Welcome to Country, Mr Dutton
It's beautiful country
There is something deeply mythical about Labor’s win last night and it is worth standing back for a while and just enjoying it. It wasn’t the result I wanted—I’m still all-in on the need for minority government—but this isn’t a moment for buts or that sort of analysis. It is a moment to savour for reasons beyond what my own personal preferences might be. We simply have to say, congratulations, Labor.
I tend to be glass-half-full on matters to do with Australian democracy and will often walk around humming Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive to myself, even as the likes of Peter Dutton, John Howard, Clive Palmer and a cast of other political ghouls haunt my dreams. An election result like Saturday’s vindicates my cautious optimism about the basic decency that exists amongst voters themselves, with the added bonus of it supporting my long-held view that the power of the Murdoch media is vastly overstated.
If Peter Dutton was the biggest loser from last night’s evisceration of his miserable party and worldview, then the Murdoch media was a close second. In fact, of all the right-wing media who have carried Dutton and co. aloft over the last few years deserve our derision. They are spent political force, and nobody outside an aging coterie of conservative voters and the political class pays any attention to them.1
Still, you can’t go through the deeply cynical, violent, misogynistic, dishonest and racist campaign run by the rightwing side of our politics without feeling something like despair. And anger. I don’t want to take the light off Labor’s win at all, but boy, we need to be cognisant about how the forces of conservatism have treated us and what it means for the future of our politics.
What becomes apparent thinking back over the last three years is that the horrors of the 2025 campaign proper were part of a conscious, top-down, attempt by the forces of capital, conservatism and an increasingly extreme far-right presence in this country to manufacture an election result that suited their needs and their needs alone.
At any cost.
Instead of focussing on rebuilding after the loss of 2022; on reengagement with their lost heartland seats; and in developing a legitimate and sustainable policy platform, the powers that be on that side of politics took the deeply cynical and deluded course of thinking they could bludgeon their way back to power with a campaign of abuse and division. They gloried in the illusion of the power of the rightwing media to get them across the line while living inside an echo chamber of their own valueless lifeworld that blindsided them completely.
In one way, of course, this is just the nature of their debased understanding of what politics is—business as usual—but we would be foolish not to recognise the new depths it plumbed, aided and abetted by the new communication technologies and, ultimately, the deep pockets of a truly malevolent fraction of the one per cent.
The key insight on this comes from contributor Dr Ingrid Matthews, who has noted a number of times on social media the way in which the Coalition approached their opposition to the Voice referendum, a moment that lulled them into a false sense of infallibility.
“The coalition voted for holding a referendum,” she writes, “and then campaigned against the question to generate granular seat-by-seat data—all publicly funded—for their targeted racism strategy in this federal election campaign.”
This strategy speaks to a truly debased understanding of the Australian people and it is nice to see it so thoroughly repudiated.
As I have been saying, Peter Dutton is not the cause of this failure. He is the effect of a much longer-running failure within the Liberal Party itself. He is the sort of leader a broken “party” throws up when there is no-one better left to do the job, as we are about to see writ large as the Liberals goes through the motions of electing someone to replace him. What a farce that is going to be.
What worries me, though, is what I said in a previous article, that what emerges on the right will be even worse than what we have had till now, a party—or a loosely connected movement of extremists—increasingly based in a litany of resentment that is white, patriarchal, inegalitarian and resentful of co-existing with of all the groups they consider “other”.
Having said that, there is some indication that at least some amongst Liberal stalwarts are recognising the problem. Former NSW MP, Michael Yabsley said a mouthful with this:
“So a Liberal party machine or a party machine if it is operating properly needs to be able to recruit members, it needs to be able to fundraise, needs to be able to develop policy, and it needs to be able to conduct pre-selections of candidates who stand the best chance of winning.
“They are what I would describe as the Liberal party’s KPIs and those KPIs - the truth is, the inescapable truth is that they have been miserably failed over a long period of time and they’re the home truths that need to be faced up to.”
I was also reasonably impressed with comments made by Liberal member and pollster Tony Barry on the ABC election coverage last night, one of the few who seemed to genuinely appreciate the scale of the problem. He not only allowed that the Liberals were decades away from renewal, but explained well the deep nature of the rot:
“It was pretty clear that we didn't have policies in the can. And I think any sort of review needs to be honest about the reasons for loss and the problems we've got as a party, not just federally. The Victorian division, which remains, you know, a basket case; the South Australian division; likewise, WA just got a thrashing. So, it's more than just a federal problem. It's the state of the party. And we need to start looking at how we can improve, not just being, you know, a tactical device party, but how we sort of build on that values-based narrative.”
Maybe find some values first…?
Anyway, good riddance. The cynical bunch of think tanks, corporations, and third-party pressure groups who have animated the corpse of the Liberal Party and the Coalition over the last term—longer, really—all came a cropper last night and got what they deserved.
Peter Dutton got a generous round of praise from many last night for a gracious concession speech, but it rang hollow to me. There is no five-minute redemption for someone whose entire political career has been to wallow in division and thuggery.
Welcome to country, Mr Dutton. It is a beautiful country, if only you realised.
For now, let’s enjoy their miserable demise and let the Labor faithful bask in what is genuinely a stellar outcome.
Perhaps the people who need to recognise this more than anyone are the producers, bookers and management at the ABC who have been providing a platform for this discredited bunch of blatherers for far too long.
Have not watched The Insiders for years, and boy was it enjoyable this morning :)
Huge kudos to the archivist who dug out the Simon Birmingham snippet wherein he laid out EXACTLY what the party needed to do after the 2022 loss. Spoiler: the party ignored him entirely.
And yes, the brief "Dutton is a lovely bloke with a great sense of humour" tribute is a bridge about 6 or 7 Nuclear reactors too far. If he's a great bloke, why did he constantly seek to divide the country? Great blokes don't do that.
Not much remarked is that the supposed surge in votes for One Nation didn't happen, even though they ran in every seat. And the rest of the far right is fragmented in a manner reminiscent of the Marxist left, with at least half a dozen parties fighting over 5 per cent of the vote. When Hanson leaves the political scene (maybe at the next election) One Nation will almost certainly go the same way. I don't think Australia has the demographic structure (not rural enough, not white enough, not Christian enough) to support a strong far right.