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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

When Scott Morrison lost the last election, it was the worst result for the Liberal Party in 70 years.

The cities deserted them, as they lost ground in every state except Queensland.

It seemed inevitable that it would take at least two terms in opposition to turn their fortunes around and Peter Dutton planned to start by wooing the bush and the suburbs, with the cities seeming too far gone.

But that’s all changed. Peter Dutton now sees a path to majority rule at the next election and is eyeing up the inner-city seats he thinks will get him there.

Today, senior reporter at The Saturday Paper Rick Morton on the surprising electorates Dutton hopes to win and whether he can do so while sticking with his hardline conservatism.

It’s Thursday, January 23.

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RUBY:

So Rick, for the last week, you've been looking into whether the Coalition and Peter Dutton could actually win the upcoming election. So after speaking to people after doing this deep dive, how's it looking?

RICK:

I think Peter Dutton thinks that they're in a much better position than anyone in the Coalition thought they might be, even a year ago. I think he can win. It’s far more likely that it would be a minority government or that they'd be in a position as a coalition to negotiate for a minority government. But the calculus is still very messy and they still need quite a few seats to get into that position.

RUBY:

The Coalition would need to win back 18 seats as well as keeping the ones that they have at the moment. So tell me how they're thinking about that and where Dutton thinks that he might have the best chance of winning votes.

RICK:

One of the things that has become clear in the last six months at least, is that Dutton himself thinks that there's been a big shift in Victoria. Which is a state that the Liberals have previously not been doing very well in and has typically been a bit of a kind of albatross around their neck. He chose to soft launch his election campaign in Mount Waverly, you know, kind of relatively inner suburban Melbourne seat last Sunday on the 12th of January.

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“Well, my friends, it's great to be back in Victoria. Thank you very much for being here today. I want to repeat what I've said before on many occasions that the Liberal Party at a state and federal level is back in town.”

RICK:

It's in the federal electorate of Chisholm, which is a marginal seat and the margin is actually currently held by Labor. The margin has nominally been halved to now just three and a bit percent after electoral boundary redivisions. So it's become kind of even more winnable, if you like, for someone like Peter Dutton. But it's still a pretty kind of, you know, relatively progressive suburban seat. It voted Yes in the voice referendum. And Peter Dutton, you'll notice when you're listening to what he's saying, he's not actually moderating his rhetoric, particularly about Aboriginal affairs.

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“We will start with a full audit into spending on Indigenous programs and Indigenous communities. And in indigenous communities where drugs and alcohol are prevalent, we will reintroduce the cashless debit card for working age welfare recipients.”

RICK:

Which to insiders is an interesting point because he thinks he's got a chance in those seats regardless of, you know, what we would think of as the previous kind of demographics of those electorates.

But, you know, if you listen to what he's saying, he gave an interview with Neil Mitchell on Neil Mitchell podcasts in September last year where, you know, in Dutton's own words, he said that…

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“In Victoria, good swings in seats to us here and seats on the radar that we hadn't expected to be on the radar at this point in the cycle. But there's no election this weekend, so it's a moot point. But there is a lot of encouragement for us in Victoria, a lot of encouragement for us in New South Wales and in WA I think is coming back to us.”

RICK:

Now, if you look at Redbridge polling. Now they’re normally a Labor linked research polling firm, and they reckon, you know, in the last quarterly snapshot at the end of last year that the LNP were pretty well-placed to pick up at least nine seats from Labor, not just in Melbourne but in Sydney too. We're talking Gilmore, Patterson, Bennelong, Aston, Robertson and MacArthur, Lyons, Lingiari in the Northern Territory and Bullwinkel, which is unimportant to our purposes here, but a great name for a seat.

RUBY:

Okay. And as you say, these kinds of metropolitan seats are not necessarily where you might think that Dutton and his message would resonate, but clearly he thinks that he has a chance of taking some of them from Labor. What about the teals though Rick, are the Coalition hoping to win some of those seats back as well?

RICK:

They're not giving up on the teal seats. Now there’s this apparently unaligned group called Australians for Prosperity. Now, they're not really unaligned because their executive director is a former federal MP for the Liberal National Party in the seat of Ryan. And they're essentially running attack campaigns against every element of politics: Labor, the Greens, the Teals.

