclear if he even crossed paths with more than a dozen undecided voters, let alone did enough to convince them.
Multiple times through the week, Dutton said some variation of “this week is about cost of living, it’s about what will decide the election”, saying he wouldn’t be sidetracked by “red herrings and all the rest of the distractions”.
So it’s anyone’s guess why he went out of his way on four separate days this week to criticise the ABC, do multiple Sky News After Dark interviews, and spend days talking about Indigenous welcomes to country after the issue was put in the spotlight by neo-Nazi protests.
Dutton, after calling the ABC and Guardian Australia “hate media” on Sunday, intentionally raised criticism of the ABC again in friendly interviews on Sky, 3AW and FM radio. But, interestingly, he wouldn’t repeat it when asked at a press conference.
We won’t dwell on this too much, because Dutton was right in saying the public aren’t focused on the “feelings” of the media (and honestly, we shouldn’t dish it out if we can’t take it). But then why would he spend so much precious time, of his crucial last week, returning again and again to bag out the media?
Labor campaign sources wondered whether he was in “saving the furniture” territory; throwing red meat to the base, retreating again to the culture war instead of appealing to mainstream issues, amid concerns of a splintering of the right to One Nation or the Trumpet of Patriots.
Those same senior Labor sources, while puzzled about Dutton’s campaign strategy and schedule, were still not ready to write him off. The unpredictability of the growing minor party vote, the scars of Morrison’s “miracle” win in 2019, and Labor’s own campaign stumbles mean Albanese’s team are still chewing their fingernails.
Liberal sources argued this was Labor’s worst week of the campaign, pointing to theconfected confusion over Penny Wong’s comments on the voiceand various controversies about ALP candidates on polling booths.
The unofficial line from Liberals is that the election will be “150 byelections”, with “micro” issues affecting each electorate, so the national polls are a less helpful indicator of where the real battle will be won and lost. There is some merit to this, with the rising minor party vote and preferences spraying in unpredictable ways. Liberals still maintain there’s a path to minority, at least, for Dutton.
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But after a week where every national poll said Labor led the two-party vote by at least 51-49, Labor people grew in confidence, and were even talking up the prospect of an increased majority.
Although not as much of an increased majority as some polls said.
The YouGov MRP poll, which predicted up to 84 seats for Labor and as few as 47 for theCoalition, was downplayed by Labor, with senior sources saying they didn’t expect that result to be borne out on Saturday.
Dutton spent the week resolutely insisting the national media polls were wrong; that his own internal party track polling painted a much rosier picture. Privately, other Liberals said the same – but nobody, publicly or privately, would put a number on it, other than to claim it would be “closer” than the polls suggest. On Friday Dutton suggested “I think we’re seeing a 2019 situation” and promised “some big surprises on election night”.
But by Thursday, the knives were coming out. To borrow another metaphor from Monday’s bus false start, the wheels – if not outright coming off – were coming loose.
In the afternoon,the Liberal costings dropped, promising larger – not smaller – deficits than Labor over the next two years, before longer-term better budgets.
In the morning, Niki Savva in the Nine papers, and James Campbell in News Corp – both insiders well connected, particularly with the Victorian Liberals, the state where Dutton must make major gains to have any chance of victory – published scathing pieces full of choice quotes from unnamed Coalition sources blasting the poor campaign and the disconnect between Dutton’s office and the campaign headquarters.
Dutton dismissed it as “insider talk from leftwing journalists” – a bizarre position, considering the sources.
The divide between campaign HQ and leader’s office is a theme that has beencanvassed since early in the campaign. Dutton himself seemed to give a nod to issues on Thursday when he said the election was “not about the election campaign but about the last three years of government” – seemingly admitting his campaign had not been stellar.
Thursday also saw candidates start to distance themselves from the leader. The ACT Liberal Senate hopeful Jacob Vadakkedathu called Dutton’s public service cuts “unrealistic” and urged voters to back him sohe could fight to change the policy; the Bennelong candidate, Scott Yung, published an ad on WeChat, popular with Chinese Australians,claiming “he doesn’t blindly follow” party orders. It came after reports – denied by both Yung and Dutton – that the candidate was telling voters that Dutton was “not going to be there for ever”.
Albanese joined in on Nova radio on Friday morning, asking to hear Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again? by the Angels, in an apparent dedication to his opponent.
To finish where we started, it’s probably unfair to dwell too much on the campaign bus: Dutton wasn’t on it, his staff don’t drive it, and the private company driver was clearly embarrassed about the mishap.
Maybe Liberal campaign HQ knows more than is evident from published polls, a come-from-behind victory based on an undercurrent of support in all the right places. After 2019, no Labor person is outright rubbishing that potential.
But if Albanese claims the win he is clearly preparing for, this week will be seen as the false start, the engine stalling at just the moment the Liberals needed it to fire.
Josh Butler is a Guardian Australia political reporter and Canberra chief of staff who travelled with the Dutton campaign