LATIKA M BOURKE: Government hit hard at Dutton with signature scare tactics — and it seems to be working

Labor isn’t fighting Peter Dutton. They’re fighting Donald Trump, Scott Morrison, Campbell Newman and every Right-wing bogeyman they can conjure.

And Peter Dutton, who spent years building up a reputation for being the hard man of Australian politics, seems completely at a loss for how to counter it.

Despite spending more than 20 years in federal politics observing his opponents, he has failed to counter-punch the systematic scare campaigns that the Labor Party’s machine has hurled his way.

Labor has always felt that Mr Dutton was their key to victory.

But the Member for Dickson’s competitiveness in the polls, largely due to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s underperformance, combined with the inflation-fuelled grievance politics of 2024, had led to expectations – set by the overly ambitious Opposition Leader – that he could make history by ending a one-term government.

After a summer of unforced errors from the Opposition, the latest being a work-from-home policy that the Coalition binned on Monday, conceding it was a “mistake,” Labor has found itself unexpectedly on the front foot for the entirety of this campaign.

“Peter Dutton’s stubborn, he’s arrogant, always believes he knows best and the problem is that leads him to make bad calls,” complained Foreign Minister Penny Wong on Insiders.

The Coalition, while improving, has been trying to turn the conversation onto the cost of living, housing, immigration and national security. But it has struggled to keep the agenda on those areas where Labor is weak.

By contrast, the Government is going for the jugular on Mr Dutton’s vulnerabilities, reviving its scare campaign tactics to paint the former Queensland copper as the Destroyer-in-Chief and a mash-up of a squad of centre-right leaders it determines the public dislikes.

Take Sunday’s rally at the State Library of Queensland. Seated at the event were the felled former premiers Anastacia Palaszczuck and Steven Miles. But those watching at home would not have known that the two unpopular Labor identities were even in the room. Treasurer Jim Chalmers went to great lengths to name-check his former boss and predecessor as federal treasurer Wayne Swan, but made no mention of Ms Palasczcuck or Mr Miles, Queensland’s current Labor leader and State opposition leader.

Mr Chalmers had another Queenslander and opposition leader in mind – Peter Dutton.

“His response to American tariffs on every country is higher taxes for every Australian taxpayer,” Mr Chalmers told the party faithful.

“Meeting economic madness with economic madness.

“Taking his cues straight from the United States with one Dogey disaster after another.”

Mr Dutton is opposing Labor’s tiny tax cut, preferring instead a fund a halving of the petrol excise. It is a stretch to claim that opposing Labor’s budget measures, unveiled before the US President’s Liberation Day, are a direct response to Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Labor only rushed its tax cuts through the Parliament on the Thursday before calling the election after the Opposition said it would oppose them. Given the tax cuts don’t come into effect until next year, there was zero need for Labor to legislate them before the election. It only did so so it could spend the campaign saying “Peter Dutton wants to cut everything except your tax.”

It’s a lethal line, even if not quite the truth.

Mr Chalmers also deliberately mentioned the reality television show The Apprentice in his speech while referring to Mr Dutton, pretending that he was talking about the Opposition Leader as a political novice. He was, of course, trying to associated Mr Dutton with the former Apprentice host who burst into American culture and eventually into the White House with his trademark brutal phrase: “You’re fired.”

None of it is subtle, as one Labor MP on the campaign hustings told The Nightly, “Trump has been a ripsnorter for us.”

“Peter Dutton wants to Americanise our local schools and local hospitals,” Mr Chalmers continued.

This, of course, is also not true. The Opposition Leader has matched every major Labor health policy, and Mr Trump has quarantined Medicaid from Elon Musk’s chainsaw, something The Nightly put to the Prime Minister in one of his first campaign press conferences held on the opening day of campaigning in Mr Dutton’s seat of Dickson.

But Labor is in demolition mode. Not content with attempting to cast Mr Dutton as Mr Trump, Mr Chalmers summoned the ghost of Scott Morrison.

“Anthony Albanese came to Queensland to help - Peter Dutton went to Sydney to help himself,” Mr Chalmers said, likening Mr Dutton’s decision to attend a fundraiser in Sydney during Cyclone Alfred to Scott Morrison’s holiday in Hawaii and infamous bushfire quip that he didn’t think to return home “I don’t hold a hose, mate.”

“What is wrong with these people? Scott Morrison fled to Hawaii - this guy fled to Sydney Harbour,” Mr Chalmers said to party faithful.

A good scare campaign needs only rely on a kernel of actuality and a heavy dose of pre-existing fears to take hold and unfortunately for Mr Dutton, he has left himself exposed to the attacks and has been surprisingly plodding in response.

As Newspoll suggests, Labor’s demolition job is working. The Government has increased its two-party preferred lead over the Coalition to 52-48.

Labor strategists have long said they were confident of retaining its parliamentary majority, and the numbers show this is no bluster.

What matters is perception rather than truth, and the reality is the opposition has lumbered to counter the lies.

This is why Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has left it up to this frontbench rottweilers to launch the Trump-lite attacks on Mr Dutton, is increasingly getting into the ring himself.

With breathtaking chutzpah, Mr Albanese invoked the ghost of three premiers past at the Brisbane rally, without even acknowledging the physical presence of the last two sitting in front of him, when he claimed that Peter Dutton would be “Campbell Newman revisited” in the “sequel no-one asked for.”

“These Liberal cuts would mean the return of Robodebt,” he said, of Mr Dutton’s policy to cut 41,000 public servants.

On Monday, Mr Albanese could barely contain his glee over Mr Dutton’s backflip on working from home.

“Peter Dutton wants to undermine work rights and in particular doesn’t understand modern families, doesn’t understand the important role that women and men play in organising their families and organising appropriate work conditions wherever it is possible,” Mr Albanese said while campaigning with the Victorian premier Jacinta Allan in Melbourne.

Peter Dutton recognised that Labor’s scare campaign got the better of him when he ditched his unpopular policy.

“We never had any intention for work-from-home changes that we were proposing in Canberra to apply across the private sector, but the Prime Minister was out there saying that,” he said.

“It was just a lie.

“We’re not going to be framed up by a Prime Minister who’s got a real problem with the truth.”

Unfortunately for the Coalition, it is being framed up, to Labor’s advantage, and Mr Dutton’s belief that: “we’ve got a lot of time to go between now and the election” is starting to make him look like a man who thinks he has time to waste.

And that would be his most negligent captain’s call of all.