The Dutton delusion: Many election myths were believed, then busted
One of the great dangers in politics – for both practising politicians and those, like me, who write about them – is in accepting the stories that everybody else is telling.
Last week, Liberal leadership hopeful Angus Taylor told The Australian Financial Review that his party needed to have 'a more collaborative and collegiate environment, where we can have more robust debate despite differences of view'.
It's a good point. It is clear that the environment of the past three years did the Coalition no favours: changing it is crucial. And so it was odd to hear Taylor say, as well, 'Dutts actually did do an extraordinary job holding the party room together'.
Perhaps this was simply the praise that sprang most easily to mind after the Coalition's devastating defeat. Still, it was a little confusing. Was this unity, as Taylor's other comments seemed to suggest, a cause of defeat or a landmark achievement?
Still, you can understand why it sprang easily to mind. For the past three years, Coalition unity has been repeatedly mentioned as an unequivocally good thing: a virtue, it seemed, in its own right. And not just by the Coalition: it was routinely described in much of the media as a signal achievement of Peter Dutton, an obviously good fact about his leadership to be praised.
And so it might have continued, had not the cost of that unity become horribly clear on election night: the consequence of policies like work-from-home that voters hated, a nuclear policy that served little purpose other than making it possible for climate deniers to sit alongside Liberal moderates, a Trump-lite approach that was wrong for the times, and a series of contradictory policy positions that were obviously never properly tested through discussion.
The reality is that after a large election loss, like the one in 2022, a party needs to resolve its differences over what is wrong and where to go. There are two ways to do this. One is via a series of elections in which its approach is gradually sharpened – which tends to be both exhausting and demoralising. The other is by having open debate. Dutton and those who praised him for maintaining unity were, in effect, choosing the long road of trial and error. Perhaps worse, the 'unity' path not only delivered defeat: it means the Coalition is three years behind where it could be in conducting that difficult discussion.
We all can and should criticise the Coalition for this. But what should not be missed, as we head into another three-year term, is that much of the press backed this approach. Part of the Coalition's mistake was to believe its own publicity.
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