In fact, their biggest funder, certainly last year in the Queensland election was Coal Australia, who according to the Queensland Electoral Commission, returns provided them with $750,000.

I was talking to one Liberal MP who suggested that the Australian for Prosperity Group is affiliated with the LNP, but not quite enough that you could actually pin it down on anyone. And so there's this idea that they've got plausible deniability.

Now, they've been running ads, banner ads, posters, billboards, etc., specifically in teal seats, with a focus on Monique Ryan in Kooyong and Allegra Spender in Wentworth.

Audio excerpt — Monique Ryan:

“The federal election has yet to be called but already I and a number of my colleagues have been subject by the Liberal Party and their friends in those lobby groups to misleading information campaigns. We’re talking about some really nasty big billboards and an attack pamphlet which was distributed to every person in Kooyong a couple of weeks ago.”

RICK:

By Dutton’s own reckoning their strategy seems to be to at least paint the teals as some kind of fringe hippie group like the Greens, in their eyes.

Audio excerpt — Campaign:

“Since the last election, teal Independent MPs have voted most often with the Greens followed by Labor.”

RICK:

So they're essentially trying to paint what they think is the likely scenario that Labor will have to form some kind of minority government with the teals.

Audio excerpt — Campaign:
“The next election will be close with many predicting a hung parliament. A Labor, Greens, teals minority government? Don’t risk it!”

RICK:

Albo would rather chew off his left foot, I think, than form a minority government with the Greens. That's certainly the prevailing view within Labor and certainly the LNP think that. That said, they're going pretty hard on the heels as a perhaps a two-term strategy in that sense where you know, they might not necessarily win back all the teal seats they won this time around, but they're going to make life hard for them.

And of course, talking to teal MPs at the moment, they say that it's already a market change from 2022 to when things were not easy, but better. And things are much harder this time around, they're telling me, because things are already very toxic.

RUBY:

After the break, how everyone else in the LNP feels about Dutton’s divisive election strategy.

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RUBY:

So, Rick, you've been looking into the Liberal Party's electoral calculations ahead of the next election and as well as needing to take seats from Labor and the teals, they also have to hold on to the seats that they currently have. So can we talk a bit about the seat of Bradfield in North Sydney? What does the pre-selection that happened there over the weekend, what does that tell us?

RICK:

Bradfield is fascinating because it used to be the jewel in the crown of the Liberal Party. It used to be the safest Liberal seat in the country and it's currently held by senior, I guess you would call a moderate faction MP Paul Fletcher, a former minister in the Morrison and Turnbull governments. He was once described to me by people within the Coalition as the most boring man in Parliament and he's retiring. Now, the teals have changed the approach in a lot of these kind of north and north west Sydney seats because what used to be an enormous margin has been eaten away by very persistent voices of Bradfield independent candidate Nicolette Boele, who I think he's had some funding from Climate 200.

Audio excerpt — Nicola Boele:

“People of Bradfield have a choice now between a community independent whose local and genuinely working for the people, or a party politician who is going to vote the way that Peter Dutton tells them every single time.”

RICK:

So maybe Paul Fletcher read the writing in the room. Times are changing. He's not contesting this seat anymore. Now, of course, there was a lot of talk about who was going to replace him. The preselections hadn't been held until the weekend just gone and Warren Mundine decided he was going to run in Bradfield. He's an anti-voice campaigner, big in the No campaign, very affiliated with Advance Australia and all the rest of it.

Audio excerpt — Warren Mundine:

“The Yes campaign is out there every day accusing the No campaign of lying. But the Yes campaign is built on a pack of lies. One lie is that Indigenous people don't currently have a voice. That Indigenous people aren't listened to in making laws and policies. It's the opposite. Indigenous Australians have many voices.”

RICK:

Bradfield voted yes in the Voice referendum. They were one of the only Liberal seats in that area to do so in the metropolitan groups.

So on Saturday, the pre-selection results were announced and backing went to Giselle Kapterian. Who’s a tech executive who had a career with Salesforce, which is a major winner of government contracts. She was backed by the Liberal deputy, Sussan Ley.

