Kitchen Cabinet has been criticised for its softball approach, but Dutton’s remarks revealed more than umpteen ‘gotcha’ interviews. Crabb’s interview shows that Dutton sees his leadership of the Liberals – much like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sees his leadership of Labor – as a repudiation of the killing seasons that marred the prime ministerships of Scott Morrison, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard, and Kevin Rudd. It is also apparent that Dutton, who, Crabb says, is ‘mainly known as the ultimate hard man of politics’, is a conviction politician who believes in the rectitude of his own snap judgements more than in an ideology or a cause. Interestingly, the Crabb interview also suggests that Dutton’s measure of a good prime minister is how fast they empty their in-tray; it’s small wonder he hasn’t gained a reputation for policy innovation during his twenty-three years in the House of Representatives. Dutton’s belief in snap judgements also explains why most of his ministerial career has been spent accumulating executive power in command-and-control portfolios such as Defence, Home Affairs, and Immigration and Border Protection. His one foray into a social service portfolio requiring lateral thinking, as Minister for Health in the Abbott government, ended badly, with the nation’s doctors voting him Australia’s worst-ever health minister.

Dutton told Crabb that he has a ‘police trait’ – meaning he sees the world in monochrome – but his belief in his authority also reflects his experiences as a politician and his circumstances as a leader. In politics, you don’t always win. Sooner or later you end up on the losing side of an argument, vote, or election. Dutton, for instance, unexpectedly lost the internal battle to replace Turnbull as prime minister. Still, the Member for Dickson has won more battles than he has lost since entering parliament in 2001 – serving as a minister in the Howard and Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments, seeing off numerous attempts to unseat him in his marginal seat, and becoming wealthy via business and real estate investments. Consequently, he is a man accustomed to material comfort and ministerial authority.

Dutton’s biggest political wins, though, came after the Coalition’s election loss in 2022. Dutton won because Josh Frydenberg, long touted as the Liberals’ leader-in-waiting, lost Kooyong to teal independent Dr Monique Ryan, and because the Coalition retained most of its seats in Dutton’s home state of Queensland. As a result, a third of the members of the Liberal party room – and almost half of the Liberal members of the lower house – are Queenslanders. Consequently, Dutton is an Opposition leader untroubled by internal challengers or dissent.

Armoured by self-regard and freed from internal competition, Dutton has spent the past twenty-eight months methodically preparing for a return to power. A key part of his campaign preparations – as documented by the Australian Financial Review’s Mark Di Stefano – appears to involve staying close to mining billionaire Gina Rinehart. For example, during the Dunkley by-election Dutton flew across the country to Perth to spend an hour at Rinehart’s birthday party. Rinehart, in turn, has hosted fundraising events for Dutton. None of this is unusual in the moneyed backrooms of Australian politics – Albanese, for instance, attended a private party for Melbourne-based billionaire Anthony Pratt in 2022 – and Rinehart is unlikely to go as far as billionaire Clive Palmer, who spent $60 million to help swing the 2019 election and $120 million to win one Senate seat in 2022. But don’t be surprised if Rinehart bankrolls Dutton’s effort to win back the six seats the Liberals lost in Western Australia in 2022. Why else would Dutton adopt a raft of Rinehart policy positions, including on nuclear energy?

Dutton’s nuclear energy announcement marked a turning point in the election cycle, committing a future Coalition government to build seven nuclear power plants in disused coal power stations between 2035 and 2050. Made after the winter recess, the timing of the announcement helped Dutton evade parliamentary scrutiny. In the House of Representatives, he would have been eviscerated over his announcement’s scant policy detail. Outside Parliament, the lack of detail didn’t matter. With a federal election due by May 2025, all that mattered was that Dutton had picked a political fight, starting an argument about nuclear energy to divert attention from the Coalition’s lamentable climate-change policies and direct attention towards Albanese’s broken promise to reduce energy bills.

U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Roe and Peter Dutton in Shoalwater Bay Training Area, Queensland, 2021 (Operation 2021 / Alamy)

The genesis of the announcement appears to be TerraPower – a US start-up building a new type of nuclear reactor in Wyoming. The TerraPower initiative, backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, is highly speculative. The construction of the Wyoming reactor only began in June and the project’s timeline and costs – not to mention its pathway to regulatory approval – remain unclear. As energy expert David Schlissel told The New York Times, ‘There’s no evidence these small reactors are going to be built any faster or any cheaper than larger ones.’ According to Schlissel, wind, solar, and batteries are safer energy bets than nuclear. In other words, Dutton is making a black-and-white decision in a nuclear grey area.

Problematic as Dutton’s nuclear punt is, his interventions in foreign affairs are more concerning. In July, the Opposition leader took two overseas tours that demonstrated his strengths and weaknesses. First, he jetted to Washington DC, to attend the Australian American Leadership Dialogue. There was nothing untoward about this trip; on the contrary, a bipartisan show of unity was in Australia’s national interest in the lead-up to the US presidential election. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles also attended the Dialogue and, judging by comments Dutton made in an interview with journalist Sarah Abo on Nine’s Today show, the two pro-US hawks caucused their views.

