SEAN:

I definitely did not anticipate Peter Dutton's campaign being as all over the place as it has been.

DANIEL:

Sean Kelly has worked to elect two Prime Ministers. The art of campaigning is in his DNA.

SEAN:

There were, of course, signs of a lack of preparation.

Audio excerpt – Interviewer:

“Here is a dozen eggs. Mr. Dutton, do you know how much they cost?”

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“About $4.20.”

Audio excerpt – Interviewer:

“No.”

SEAN:

There was a lack of policy out there in the ether.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“Look, I think we've made a mistake in relation to this policy, Sarah.”

SEAN:

There had been certainly intimations of failures around detail, around costings before the campaign began.

Audio excerpt – David Spears:

“Where do you cut? This is the question. Where do you cut?”

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“Where we find inefficiency, David…”

SEAN:

But the thing about a campaign is you have a long time to prepare for it.

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DANIEL:

Sean says, Dutton’s lack of preparation is a feature not a bug. And until now, his loose approach has served him well. He’s been the person willing to speak his mind without much thought, generate a headline and keep moving.

But now, under the scrutiny of an election campaign, the traits that powered his rise are working against him.

From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James. This is 7am.

Today, former adviser to Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Sean Kelly, on the campaign that was – and the result to come.

It’s election day.

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DANIEL:

Sean, thanks for joining me. You’ve been watching as Peter Dutton’s campaign has unravelled. But talk to me about this final week. How do you think the last leg has gone for him?

SEAN:

As an old colleague of mine remarked to me the other day, it's like he's interrupting every mistake with another one. I mean this last few days you've had difficulties around their visa policy and working backpackers.

Audio excerpt – David Spears:

“Peter Dutton’s not said what you’ve just said which is now good to have it clear, that you won’t touch working holiday visas.”

Audio excerpt – Bridget McKenzie:

“We need a skilled workforce, David, but what the Labor Party has essentially done is brought in yoga teachers instead of construction workers.”

SEAN:

You've had Peter Dutton seeming to back away from earlier suggestions that he revised the curriculum, of the fear that he had that school students were being indoctrinated. Now there are going to be no changes to the curriculum.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“I support young Australians being able to think freely, being able to assess what's before them, and not being told and indoctrinated with something that is the agenda of others.”

SEAN:

There was an attack on the Guardian and the ABC for being hate media, which was very Trumpian.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“Forget about what you've been told by the ABC and the Guardian and the other hate media. Forget about that. Listen to what you’re hearing…”

SEAN:

But then Jane Hume tried to walk it back and say it wasn't really a thing but then Peter Dutton doubled down on it the next day.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“I just think they're so biassed and many of them are just activists, not journalists, that their position becomes counterproductive and they're playing to a particular audience, to a Green voter.”

SEAN:

You know, I wrote at the start of this week, Peter Dutton needed the last week of his campaign to be strikingly different from the previous four. I have been stunned by the extent to which it has continued the tone of the previous four. I suppose, I shouldn't be because, of course, this is what happens in politics, people get into habits, they find it very difficult to break them.

DANIEL:

Tell me about the habits you’ve seen Dutton form over his career and how they’re playing out now.

SEAN:

I think because of the way Peter Dutton presents, people tend to assume he's quite a disciplined guy. You know, he has this bearing of the policeman that he once was, he often speaks in quite quiet and measured tones, even if the topic that he's discussing is one that sounds like it's provoking anger. And I think that gives you a sense that he is this disciplined guy. Actually, the pattern in Peter Duttons' career, going back to quite early on, is that he’s pretty loose. He’s pretty loose in an interview. And I spoke to Lech Blaine, who wrote a Quarterly Essay about Peter Dutton, and he made the point that the habits which helped Peter Duttun rise in the Liberal Party, being able to make, kind of, incendiary comments on right-wing media, like a media that was friendly to him, helped him, now are hurting him.

If you look at things that have really propelled Peter Dutton through the party, It has been that willingness to go just a little bit further than everybody else. Right-wing shock jocks have loved having him on. They will say something to him and he is more than happy to repeat it back to them. And that then becomes the news. But that means that he often says things which he hasn't really considered deeply. And you can see that in this election, you know, he makes these comments about what the Indonesian president had said when that was absolutely not true, and suddenly he's consumed in a news cycle over that for a couple of days. And I think that also says something about the Liberal Party, you know, is that tendency actually what the party should be valuing? Because, depending on what happens tonight, arguably it hasn't helped them that much in the end.

DANIEL:

So if we do what Peter Dutton has asked us to do and think about the previous three years, I would suggest he would say his crowning moment during that past three years, politically, was the defeat of the referendum and the campaign that he, along with others, run to defeat that referendum. So what lessons do you think he took from that experience?

SEAN:

Yeah, look, I think the Voice is so fascinating because it was the biggest debate of this term. It has a lot of substantive importance, obviously. The overall verdict has been that it hurt Anthony Albanese, that it gave voters the perception that he was distracted by a cultural issue at a time when he should have been focusing on cost of living. But I think, in hindsight, what it really did was get Peter Dutton focused on a cultural issue when he could have been focused on cost of living and when he would have been taking the opportunity to broaden his image. Because the real difficulty for Peter Dutton is that he, since the very beginning of his career, has presented as a kind of strong man. Now he obviously needed to soften that in various ways and I think with the Voice, he instead leaned into that image and that's all Australians heard from him for a very long time. And he took from that, that that would work. That he could continue in that vein.

