KATINA CURTIS: This has already been a blokey campaign from the Liberals. And it’s getting worse

A fortnight ago, a Labor insider was musing that they had expected more of a law and order fear campaign from former cop Peter Dutton.

They suspected that once he’d taken the early part of the election to broaden and soften his image, the Coalition would come in hard with national security, maybe a scare campaign about China, to bring it home.

On Monday, right on cue, Dutton hit the security button.

“I think Australians underestimate how big an issue this is at this election. People feel unsafe,” he said, unveiling a $750 million policy that bundles together a whole bunch of measures to tackle “drugs and thugs”.

He’s also tipped to unveil his long-promised defence spending pledge by Anzac Day.

The move puts him squarely back onto safe ground, policy-wise.

Labor is banking on more people thinking like the Sydney cabbie this column met who was worried about Chinese warships, Russian planes and foreigners buying houses — but said that Dutton was “too scary” to contemplate in the top job.

The Coalition is betting on people not having paid attention and then defaulting to habitual beliefs about which party (theirs) is better at handling economic and security matters.

Dutton’s shift to security and safety adds to what is already a very blokey campaign.

He’s visited construction sites and factories, chatted with building apprentices, cooked barbecues and driven large trucks to petrol stations.

It took two weeks before his social media posts featured women who weren’t Liberal Party members or candidates — and even then, they were young women in high-vis at a factory.

It makes you wonder who in the party hierarchy read the 2022 election review.

One of its key findings was that the Liberals performed particularly poorly with female voters, across every age group and every part of the country.

There is often focus on the number of female MPs and candidates as a proxy for how well a party is doing on gender equality.

On this measure, the Liberals are failing.

It’s doing the best in NSW — where the party organisation, despite its administrative failures, has had a concerted effort to recruit more female candidates — and Tasmania, where there are only five seats.

Overall, just a third of Lower House Liberal candidates are women.

Dutton’s home State of Queensland lags well behind with five women running out of 30 Liberal National Party candidates.

Of course if you, like the dedicated Press Club viewer who recently graced this column’s inbox, are “sick and tired of gormless feminism” and think there are already too many women in government, the policy offerings may hold more sway.

Here, Dutton is pitching to men who are tradies living in the outer suburbs of our major cities.

Fuel tax cuts that offer more to people who drive utes to work, big incentives to get more people into apprenticeships, an intense focus on mining, construction, agriculture and energy.

Even the small business tax breaks were explained by talking about factories being able to buy more equipment.

It’s the voter group that helped propel Donald Trump into the White House.

That intention hasn’t escaped Labor, with Anthony Albanese telling a podcast over the weekend he thought Dutton was “bringing a machismo, essentially, to politics”.

The difference in Australia is we have compulsory voting.

In the same podcast, Albanese said Dutton’s approach was “something that I think alienates the centre”.

Political strategist Chelsey Potter says the party she invested nearly two decades in just doesn’t appear interested in the issues that are core to younger women’s lived experience.

Take the female reporter’s query on what Dutton was offering “modern working women”, which prompted a reply that he wanted to help older, homeless women get into homes.

Potter has heard from many moderate Liberal women saying they no longer know who to vote for, and thinks there’s a real possibility the party’s vote among women will drop even lower than it did in 2022.

Dutton’s campaign could have had much to offer women, but he hasn’t seized the opportunities.

He brought out son Harry, a carpentry apprentice, to face the media last week (a move many thought was ill-advised) and take questions on his efforts to save for a house.

But he could also have involved daughter Bec, who featured in a video at the party’s campaign launch, talking about trying to break into the property market.

She could have shared her experience as a childcare worker, one of the nation’s lowest-paid, most feminised sectors.

He could be speaking to women running small businesses from home to earn extra money to cover costs, or soccer mums racking up fuel bills taking their kids to after-school activities.

Or just any women, really, to boost a campaign in need of a reset.