When Anthony Albanese visited Dickson on the first day of the election campaign, Labor strategists were still not expecting to mount a serious challenge in the Brisbane commuter belt seat, held byPeter Duttonfor 24 years.
“I think the logic was to start the campaign on the front foot, in enemy territory, rather than anyone thinking too much that we could win Dickson,” a Labor source says.
Five weeks later on election night, Labor’s Ali France, a three-time challenger in Dickson, became the first person ever to unseat an opposition leader at a federal election.
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The trigger for Labor to mount a final blitz in Dickson came from an unlikely source.
On 31 March and 1 April, Climate 200 conducted a poll in Dickson in the hope of positive news about support for community independent candidate Ellie Smith.
The UComms poll found the independent couldn’t win Dickson – her primary vote was about 10%. But the poll also showed Labor was in front in the seat, 51.7% to 48.3%.
Guardian Australia understands that Climate 200 then showed the poll results to Labor – which had not commissioned any previous polling in Dickson, and was unaware the seat was so close – on 4 April. The party quickly conducted its own survey, which showed Dickson as a dead heat.
On 9 April, Labor’s campaign director, Paul Erickson, sent an email to supporters headed: “We’re taking on Dutton in Dickson”.
“I just greenlit an additional $130,000 for Labor’s campaign in Peter Dutton’s seat of Dickson,” Erickson wrote.
“Overnight, our campaign conducted new research in Dickson. It turns out Peter Dutton’s seat is closer than we originally thought. I’m sending this email to Labor’s top supporters, because as you read this, we’re working to adjust our budget in response to these findings.”
The Coalition told the Courier-Mail at the time that its own polling, conducted by Freshwater Research,had Dutton comfortably in front; Dutton himself dismissed the push as a “propaganda campaign”.
“The people of Dickson aren’t stupid,” he said. “The polling I’ve seen puts us in a comfortable position, I’m happy with that. You wouldn’t believe it but Labor put out a fundraising email which started this propaganda campaign. I wouldn’t fall for that.”
News Corp reported this week that Coalition insiderswithheld polling resultsfrom Dutton, including in Dickson. Some Liberal National party insiders dispute that the party would have conducted any significant polling in Dickson. One said: “We tried to win the election, not save the furniture”.
Even as results showed big swings away from theCoalition, party faithful were still shocked to see Dutton’s seat go on election night.
After all, Dutton had been written off in Dickson before. He wasn’t supposed to enter parliament in 2001, but defeated a shadow cabinet minister, Cheryl Kernot, in a seat that had changed hands a few times since it was first contested in 1993. As Dutton said on election night, Dickson had a “one-term curse” before he ran.
Heading towards the 2010 election, Dutton held a slim margin and the polls pointed to another big Labor win. He attempted to switch to a safe seat on the Gold Coast, before the electoral tide turned and Dutton increased his margin.
And he faced “the fight of his political life” in 2019 when activist group GetUp!poured millions into a ground campaignto oust him. Dutton again defied the push and held on. Labor strategists believe the GetUp! campaign, and the perception it was being funded and run from outside the electorate, probably did more harm than good.
“In a state like Queensland, if people perceive that groups from other states have come to tell them what to do or how to live they will react very badly to that,” former Rudd government minster Craig Emersontold Guardian Australiaat the time.
“That’s not an attack on GetUp, maybe 100% of their volunteers who were on the booths campaigning were Queenslanders, but if there is a perception they were outsiders,Queenslandis such a parochial state that it would go down very badly.”
This time round Ellie Smith, who won 12.6% of the vote, says her campaign was a grassroots one. Climate 200 gave her $319,590 starting in September, but Smith says most of the money she raised was from locals and local donations.
By midway through the campaign, the Coalition appeared spooked by the independent, and beganattacking Smithon local billboards.
“We started with about 20 friends around a table and it grew very very quickly, the momentum was really there for change in Dickson, people were really motivated and they’d never done anything like it before,” Smith said.
“We really set out to win and I think that motivated people [but] we weren’t unhappy with the result.
“They saw our campaign as a major threat towards the end of the election. [The Coalition] would have spent 300k in the last three weeks attacking me personally. It really didn’t stick, it was very clear we’d done the work so people understood what I stood for as a community independent.”
Dutton’s primary vote of 34.9% – down 7% – is the lowest in his two decades contesting the seat. When he won narrowly in 2007 – by about 200 votes – the Coalition primary vote was 46%. Part of the story in Dickson is that Smith ate into Dutton’s support, and that her preferences mostly flowed back to Labor.
France, who had been widely tipped to beat Dutton in 2019, contested Dickson again in 2022 and brought the margin back to a tight 1.7%.
France said on election day that “seven years of work” had helped her forge relationships with people in the area.
“I’ve knocked on so many doors, I’ve had so many conversations. I feel like people really know who I am and what I stand for now,” she said.
“[Dutton] is a massive spender on his campaign, particularly advertising. We have never been able to compete with that. But what our campaign has always been about is a huge grassroots game. It’s about door-knocking, it’s about the high visibility. It’s about being at markets.”
Labor sources reject any suggestion that Smith’s campaign radically changed the outcome, pointing to the fact France increased her primary vote, in addition to Smith winning a large chunk of the anti-Dutton vote.
Paul Williams, an associate professor of politics and journalism at Griffith University, said Dutton’s profile as opposition leader had been “much higher” at this election than ever before. That might have hindered, rather than helped, in Dickson.
“There’s no doubt that the overarching factor [for the whole election campaign] was Peter Dutton and his personality and personal style,” Williams said.
Like many others, Williams had predicted Dutton would lose Dickson at past elections, only for him to hold on. He said the electorate was part of a bigger story – Queensland seats like Petrie and Forde, both won by Labor unexpectedly, had similar demographics.
“These places have a higher proportion of tradies, small businesses, blue collar workers [and they’re] defying electoral gravity.
“[People] were hurt by the cost-of-living crisis and yet they’ve rewarded Albo and kicked the opposition in the groin.
“One view is that people liked Peter Dutton as a local member, maybe as a minister, but they didn’t want him as a potential prime minister.
“[Dutton] is a difficult politician to warm to as a leader. And of course he’s come into focus much more [as opposition leader]. Local voters might not have paid much attention to who their MP was, but after 2022 [Dutton] becomes a figure of national focus and Labor was certainly saying that the more people see of Peter Dutton, the less they like him.”