NICK DYRENFURTH: The Coalition is learning all the wrong lessons from Trump’s success

“How did you go bankrupt?” asks one character in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. The answer: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly”. And so, it seems, goes Labor’s ever more fraught relationship with its suburban working class voter base.

The fallout from the weekend’s Victorian by-elections has focused on Labor’s troubles (and the Greens’ humiliating loss of a prized seat), and Federal implications, and rightly so. To adapt John Howard’s 2002 warning over terrorism, Labor should be alert and alarmed. Polls have primary support for the Albanese Government among outer suburban voters well below 30 per cent.

Labor confronts the class voting realignment playing out globally. The question as to whether non-university educated, working class, suburban-dwelling Australians might switch from Labor towards Peter Dutton’s Liberals, or anti-establishment right wing politics embodied by the UK’s Reform Party (leading Keir Starmer’s Labour government and Tory opposition according to polls), was seemingly answered in the Labor heartland seat of Werribee.

Victorian Labor emerged chastised by a 16 per cent swing. Yet the Liberal primary vote increase was a pitiful half of the ratbag Victorian Socialists’ 7.3 per cent. Instead, the anti-incumbent swing went to a community independent and minor parties, who won a combined 43 per cent.

Is this a harbinger of the two-party system’s demise? John Howard told former deputy prime minister John Anderson’s podcast a few days ago: “40 per cent always voted for the Coalition, 40 per cent always voted Labor and 20 per cent floated around. I now believe we are living in a 30/30/40 world. The primary vote at the last (Federal) election indicated that.”

All this should temper Liberal triumphalism. The erosion of Federal Labor’s vote has failed to lift the Coalition’s primary above 40 per cent. It is doubtful the Liberals will smash through Labor’s “red wall” in 2025, certainly not in Victoria, and certainly not if they are content to merely cherry pick Donald Trump’s winning appeal to US working class voters.

The Coalition is learning all the wrong lessons from Trump’s success. Rather than understand how he appealed in 2016 and again in 2024 to working class grievances through economic policies once the stock in trade of the left of politics, including using tariffs as industry policy and continuities with the Biden administration’s rebuilding of American manufacturing, Team Dutton perorates on “wokeism” and slashing an imagined DEI-heavy bureaucracy.

If the Liberals think the good burghers of Werribee and in other suburban seats lay awake at night worrying about trans issues and not cost-of-living or their mortgages or the prospect of their kids never buying a home of their own, I’m auctioning off the West Gate Bridge. Culture war sorties won’t put food on tables, pay bills or service mortgages or rent.

Team Dutton can no longer afford to ignore the economy, subject matter the alternative prime minister is painfully uncomfortable with.

Shadow treasurer Angus Taylor needs to be hauled out of witness protection. A key reason why the Coalition will struggle to knock over Labor’s Red Wall lies in its refusal to recognise the end of and break free from the free market economic orthodoxy that dominated politics until the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. Trump and more so US Vice-President JD Vance get this and got the votes of workers.

Taxpayer-funded lunches for bosses are no substitute for the kind of material policies working class voters are crying out for, from revitalising home ownership to ending the rort of immigration as a tool of wage suppression. Dutton’s “Get Australia Back on Track” slogan is a recipe for more of the same old, tired policies we saw during the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years. I suspect the Coalition is not yet ready to face up to hard truths, for instance that Australia’s housing crisis actually began in the early 2000s under Howard.

Then there is the question of whether Dutton can move beyond faux patriotic stunts to making hard decisions in Australia’s national interests. Dutton hails Trump as a “big thinker” with respect to geopolitical machinations but his record tells a different story.

Consider the Port of Darwin, leased in 2015, on the Turnbull government’s watch, for 99 years to the Chinese Communist Party linked Landbridge Group, despite national security concerns such as the proximity of the port to a base where US marines are stationed and to Darwin International Airport. It should never have been countenanced and both major parties have erred in not re-nationalising the port. Why did Dutton, the tough talking minister for defence, not tear up the lease when he had the power to do so in 2021-22?

Returning to Labor, Dutton’s Trumpian imitation, some of the way but not all the way with Donald J, presents an election opportunity for Anthony Albanese to reconnect with working class voters. The endless daily announcement of new policies without an overarching narrative tying them all together must end. Labor’s Future Made in Australia agenda should be front and centre of its re-election pitch.

Albo can wedge Dutton, a skilled practitioner of wedge politics.

In the face of Trump’s war on our steel and aluminium exports, is the Liberal leader on the side of Team Australia or not?

Let’s see Albo announce that we are taking back Darwin Port, channelling Labor’s great wartime prime minister John Curtin, so that “Australia shall forever be the home of the Anzac people”, and challenge the alternative PM: et tu Peter?

Nick Dyrenfurth is Executive Director of the John Curtin Research Centre