When I watched Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s speech in reply to the Budget, I had lines from Sondheim’s “Bring in the Clowns” running through my head: “Me here at last on the ground/you in mid-air.”
This was more imagery and literary allusion than there was in the duration of Mr. Dutton’s Budget Reply speech.
But a plain speech was the medium that carried his message, as opposed to the federal treasurer’s 29.05 minutes of exhortations and perorations.
The opposition leader is the plod-turned-politician you can rely on to stolidly get the job done—the ordinary bloke who is one of us.
A small businessman who employed 40 people. I know how you feel, unlike the members of the government bench who are all lifelong politicians.
His feet are on the ground and the other side are up in the air. Let’s get Australia “Back on Track.”
The consensus, with which I agree, is that Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmer’s budget is inflationary and will do nothing to address the short- and long-term issues besetting the country, instead setting Australia up for bigger and more intrusive government with higher expenditure and higher taxes.
How do you repair Labor’s excesses?
You increase the flexibility of the economy, reduce the costs, get government out of the way, and encourage people to be self-reliant.
Demography is a problem for us with too many migrants, and despite this a rapidly aging population.
This results in not enough houses and not enough workers. The treasurer almost ignored this with a miniscule reduction in immigration and nothing to address the looming worker shortage, apart from more immigration.
Dutton addressed all these areas, not with a huge amount of policy detail, but with enough substance to convince Australians that he cares and understands.
His job in a budget-in-reply speech is to hold the government to account, not to govern himself. The time for detailed plans is much closer to the next election.
He started his speech at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with food and shelter—always a good place to start an election-style pitch because they are the needs we feel most keenly, and this is where he wants to fight the next 12 months.
So cost of living, housing, and electricity prices were the most enduring themes in his speech.
The answer to housing is to cut permanent immigration by a quarter and cap student placements by an unspecified amount. In this he positioned himself as an opponent of big business, Big Australia, and a champion of average Australians.
For business he promised to roll back Labor’s IR changes and reinstate a simple definition of contractor.
He also promised to increase the level for the instant write-off of capital purchases to $30,000, an effective tax cut, particularly for small businesses in a strong growth phase.
Nuclear is his answer to cost of living, correctly pointing out that energy costs jackpot through the production and distribution chain landing as higher prices, and that Labor’s “renewable-only” power system cannot produce power which is “cheap and consistent compared to other countries.”
Nuclear also provides him a way of talking to Australians about climate change in terms they might find persuasive and believable. Not only does it address CO2 emissions, but it is a technology people can believe he would support.
He also had policies to encourage older Australians to earn top-up income, which addresses both cost of living, and the demographic time bomb of a rapidly aging population.
Another theme of the next 12 months is likely to be opposition to the government’s policy of picking winners through its Future Made in Australia policy, which Mr. Dutton positions as social welfare for billionaires.
He promised to wind-back $13.7 billion promised to support “green” hydrogen and critical minerals on the basis that if there is a good enough business case the capital will be readily available.
It’s a good image—him grabbing money back out of the wallets of Twiggy Forest and Gina Rinehart. It upends the narrative that the Coalition is the party of privilege, and it reinforces the narrative that he stands for the ordinary person.
It’s often claimed the Coalition has a “women problem.”
The opposition leader had some policies with that in mind, supporting extra spending on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, $50 million for research on endometriosis, as well as promising higher bulk-billing rates.
There was also extra spending and legislation for domestic violence, knife crime, age verification on the Internet, as well as penalties for using electronic systems to threaten intimate partners and family.
Defence and borders were his last significant pitch.
He brings credibility to this, having been the minister for border security with a much better record than his Labor predecessors and successors.
It is also an area of quiet concern, particularly for the generation whose parents were involved in WWII and who know from family accounts what being unprepared can mean. Things are much worse now in defence than the 1930s.
Mr. Dutton’s speech was solid, and in the tradition of the strategies that have won the Coalition victories in the past. Former Prime Minister Robert Menzies campaigned on the suburbs and regions, as did Fraser, Howard, and Abbott.
The nattering aunts on the ABC’s 7.30 Report hated it and mocked it—Mr. Dutton would be relishing that.
Labor has always been prone to concentrate on issues, like The Voice, which are of peripheral, or no, concern to most electors, and it has thought, since Gough Whitlam, that elite opinion is more important than public opinion.
Mr. Dutton is setting out to demonstrate that they are wrong again. That Australians will ultimately prefer a dour doer, to a flamboyant flake.