But the problem in taking that lesson from a referendum is that we know that referendums don't succeed unless you have bipartisan support. So Peter Dutton had pretty much doomed the referendum from the moment he said no, the Coalition is not going to support this. Everything he did after that was really not that relevant. But I think he probably convinced himself that he won that campaign by going out there and campaigning and being a great campaigner and by leaning into the vibes and Australians were sick of wokeness and then Donald Trump came along and and emphasised that view, validated it in the eyes of many in the Coalition and, I suspect, Peter Dutton, and I think that meant that they headed into this campaign in exactly the wrong position.

DANIEL:

After the break – the gift Trump gave Albanese.

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DANIEL:

Sean, we’ve talked about Dutton. Now let’s talk about the Prime Minister. How would you rate his campaign?

SEAN:

Really pretty good. Nothing dramatically impressive. He's been pretty sharp. He's being far on message than I think we've come to expect from the Prime Minister over the past couple of years. And that's been there since the start of the year. Very early on in the year I said we're seeing a little bit of a new Anthony Albanese. He is much sharper and I think what's really interesting about Labor ,and what I think has helped the Prime Minister on the campaign trail, is for various reasons they got out all of their policy well before the campaign, he hasn't had to think on his feet in a way. He's had to relentlessly prosecute the messages that Labor have been prosecuting for the last three years.

DANIEL:

And do you think that the fact that Albanese, given the global events that have been happening around us, particularly over the last 100 days, that that sort of steady, non-exciting type of leadership and campaigning has basically played into his hands?

SEAN:

Look, 100%, and I think this is a really important fact, you know. We can say, because it is true, that Anthony Albanese has had a pretty good campaign. Peter Dutton has had a disastrously bad campaign, but in the end, there was one factor that shifted everything and it was Donald Trump. And specifically, Donald Trump with the tariffs. It just unleashed a sense that the globe was in this hugely uncertain time and that then I think drove people back towards incumbents. We saw that, of course, in Canada in this last week. Specifically, I think it helped left-wing incumbents versus right-wing insurgents like Peter Dutton. It hurt a lot of right-wing candidates, I think that it definitely hurt Peter Dutton. In this workman-like approach that Albanese has taken to the Prime Ministership, which I think has been, you know, making a virtue of his weaknesses in some ways, it was also born out of a sense that politics had become too volatile in recent years. You know, he used that term conflict fatigue. And I think that is some form of anticipation of the environment in which this campaign has ended up taking place. It was essentially Albanese seeing that there was a lot of uncertainty in the electoral landscape and that voters would end up gravitating towards somebody who was just a little bit quiet, who had brought the tone of politics to a calmer place, and that is what has ended up helping him enormously these last five weeks.

DANIEL:

So if we think about Anthony Albanese's Prime Ministership to date, what will you remember about it?

SEAN:

Look, I have this theory about politics, it's a bit of a loose theory, but I call it the rule of three, and it's what three things can you remember from the last term of government? And if two out of the three things you remember are positive, then that government is likely to be re-elected. I'm not sure what you do remember from this term. Perhaps in later years, you will remember the government, in the end, defeating inflation. You know, inflation seemed like a really negative thing for most of this term, I think it probably ends up seeming like a positive achievement of the Albanese government. The Voice ends up being seen as a failure, obviously, though perhaps you can surmise a future where people think, well, at least Albanese was brave for attempting it, for listening to the requests of Indigenous people. And I really struggle to get to a third. And look, this is the thing about Albanese. He has been very explicit, from very early on, that his approach is to go gradually. Is to not get people offside, is to not pick fights and to build change over time. But then there are also long building crises and I think this is the place Australia finds itself in at the moment. We have education standards which have been declining for a long time now. We have a school system which rather than shrinking inequality between students widens the learning gap between students. We have a health care system which is struggling to get enough GPs, which we know bulk-billing has been under pressure. We have aged care in trouble. We have childcare standards in trouble. Across the entire life cycle, our standard of living in this country is facing huge threats. Now those are often slow building crises, but that doesn't make them less like crises. And I think in a way the test of this government is going to end up being has it acted dramatically enough, fast enough to turn those problems around by the time it has to hand over power to somebody else.

DANIEL:

And finally, Sean, you knew this question was coming. Who is going to win and why? And I'll add on top of that, what do you expect the new parliament to look like broadly?

SEAN:

Look, I really don't know. I really don’t know. First up, any election can go any way. Things can always shift in ways that people don't expect. People keep pointing back towards 2019 and the fact that Bill Shorten unexpectedly lost. I suspect that this is not like that for the simple reason that the polls were shifting back towards the Coalition for a very long time before that election. The final polls didn't pick up the extent of that, but the trend was there. In this election the trend has been towards Labor, so I think it would take something really out of the box for Peter Dutton to win tonight. But of course it's possible.

It will be fascinating if Labor do end up in minority. We see the Teals trying to prove that they can win in an environment without Scott Morrison and actually have an agenda of their own that is not just an absence of what the Coalition is doing. And we have the Greens really trying to be the party of renters, shifting a little bit further towards economic issues and away from their traditional ground of climate, environment issues. So whatever the actual result is tonight, each of the parties is behaving in very, very different ways than what we are used to and, of course, the Teals in that environment are still pretty new. So I think whatever happens tonight, we will see a new landscape because some of those experiments will continue to go forward if they've been successful and the failed ones, you know, those parties will have to go back to the drawing board.

DANIEL:

Sean, never a dull moment. Thanks for coming in and speaking to us.

SEAN:

Thanks for having me.

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[Theme Music Starts]

DANIEL:

7am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper.

It’s made by Atticus Bastow, Cheyne Anderson, Chris Dengate, Erik Jensen, Ruby Jones, Sarah McVeigh, Travis Evans, Zoltan Fecso and me, Daniel James.

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

Tonight, I’m heading to the Labor Party’s election night party and I’ll have a full report for you first thing tomorrow. See you then.

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