So Kapterian won. Mundine didn’t get it. No one serious thought he was going to get it. It was a crazy choice. I don't know who thought that was a good idea, but it does tell you that there is still this ideological divide in the party when you've got these kind of public displays of disunity.

RUBY:

Yeah, it points to this ongoing eternal tension between the conservatives and the moderates in the party. And I mean, how significant do you think it is that the conservative wing of the party couldn't get its candidate or a candidate up in the seat? Does it say that perhaps the coalition is less united behind Dutton's vision than he might hope?

RICK:

There's an interesting moral kind of arithmetic going on here, I think, with a lot of the moderates. I mean, a lot of moderates are retiring Simon Birmingham, is retiring, not that being a moderate did much for for him in the last kind of term of parliament because a lot of them have had to kind of fall in lockstep behind Peter Dutton as Peter Dutton has refused to moderate his own behaviour, which, you know, he will go out and say, look, I'm just being a very fair and sensible person. In fact, Neil Mitchell asked him, you know, did you ever go through a left wing phase at university? And Peter Dutton said...

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“No, I wasn't.”

Audio excerpt — Neil Mitchell:

“Never?”

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“No, no, no. I was born sensible and I've maintained it since then.”

RICK:

Now that's his kind of branding, right?

You've got the Peter Dutton who obviously deliberately didn't turn up for the apology to the Stolen Generations, later apologised for not doing that, but then comes out just weeks ago and says I'm not going to stand in front of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flag.

The Overton window is shifting on what you can and can't get away with in public life. Trump has changed the world and there's no doubt that Peter Dutton has been trying a little bit of that here. You know, you've seen him in press conferences attacking journalists, particularly from the ABC.

And so Dutton's approach seems to be that he doesn't need to win over every voter in a teal seat or an inner city seat. He certainly doesn't need to win over the ones who are progressive and would never change. But there are enough in the middle who can flip a seat. Who might actually be like, you know what? And this seems to be the report I'm getting from moderate MPs who are getting approached in their electorate by their constituents who are saying, well, I do. I like Australia and I don't want to change the date and no one can tell me not to celebrate Australia Day. Now, I think that's a mean spirited kind of approach to things, but it's certainly happening that I think you would be a fool to deny that. And part of it is that these things are kind of forged by degrees, and we've been witnessing this shift over many years around the world. And Dutton's approach seemed to be that there might actually be enough in it to flip a few seats.

RUBY:

And just finally, Rick, if the last few months, the common thought on this election has been that Labor will prevail, but not by much, but they will end up having to form a minority government. Do you think that that is still the most likely outcome or does it seem to you like the kind of common wisdom on that is shifting?

RICK:

I think there is a prevailing view, certainly even among Labor supporters, that this federal government has been pretty disappointing even on the things on which they ran integrity. The National Anti-Corruption Commission is literally a joke at this point, I think. I don't think I'm being unfair in saying that. But, you know, they can still do the thing where they actually point out, you know, who Peter Dutton is. This guy is trying to reinvent himself as this kind of working class hero. And he keeps saying really that he believes the Coalition are the party of the working class these days. He might mean that, he might actually believe it. But he's also someone who's worth a lot of money and who spent more time in property investment than he ever did as a cop in Queensland. Neither of which are particularly progressive pastimes.

But if the rhetoric wins, then it doesn't matter what the state of play is in terms of the facts, the rhetoric has won. And I think this election, I guess, like all of them, but perhaps the stakes are higher, will be fought and won on rhetoric because there's not a lot of policy detail floating around on either side.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you for your time.

RICK:

Thanks Ruby. It's always a pleasure.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today

Australian Federal Police say they’re investigating whether overseas actors have paid local criminals to carry out antisemitic attacks in the country.

AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw says there is intelligence to suggest that Australians may have been paid using cryptocurrencies to execute hate crimes domestically.

And

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has had one-on-one talks with newly sworn-in US secretary of state Marco Rubio, downplaying concerns about trade sanctions.

President Donald Trump has already flagged imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico but Senator Wong says she had positive discussions with her US counterpart about trade, as well as the AUKUS partnership, stating “our alliance has never been stronger”.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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