It’s only the first week – and if you thought Peter Dutton’s election campaign looks chaotic, dishevelled, and thin on policy substance, you’re right.
While there’s no doubt that Anthony Albanese has a fight on his hands – as polls have consistently shown – this has not been a good start for Peter Dutton.
It began with Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ budget speech, replete with the cost-of-living measures on which the Albanese government is making its strongest reelection pitch: expanded Medicare bulk-billing, three-day childcare guarantee, urgent care clinics, transition to renewables, energy relief and, the surprise package: a tax cut for all taxpayers to ‘top up’ the revamped stage 3 tax cuts announced last year.
Chalmers’ tax cut comes from lowering the tax rate for the lowest paid workers from 16 per cent to 15 per cent in mid-2026, and to 14 per cent the following year.
There is a tax equity dimension at play here as well as the obvious tax cut. Cutting the lowest tax rate is an important, albeit small, recalibration of the income tax structure, reducing the share of tax paid by the lowest paid in the total income tax take, as it should be.
Surprisingly, the shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor, immediately announced that the Coalition would not support the tax cut, and the Liberal and National parties duly voted against it.
Income tax increase
Even more remarkably, Peter Dutton then promised that if elected, a Coalition government would legislate to increase income tax in order to reverse Chalmers’ tax cut.
The opposition’s controversial commitment to increasing income tax was the highly charged backdrop to one of the most important speeches in Dutton’s three years as leader of the Liberal Party, his budget reply speech.
It’s strange electoral territory to begin an election campaign promising to increase income tax, particularly when added to Dutton’s unpopular promises to sack 41,000 public servants, deny you the right to work from home and the right to disconnect, and wind back the Albanese government’s advances in renewable energy in preference to the mirage of nuclear power in 30 years’ time.
Budget replies are an opportunity for an opposition to outline how it would govern, and to announce major new policies. Media drops hyping a ‘big announcement’ fuelled expectations that Dutton would address critical issues – housing, climate change, cost of living, energy – and provide a pathway into government.
We were promised a ‘big announcement’ for the future, what we got was a recycled version of the past. Dutton’s ‘big announcement’ was a gas reserve policy, which would retain a proportion of gas for domestic use.
Although Dutton called this ‘one of the most visionary policies put forward in our country’s history’, it largely reprised Scott Morrison’s 2020 ‘gas-led recovery’ which failed to deliver either more gas or lower prices.
No costings, no detail
There were no costings, no detail, no indication of how it would work or how it would bring down prices.
The recycled gas policy was mirrored by another ‘big announcement’– a promise to halve the fuel excise tax for 12 months. This is a tax cut for fossil fuel suppliers and not, as much of the media incorrectly described it, a cut in petrol price.
We’ve heard this story before and we know how it ends – a brief reduction in petrol prices and a rapid return to higher prices once the excise tax cut ended.
If recycling old policies isn’t troubling enough, consider Dutton’s eagerness to align himself with US President Donald Trump.
Two months ago, Dutton praised the ‘shrewd’ and ‘reasonable’ Trump as a ‘big thinker’.
As the rest of the world looked on in horror as the unpredictable Trump’s discordant policy jumble unfolded – from tariffs to mass deportations, diminishing health care, thousands thrown out of work, and educational and cultural institutions purged of ‘DEI hires’ and ‘false history’, Peter Dutton was already on board.
Without waiting for the orange-tinged dust to settle, Dutton appointed his own DOGE efficiency leader in Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Shredding of government jobs and services
Are we really ready for the shredding of government jobs and services, from Medicare to veterans’ affairs, and Centrelink?
With Trump’s colours more clearly on display, Dutton is now complaining that reminding voters of his political proximity to Trump is ‘desperate sledging’.
Finally, in a moment of undiluted political hubris, Dutton told radio hosts Kyle and Jackie O that, if elected, he would not live in the official prime minister’s residence in Canberra at The Lodge, preferring the harbour-side views of Kirribilli House in Sydney.
‘I’ll take Sydney any day over living in Canberra,’ he said, dissing the nation’s capital just as he hopes to be elected to work there. It’s an astonishing political misjudgement that Dutton would refuse to live in the prime minister’s official workplace, Canberra, while at the same time telling Australian workers that they cannot work from home.
Emeritus Professor Jenny Hocking is a historian,
political scientist and award-winning biographer.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
