CAMERON MILNER: Why Labor’s desperate attack on Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was always doomed to fail

There’s a time and place for negative attack ads and messages in every political campaign, but Labor’s desperate attack on Peter Dutton is doomed to fail.

The Labor dirt unit has gone to extremes this time and instead of an effective attack it reeks of panic and of just how badly Labor really thinks it’s going at the election to be held in early April.

There will be some who say, “yes but it’s in the headlines” and think that alone justifies the use of data, all declared, from 16 years ago or that “news” the Opposition Leader has committed the political crime of, wait for it, buying and selling houses when his family moved around.

It’s pathetic and the strategy is all wrong. Because when it comes to property transactions, it’s Albanese who is the rent lord, reaping a super profit from his Dulwich Hill terrace house.

It’s the tone deaf PM in the midst of a housing crisis and a cost-of-living crisis all of his Government’s making who dropped $4.3 million on a cliff top retirement mansion.

Albo also delivered the new road to his front door at Copacabana and dropped the rent to get a tenant in so he could start the meter on his massive negative gearing tax break he’ll earn on the house until he retires there.

What was Labor thinking? Surely they aren’t that hopeless.

Then again, evidence would seem to support the conclusion that they are.

Both sides do research and dirt units are a feature of every opposition and government I’ve seen.

This time Albanese has enlisted his close mate and lobbyist Eamon Fitzpatrick to run the dirt unit for this campaign. He’s no stranger to this role having done the same for Julia Gillard, Anna Bligh and was even brought in to help guide dirt campaigning for last year’s Queensland election campaign.

The LNP have dubbed him “the agent of infection”.

His social media is full of pictures of him and Albo at ALP event after event as he reps for Indonesian based interests. He was also contracted by the Hong Kong government to “improve their image” after all the arrests and crack down on democracy in 2020.

Albanese has sought to distance himself from the mud being thrown by his close mate, but voters are a lot smarter than Albo gives them credit for.

Voters join the dots pretty easily and will know this was a clumsy attack designed to hide scrutiny of the Albanese Government in its dying days.

As Chinese warships fire off our coastline and it takes a commercial airline pilot to be our Australian Defence Force intelligence gatherer. As the PM still can’t say when or even if he was told about a bomb-filled caravan in Sydney, voters just shake their heads and switch off to a PM who is shrinking and wilting as his judgment day approaches.

These aren’t the only weird acts of a Government facing its end of days. Tony Burke is out there vote stacking while the Albanese Government shovelled $5m to the Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work, a think tank run by Assistant Minister Tim Ayres’ partner. What were they thinking? Perhaps they actually weren’t.

The only guy still trying is Treasurer Jim Chalmers in Washington who is attempting to stop Trump’s tariffs on our steel and aluminium.

Albanese meanwhile is spraying billions of dollars around. There’s $2b for one railway station in the marginal Federal seat of Hawke. Then $2.4b to re-nationalise the Whyalla steelworks. Billions and billions since January has been promised and yet poll after poll shows Labor slipping further and further behind.

The prospect of Labor actually losing in one term was initially unthinkable, but the latest attack on Dutton belies a leader who has nothing left to offer than smear and fear.

Labor’s trainwreck Medicare 2.0 has fallen flat. Labor are locked in with Albo who voters just can’t stand to see, let alone hear, on their news feeds.

So it comes down to throwing mud. Letting your lobbyist mate brief out to lazy journalists pathetic attacks.

There’s a saying the late, great Bill Ludwig was fond of saying about negative campaigning: “If you are going to hitch yourself to the shit cart you are bound to get some of it one yourself”.

This half-arsed attack on Dutton has backfired and exposed Labor and Albanese as devoid of ideas of how to win the next election. Dutton and the Liberals will take heart that Labor’s attack was pretty piss weak.

This is a Government with a leader bereft of political judgment, who squandered the goodwill of voters first with his Voice vanity project and has now managed to put Labor in a position to lose after just one term in office.

The attack on Dutton has blown up in Labor’s face and only reminded voters of how deeply out of touch Albanese is with his own property plays.

It looks panicked because it is. Labor under Albanese is clearly out of ideas and has all but run out of time.