The man without a plan

This post follows from last week's Deep Dive into Albanese's Labor government. While politics isn't exactly my forte, it's inseparable from economics—ultimately it's the politicians in power who determine which economic policies are pursued, not the economists.

Now, Peter Dutton is unlikely to win the election—he's trailing in all the polls and on prediction markets, and the election is less than two weeks away. But stranger things have happened, so on the off chance that he does form government, here's my take.

Who is Peter Dutton?

He might not have had a stint as Prime Minister, but Peter Dutton has been an elected official for a long time—24 years, in fact. He served as Minister for Workforce Participation and then Revenue in the Howard government; Minister for Health and then Immigration in the Abbott government; Home Affairs under the brief Turnbull government; and finally Defence in the Morrison government.

That's a fair bit of experience, and comes with a long voting record that shows, above all else, an unwavering loyalty to the party—Dutton has never cast a vote against the majority of the Coalition. And that's basically it; he's a conservative, through and through:

"He stands up for what he believes in," [longtime pollster Kos] Samaras says. "Voters may not like him, but they appreciate he is a politician who stands on his beliefs. That was a brand he developed during the Voice referendum. But that's the only definition that exists. Voters have no other impression."

There's a time and a place for such a politician. For example, after the turbulent Morrison/Frydenberg years, all Anthony Albanese had to do was pretend to be a normal, relatable human being for a few weeks.

All Scott Morrison had to do in the election prior to that was not be Bill Shorten.

But there's now a right-of-centre madman in the White House, and the left-of-centre Albanese government can hardly be accused of being too erratic (mediocre would be more apt). If voters don't perceive enough differentiation between the status quo and the alternative, and they happen to be in a state of heightened risk-aversion due to Donald Trump's trade war, then they're more likely to vote for the devil they know.

More backflips than Cirque du Soleil

If the election had been held a year ago, Dutton probably would have won. He successfully campaigned against the Voice referendum, and was a welcome breath of fresh air for a society that had grown tired of the wokeism that had seemingly infiltrated every walk of life.

The Albanese government also managed to absolutely botch the inflationary cost of living crisis, and in 2024 global incumbent governments lost nearly every election they faced.

But then along came Donald Trump. While people are largely satisfied with his anti-woke and anti-immigrant agenda—or at least their views on those issues haven't changed all that much since November's election—the public's opinion of his economic management and trade war has plunged.

Very few people expected Trump to go—to quote Tropic Thunder, "full retard"—on tariffs. But he did, and suddenly incumbent governments were back in vogue.

That forced Peter Dutton, who had echoed many of Trump's policies including establishing his own Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and taking a hard stance on cultural issues, and whose front bench had boasted they would deliver "the exact same attitude [as Trump]", into his first reversal.

While I certainly respect someone who's willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence—in fact, that's about the most anti-Trumpian trait one can possess—in politics it can give the impression that you're weak and have no convictions; that you're willing to say or do anything to get elected.

To be clear, that's exactly what any politician would do. Just like the rest of us normies, they act on the incentives they face, and a politician's primary priority is to get elected or re-elected. But through all of his pivoting, Dutton is effectively saying the quiet part out loud: voters want to believe that politicians are acting in their interests—for the greater good, or in service of the "public"—not because they're self-interested.

By announcing policies only to backtrack weeks or months later, Dutton comes across as a man without a plan; someone who only makes up his mind on something once he has run it past several focus groups. It's a strategy that is so obvious that satirical groups have been having a field day.

Too many "mistakes"

What was especially interesting to me is that, while researching this post, I concluded that every single backflip was for the better—some of Dutton's ideas were truly awful. It's almost as if he hadn't thought all that deeply about many issues, instinctively reacts to a question from a journalist or in Parliament, and then his team goes into full damage control trying to convince him to walk it back.

Most recently, Dutton's hard-line response to the supposed Russian air force base in Indonesia, for which there was little evidence, is a good case in point—"a mistake" that he shouldn't have made, had he done even a little bit of due diligence before making such a rash statement.

But there's a long list of Dutton announcements and subsequent backflips, so let's go over a few in order of their electoral impact.

Cutting the public service

In true Trump style—Dutton was using a similar playbook up until the situation over there went... pear-shaped—Dutton criticised Labor's expansion of the public service and said that if elected, he would fire 36,000 workers.

By January 2025 that plan had been formalised into a "government efficiency" platform, with Senator Jacinta Price named shadow minister, and the number of staff would be reduced by an even greater 41,000 by 2030.

But when headlines about all the dodgy stuff Elon Musk's DOGE had been getting up to combined with the rapid decline in Trump's popularity, Dutton pivoted: no public servants would be fired, there would simply be a hiring freeze and a reduction in staff would be achieved through natural attrition and a yet-to-be-determined number of voluntary redundancies.

But it was a bad policy from the get-go. In fact, in my experience it's precisely the wrong way to go about improving government efficiency. We've known about how bureaucracies tend to cycle into rigidity since Anthony Downs' Inside Bureaucracy (1967). Periodic reform and changes to governance structures are needed to 'shake them up'.

Regardless of how he plans to achieve his cuts, Dutton's hatchet job does none of that and will come with a litany of unintended consequences.