ABO: Is AUKUS at risk under a Trump presidency? I mean, the Deputy PM, as you know, has met with Republicans – you have as well – to shore up support for the deal. It’s going to go ahead, isn’t it? Even if Trump gets in?

DUTTON: They say up on the Hill at the moment here there’s only two things that unites the Republicans and Democrats. One is China. And two is the relationship with Australia, and AUKUS is part of that … On the Australian side – Liberal and Labor – we’re as united as the Democrats and Republicans.

Dutton’s position in the Today interview was appropriate. His points were nuanced and, as with his 2024 Budget reply, his tone measured and reasonable. Unfortunately, the reasonableness, not to mention the bipartisanship, went out the window when Dutton flew to Israel. There, in a three-day trip funded by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Dutton met Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, and National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi. He also visited areas attacked by Hamas on 7 October and spent an hour with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The extensive access granted to Dutton was unusual but understandable, given  how isolated Israel has become over its military actions in Gaza – any international interaction was welcome. Dutton then applied his black-and-white instincts to the greyscale world of diplomacy, appearing via satellite with Sky News journalist Sharri Markson and accusing the Albanese government of damaging Israeli-Australian relations:

I think it’s a relationship that we need to rebuild, that we need to restore, and that we need to respect. I sent a very clear message [to Netanyahu] on behalf of the Coalition that should we win the next election, we look forward to the relationship becoming stronger.

The Sky News interview, during which Dutton also blamed Albanese for increased anti-Semitism in Australia, confirmed that Dutton’s Israel trip was for political rather than security purposes, designed to create domestic and international headaches for Labor. It was a reckless act. A few weeks later, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, over which Dutton had ministerial oversight until 2022, raised Australia’s national terrorism threat level from ‘possible’ to ‘probable’.

Dutton is not the first Opposition leader to go it alone on the international stage. In June 1971, then-Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam led a delegation to Beijing and met with China’s Premier, Zhou Enlai. It was a risky venture, but Whitlam wasn’t out on his own. Numerous Australian allies, including Canada and the United Kingdom, had already normalised relations with China – and the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was secretly paving the way for President Richard Nixon to meet Zhou Enlai in Beijing.

Geopolitically, Whitlam’s timing in China was perfect. Dutton’s timing in Israel was terrible. It did nothing to promote a release of Israeli hostages or to encourage a Gaza ceasefire, and it did nothing to ease tensions in Australia. At best, Dutton undermined the Australian government’s relationship with the Israeli government. Then again, judging by Dutton’s past remarks about so-called African gangs, multicultural harmony probably comes under the heading of ‘our sometimes over-tolerant society’ in his mind. After all, he treated the troubles in Gaza and the West Bank as a photo op. Never mind the consequences for Jewish and Islamic communities in Australia. Never mind that, by aligning himself with Netanyahu, he ran the risk of undermining Australia’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. Never mind the increased risk of terror attacks at home.

It is ironic, really. Dutton’s built his career by talking up external security threats, but, as in the United Kingdom and the United States, Australia’s greatest terror threats stem from home-grown extremists. His cavalier attitude to national security – undermining multiculturalism at home and abroad – should count as a strike against the Coalition in the coming election, but it won’t be a vote changer. What will change votes is the cost of living.

Since taking office, Albanese has adopted a backroom approach to governing. The PM has tried to play a long game, avoiding wedge issues like tax cuts and nuclear subs, mending diplomatic fences in the Pacific, rebuilding trade with China, and rebooting real wage growth, while preparing a signature policy on universal childcare for the 2025 campaign. But most voters are unaware of these efforts. What they do know is that life is harder; it costs more to pay rent, put food on the table, refuel the car.

Dutton taps into this community angst whenever he talks about using nuclear power to bring down costs, calls for cuts in immigration and better security on our borders and streets, or attacks the government for wasting money on the Referendum for the Voice to Parliament. The attacks are boilerplate Opposition fare, but they are delivered with discipline and amplified by partisan elements of an increasingly dysfunctional media.

Albanese, meanwhile, has a perception problem. He is a competent prime minister leading a strong Cabinet, but, on his watch, inflation has risen and the Referendum on the Voice failed. He is also a poor campaigner – an old-fashioned problem solver who likes to explain, facing a Manichaean candidate who likes to blame.

I began this essay by comparing two Queensland coppers: Dutton and Hayden. The truth is that, of the two contemporary political leaders, Albanese is the one most like Hayden. That’s because Albanese, like Hayden, has firsthand knowledge of the injustices some people bear. Those experiences, combined with the twenty years he has spent on the Opposition benches, have made him a more well-rounded person than Dutton. The trouble is that the qualities that make a better person don’t always make a better political candidate – as demonstrated by two brilliant campaigners, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.

Where does all of this leave us ahead of the 2025 election?

My prognostication is that Australia is on track for a hung parliament. Unless there is a dramatic turn in the polls, neither Dutton nor Albanese is likely to win an outright majority. Of the two leaders, Albanese – having handled government business during the minority Gillard government – is the one most likely to navigate a crossbench controlled by Greens, teals, and independents. But I am loath to write off Peter Dutton. The Member for Dickson is a public figure too easy to underestimate. He can win.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.