https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/04/15/2025-election-peter-dutton-collapse-liberal-party-future/

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If the polls are right, the Coalition is headed for defeat. Where does that leave the Liberal Party, which has abandoned so many of its traditions to get here?

Peter Dutton is in heaps of trouble. Three polls were put out in the past 24 hours, all showing a growing swing to Labor. They’re just the latest in a growing list of polls indicating that at first the Coalition’s momentum had halted and then, point by point, has gone into reverse. When Anthony Albanese talked about kicking with the breeze in the last quarter, he wasn’t wrong.

Worse, Dutton’s own personal numbers are declining while Albanese’s are improving. It’s almost as it, as voters have paid more attention to the leaders as the campaign got under way, they’ve decided that they don’t like what they see in Dutton.

And Dutton has fired his big guns: a revamped low and middle income earner tax offset, and tax deductibility for mortgage interest, announced at the campaign launch on Sunday, added to the petrol excise cut from the budget reply.

But Dutton’s pal Donald Trump has sent the oil price plummeting with his policy chaos. Unlike 2022, no-one is lamenting how much it costs to fill up at the bowser. And the tax offset and tax deductibility were announced at the same time as Labor was offering its own (further) tax cut and 5% deposits for mortgages. Your average disengaged voter would only have noticed both sides throwing money at them on the weekend — or Jacinta Nampijinpa Price channeling Trump. And economists have spent the past 36 hours bagging both sides for wasting money and further buggering up the tax system.

So after nearly three years, and with just an Easter/ANZAC break and a week of campaigning to go, there’s a non-trivial chance that Labor could actually increase its tiny majority, leaving the Coalition in an even worse position for the 2028 election than Scott Morrison left it in three years ago.

While Dutton and his campaign team think about how they can turn the campaign around and pull Labor’s lead back, and hope for a 2019-style polling error in their favour, others within Liberal ranks might be reflecting on where such a result might leave them.

Failing to win back teal seats (or, in the worst case scenario, failing to win them back and losing more, like Bradfield and Wannon) would lock in those independents and make a medium-term return to government for the Coalition much more difficult. Likely, the Liberals would have to wait until the current incumbents decided to leave politics to have a crack at regaining their seats.

If the loss of teal seats was offset by success in outer suburban seats, that would be some comfort that Dutton’s strategy had been partly effective. But what happens if the latter don’t swing to the Liberals? Does that mean the strategy was right, but the execution flawed? Or is the whole strategy of refocusing away from what used to be the Liberal heartland in favour of lower-income, more multicultural communities never going to work?

That mirrors the Liberals’ ideological dilemma. If Dutton entered the campaign having tossed aside some fundamental Liberal beliefs, with his big-government nuclear power plan and using divestment against big corporations, it is the Liberals’ core competence of fiscal discipline that has been thoroughly trashed in the past few weeks.

However ill-deserved the Liberals’ reputation for good fiscal management might be — they have long been the party of higher spending and higher taxation, as measured by proportion of Australia’s GDP — voters have until recently assumed that the Liberals would always balance the books. But in the face of voter disenchantment with the benefits of fiscal discipline and the need to combat a fiscally reckless Labor government, Dutton has gone for broke with handouts galore (with more to come on defence spending as well). Unlike John Howard in 2007, however, Dutton is doing so while the budget is mired in deficit, with no return to surplus on the horizon.

Angus Taylor, desperately trying to fly the Liberal flag in an outfit run by a Queenslander, can insist the Coalition will have a better fiscal outcome when they release their full costings — at this rate, presumably one minute before polls open on May 3 — but a Dutton government would still deliver deficits into the 1930s, like Labor.

When voters clock that endlessly running up bills on the national credit card only leads to spending tens of billions a year on bond interest rather than, say, health or education, will they remember the now-distant Howard years when achieving surpluses seemed easy (chiefly because Costello taxed us so much?) Or will the Liberals just be Tweedledee to Labor’s profligate Tweedledum?

A win, or a narrow defeat, would vindicate Dutton’s strategy and his abandonment of Liberal traditions. But a loss along the lines currently suggested by the polls would leave them ideologically and strategically bereft. For Liberals — including the last remaining actual liberals in their ranks — there’s more at stake than merely who forms government on May 3.

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