MARK RILEY: Peter Dutton is no Donald Trump. So what inspiration will he draw from his victory?

Every time he has faced the media since the US presidential election, Peter Dutton has been confronted with variations of the same question.

What inspiration does he draw from Donald Trump’s victory?

The assumption is that Trump’s triumph has given licence to the Coalition to fight the coming Federal campaign from much further to the right.

But that would be risky.

Australia is not America.

Elections here are won in the middle.

We are not going to see Peter Dutton storming the election campaign trail in a red cap promising to Make Australia Great Again.

Dutton has conceded, though, that he and Trump come from similar positions on some of the main issues.

They have both put the same proposition to voters on the cost of living: “Are you better off than you were before the last election?”

But there is nothing new in that.

Opposition leaders around the world have been asking that for donkey’s years.

They do have similar approaches to border policies, but only in the broad.

And while Dutton has perfected a rapid-fire list of grievances that he lets rip at every media appearance, they are in no way comparable to the eviscerating, nasty and often bizarre claims Trump made in his now famously wandering and weaving campaign addresses.

Dutton did give a subtle hint this week, though, that he intends to draw inspiration from another conservative leader’s successful playbook — that of John Howard.

“Interest rates will always be lower under a Coalition government,” Dutton said in Tasmania on Sunday.

To those of us who’ve been around the place for a while, it instantly brought back memories of Howard’s campaigns of the 2000s when he pounded that line in almost every stump speech.

It served Howard well.

Until it didn’t.

The promise rang hollow in the disastrous 2007 campaign when the Reserve Bank increased rates just weeks before Hurricane Kevin threw Howard out of government and his own seat.

Dutton hopes for a different result as he now brushes off that slogan for a cost-of-living election campaign built around housing.

It is one that has recently taken on a very different complexion.

The Government has placed all its bets on driving inflation back into the Reserve Bank’s target range of between 2 and 3 per cent by the end of this year to give the RBA board reason to begin cutting official interest rates either next month or in February.

The hope has been to showcase those cuts to convince voters to back its economic plan for a second term.

But a changing global outlook, fuelled by the threat of another Trump trade war, has put the Government’s central narrative in serious doubt.

The markets here are beginning to price in the possibility that the first rate cut won’t come until August next year, at least three months after the expected election.

And Dutton is on it like white on rice.

No cut before the election will prove his charge that the Government’s economic approach has been keeping inflation higher and not forcing interest rates lower.

He now says the job of driving both down has been made so expensive by the Government’s actions that he might have to shelve his plans to deliver bigger tax cuts for higher income earners.

What a happy convenience.

Going to an election as the battlers’ mate while slashing taxes for the rich was always going to be a stretch for Dutton.

He said in an interview on Wednesday that the banks had told him a family with a mortgage of $500,000 was paying $1800 a month more in repayments than they were when the RBA’s cycle of 13 interest rate rises began — which, he omitted to say, was in the final weeks of the Morrison government.

Even one rate cut, he said, would only reduce that added burden by $80 a month.

He then launched into a soliloquy of competing propositions, saying families were worse off not better off, needing a government that worked for them not against them, making life easier not harder, by driving interest rates lower, not higher.

It was a line he believes strikes at the heart of the issue that is dominating the lives of average Australians — the real cost of living.

And it is an attack he is road-testing for an election campaign in the next six months — one he won’t conduct with MAGA-like bunting but with John Howard’s promise ringing in voters’ ears: “Keeping interest rates low”.