LATIKA M BOURKE: Peter Dutton’s $21b defence drive finally gives him a point of difference over Albanese

Finally, someone said it.

“The world has changed,” Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie said, standing alongside Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, as they announced a promise to boost defence spending to a record 3 per cent of GDP within the decade.

“This is a big, big announcement,” Mr Hastie told reporters at the Australian satellite communications manufacturer Blacktree Technology in the Perth suburb of Belmont.

“It sends a signal to the world as well that we are serious about defence.

“We can’t take anything for granted anymore.

“If there’s a lesson from Ukraine, it’s that you’ve got to be able to stand up on your own two feet — at least until your allies can come and support you.

“With the election of President Trump, America is moving towards an America-first posture.

“We still have a strong relationship with the United States but we can’t take anything for granted.”

It’s the first and belated sign of realism in this Federal Election campaign about what the advent of the Make America Great Again movement means for Australia and how it should be shaping what we do next.

This conversation has been entirely absent from the election campaign, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese embarking on a nationwide Medicare Card-waving tour, while trying to scare the living daylights out of voters about the Trump fixation of healthcare under Mr Dutton.

Mr Dutton has been burned badly by trying to lean into MAGAism, having to roll back his plan to force public servants from working from home as well as announcing his own DOGE, set to be headed by Senator Jacinta Price, who later declared that the Coalition needed “to make Australia great again.”

Not only has he failed to fight back but, mystifyingly, delayed leaning into his few positives.

That came on Wednesday, although it is possibly too late.

“What we announced today is a record investment in defence of over $20 billion to defence over the course of the next five years,” Mr Dutton said.

“Which will bring spending up to 2.5 per cent of GDP.

“We need to keep our country safe, if we’re to preserve peace and stability in our region.

“If we’re to be a good ally with our partners, then Australia needs to invest in defence.”

But he declined to credit President Trump as the catalyst for the proposal.

“Ultimately, we look at what is in our country’s best interests,” he said.

“And we’ll act in our country’s best interests to defend us, to keep it safe and to make sure that our neighbours stay safe as well.”

Both sides, but particularly Mr Albanese, have been willing to use Donald Trump as a political knuckleduster but been completely unwilling to vocalise to the public what voters already know deep down – the world we knew it has gone and Trump’s America means we are dealing with an unreliable and potentially unstable ally for the foreseeable future.

Mr Albanese has resorted to slurs from US culture in his attempts to paint Mr Dutton as a Trump-lite candidate who wants to Americanise the health system.

When the Liberals released a “diss track” to highlight the cost of living, the Prime Minister bizarrely attacked the Opposition as always wanting to “borrow cultures.”

It was ridiculous and reckless, particularly from a Prime Minister who insists the US-Australia alliance is in fine shape despite Donald Trump’s erratic and punitive approach to allies.

As this column has argued, Trump’s behaviour should be a clarion call to Australia.

But the Government chose to follow the European model of boosting spending on social services while ignoring the warning notices being issued from Washington, that sub-par spending on domestic defence budgets would no longer be underwritten by the United States.

Mr Dutton has had many failings this election campaign.

But the former defence minister, aided by his curiously invisible shadow defence spokesman in Mr Hastie, put forward a spending commitment that Labor, which is likely to secure a second term in government, should have beaten them to presenting if it truly wants to displace the Coalition as the party of national security.

Mr Dutton also took aim at Richard Marles, the Defence Minister, for having failed to secure the same commitment.

“He’s more interested in playing golf courses around the world than getting a better understanding of what it is that we need to do as a country,” Mr Dutton said of the Deputy Prime Minister.

“And he’s had no capacity at all, even though he’s taken proposals to Cabinet, to get them funded.

“He’s been rolled by Penny Wong and others, and unfortunately, it’s our Diggers who miss out.”

It was a rare blow that landed against Mr Marles, an Albanese ultra-loyalist who believes the current spending level will be enough to please the MAGA crew currently occupying the White House and the Pentagon.

Asked what capabilities this would add to Australia’s hollowed-out force, Mr Dutton singled out drones, guided weapons, munitions production and boosting the frigate program, while maintaining that he would not be outlining procurement contracts from opposition.

How all this will be paid for remains the central question, alongside why the Coalition would leave it so late to put out such a major policy that, in an election beset by two uninspiring blokes, clearly marks out one against the other.

And on an issue where Mr Dutton is so far ahead of Mr Albanese. Newspoll found that voters trust Mr Dutton to defend the country over the Prime Minister by a margin of 35 to 23 per cent. That’s significant. Voters might not decide on foreign policy or even national security, but strength and the sense of a strong hand on the tiller does factor. Just ask Donald Trump!

A clue may be in the costings. Mr Dutton alluded to the “prudence” of waiting until now to reveal his defence spend - two days before ANZAC Day - saying he wanted to see how the final sums fell on the government side before announcing the commitment.

The price tag of $21 billion is an eye-watering, albeit necessary sum. And Mr Dutton cannot specify how it will be paid for – yet. He was repeatedly asked from where the $21 billion in spending will come? Cuts, debt, taxes or a mix of all three?

He argued that the small tax cut Labor announced in the pre-election budget would pay the sum.

Those are the so-called “top-up tax cuts” worth $17.1 billion, which would reduce the lowest tax rate from 16 per cent to 15 per cent from 2026 and again in mid 2027 to 14 per cent for those on incomes between $18,201 to $45,000.

The Coalition ridiculed these structural changes to the lowest tax bracket as a “seventy cent a day” tax cut that would not help anyone by the time it started flowing next year.

By contrast the Coalition plans to temporarily cut 25 cents off every litre of petrol excise. The trouble is, Mr Dutton had already earmarked that $17 billion to pay for the fuel excise cut.

The Opposition Leader will be reluctant to announce pre-election savings given the enormous scare campaign that Labor has launched, with effect, this campaign.

This means when costings are released late next week the answer is likely to be more debt and possibly higher taxes.

Unfortunately for the economists, voters hold less concern about higher government spending than they used to, meaning Mr Dutton’s prudence may be another costly political mistake that he will chalk up this campaign.

“At the next election, Australians have the choice between two very different sides of this debate,” Mr Dutton noted.

He is right. But given more than a half a million people voted before this was even announced with polls showing Labor on track to retain its majority, it’s a dividing line he should have drawn sooner.