Peter Dutton dirt files: Coordinated character assassination attempts are vintage campaign warfare

Nothing screams election more than a spike in personal attacks on an opponent, and Labor stepped up to the plate this week with a political assault on Peter Dutton that revived accusations of “dirt units.”

Assistant Trade Minister Tim Ayres rounded off a week of seemingly coordinated character assassination attempts by summoning the media to a Canberra doorstop on Friday to question the Coalition leader’s integrity.

For days, Labor has shed a spotlight on Mr Dutton’s healthy property and share portfolio and raised questions about bank shares he bought during the global financial crisis in 2009.

“Peter Dutton saw that misery and that fear in the Australian community and was out there buying shares to further enrich himself. That is the character test,” said Senator Ayres.

‘But where’s the smoking gun?’, asked one journalist, pointing to the lack of evidence Mr Dutton cashed in on advanced knowledge about a pending rise in stock value.

“The real question is character. It’s when the country was on fire, when the people that I represented, ordinary Australians, were terrified about their future prospects, this guy was buying shares,” the one-time union official repeated.

Mr Dutton has been strident in defending his hard-won wealth, and has fiercely denied any wrongdoing.

On Friday, he slammed the Government for its “desperate” tactics to hide the Prime Minister’s lack of achievements.

“The Government’s been a disaster. So, what do they resort to — smearing and throwing mud?” he told the Today program.

Mr Dutton earlier blamed Labor “dirt sheets” for recent media reports about his 16-year-old share decisions and details of $30 million worth of property transactions over the past three decades.

The reporters involved have publicly said the revelations emerged from their own research.

Whether controversies come to light by old-fashioned journalistic shoe leather or the dark arts of political spin, former Rudd and Gillard staffer Sean Kelly said it shouldn’t shock anyone that dirt units exist.

“Any major political party which is not devoting at least some resources to having an intense, forensic look at their opponents isn’t trying hard enough to win an election,” he told The Nightly.

“Knowing what there is to shine a light on in regards to your opponents is a core part of your work.”

Another long-time political operative observed that one person’s dirt unit was another person’s political integrity unit.

Mr Kelly thought in Australia there were sensible ethical boundaries, in that media and political opponents were generally reluctant to go after a politician’s family or personal life.

In December, Education Minster Jason Clare admitted a lowbrow social media meme of Mr Dutton and his wife Kirilly, created by the Victorian ALP, was “stupid” and “wrong” after the Prime Minister ordered it taken down.

Mr Kelly said political attacks worked best when there was a nugget of truth that confirmed something voters might already be thinking.

“That can be tremendously damaging,” he said.

Other common lines of research dig into the background of potentially dodgy candidates and looking for hypocrisy or conflicts of interest.

The aim is to at least take the other side off their intended message for the day or week, and ideally make voters turn away from them.

As to the bigger question of whether dirt-digging caused broader damage, Mr Kelly said there clearly had been declining trust in the political system over a long time.

“But I think these things can be overdramatised,” he said.

“Do we really think that that’s because of personal attacks, or do we think it’s because of the failure of successive governments to deal in any structurally important way with the very large problems facing this country?”

While mud-slinging is part of the normal cut and thrust of politics, it also comes with a health warning, said Kosmos Samaras, director of strategy and analytics at the Redbridge Group.

Labor’s strategy was clearly to try to define the character of Mr Dutton for voters who had little awareness of the Opposition leader, he said.

But the chances of being able to push their intended message into voters’ field of vision were “extremely remote,” he said.

“Labor’s strategy is sound. However, they will confront a logistical barrier,” he said, pointing to a now fragmented media market that made it even more challenging to cut through to a disinterested electorate.

Either side of politics ran the risk of turning voters off with a negative campaign rather than presenting a positive vision for the country, cautioned Mr Samaras.

“Negative is no longer working like it used to,” he said.

“One of the reasons people don’t consume news is it depresses them, especially young women,” said the polling expert.

“The number of young women who tell us, ‘I no longer switch on the news, because it just depresses me’, I’ve just lost count. So, the last thing they want is just more doom and gloom.”

But a string of opinion polls showing Mr Dutton with more favourable personality ratings with voters who see him as more in touch with ordinary Australians and a more decisive leader in a crisis may push Labor to take a punt on swiping at the former copper’s moral fibre.

Tony Barry, director of corporate affairs and communications at Redbridge, argued there were potential rewards as well as risks of personal attacks in the current electoral climate.

“In all of our recent research, the national soft vote segment is around 47% which is an atypically high number and means a lot of voters are very easily persuaded to either vote for or against either major party,” he said.

“The reward is it may move currently soft Liberal voters back into their column but the risk is that soft voter perceptions of ‘dirty tricks’ might persuade some soft Labor voters to switch to the Liberal Party,” he said.

“At the moment, Albanese is trailing Dutton on most leadership attribute tests so the risk is probably justifiable as they need to drag his personal numbers down to Albanese’s.”