Peter Dutton interview, part one: Opposition Leader says smart Aussies will see through Labor scare campaign

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says he is banking on the Smart and Forgotten Australians to see through Labor’s scare campaign.

He accused Anthony Albanese of pulling a swifty on voters because the Prime Minister was too ashamed to campaign on his own record when it came to the cost of living.

Declaring it was still “game on” in the May 3 poll, Mr Dutton said the public should not write him off as the Coalition’s ground game in key seats was the strongest it had ever been.

He said that the Liberals private research was picking up suburban fears about local crime and international instability that public polling was missing and that the soft vote remained enormous.

The Opposition Leader made the comments in an upcoming interview with the Latika Takes podcast in collaboration with The Nightly on the campaign trail in Victoria.

During the wide-ranging interview conducted ahead of the leaders’ final blitz of key seats across the country before polls close on Saturday night, Mr Dutton conceded that Labor’s scare campaign had taken a toll but believed it was starting to dissipate.

“I think there is an impact first up and I think that is starting to wane now because I think people see through it,” he said.

“And I think people think, hang on, this guy, this Prime Minister just looks into a camera and flat out lies to me.”

Mr Albanese has repeatedly accused Mr Dutton of planning to cut Medicare to pay for nuclear energy, which the Coalition is proposing for the 2040s as a way of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Mr Dutton, who has matched all of Labor’s major health spending commitments, rejected outright the Prime Minister’s claim.

“Of course it’s not going to happen,” he said.

Asked why he had not counter-punched Labor’s lies or run a scare campaign of his own, he said it was because the Coalition believed that voters deserved better than a race to the bottom.

“The view has been that we just don’t dignify it or respond to it because people will see through it,” he said.

And in a reprisal of Robert Menzies’ famous Forgotten Australians address that went on to define Australia’s post-war aspirational middle class, Mr Dutton said he believed voters were also intelligent enough to see through Labor’s tactics, dubbing them the “Smart Australians.”

“I think Australians are smarter than that,” he said. “We’re banking on the Smart Australians and the Forgotten Australians.”

“The choice is between a government that hasn’t done well and doesn’t want to talk about its record and has largely just run a slur campaign.

“This government has had its focus largely on inner-city Greens in Sydney and Melbourne and the Australians who are sitting in traffic for an hour to get to work each morning, and an hour and a half to get back in the afternoon, run kids around the sport, all the rest of it.

“They’re the Australians that we’re relying on in this election and I think they know the Prime Minister’s pulled a bit of a swifty, he’s pretty loose with the truth.

“And they’re smart enough to know that it’ll get worse if this government’s re-elected.”

Questioned by The Nightly at a campaign stop on the New South Wales Central Coast in the Labor-held marginal seat of Robertson on Monday, Mr Albanese denied that his scare campaign was insulting Australians.

“No, let’s be clear,” Mr Albanese said.

“He can’t say where his $600 billion for the nuclear plant is coming from.

“There will be cuts.

“It’s important that not only have I put forward a positive, coherent agenda, we have also put forward legitimately a critique of the other side.”

‘Don’t write us off’

Mr Dutton led the Coalition to a leading position in the polls, but after a series of unforced errors, including a now scrapped plan to force public servants to return to the office, floating a referendum on deporting terrorists and paedophiles and wrongly claiming the Indonesian President had confirmed a Russian request to base fighter aircraft in Indonesia, the opposition is now behind.

But he insisted that the Liberals’ own data, conducted by former Crosby Textor pollster Mike Turner of Freshwater Strategy, was picking up undercurrents that the published and cheaper public polling was missing.

“Don’t write us off at all,” he said.

“We have knocked on more doors, we’ve made more outbound calls, and we’ve done more advertising in key seats at any point.

“For some of those candidates, they’ve got a name ID which would normally be somewhat behind a sitting Labor member, an incumbent member, but their name ID is at least as high as the local Labor member.

“And in some of these seats, they’ve been traditional Labor strongholds, but the Labor Party’s taken it for granted for too long.

“And as the demographic shift has taken place for us in inner metropolitan seats, the outer metropolitan seats are now families with big mortgages, car repayments, and they are moving away from the Labor party to the Liberal party.

“So I think there is an enormous opportunity for us to come home, with the wind at our back.

“And not to underestimate the challenge and accept where some of the sentiment is, but what I’m seeing from our candidates, hearing from our experts on the ground and seeing in our own numbers, it’s game on.”

He compared the dynamic to the 2019 election which former Labor Leader Bill Shorten was expected to win but lost in a shock upset.

Mr Albanese has also pointed to his predecessor as a Labor leader’s surprise loss to warn his own team of getting complacent, as the government’s polling has improved, suggesting he is on track to retain government, although could lose his majority.

“I think there is a big disparity between the big overall overarching numbers that you’re seeing in some of the published polling,” he said.

“People are really unsettled about what they’re seeing with knife crime in their own neighbourhood, with stolen vehicles, with bail laws, with domestic violence incidents, with the anti-Semitism with what they’ve seen in Europe, what they’ve seen in the Middle East.

“All of that has created a dynamic where national security is a factor in people’s minds at this election as well.

“So it’s not just who do you trust to manage the economy, but also who do you trust to keep us safe in our neighbourhoods, in our communities and in the region.

“And that has an undercurrent, which I don’t think has been picked up, by many as well, but certainly, our people are reporting it back on the doors that crime is a huge issue in WA and Victoria and New South Wales and elsewhere.”

Mr Dutton has been campaigning in Labor strongholds such as Hawke in outer Melbourne but has also been targeting teal-held seats which fell to progressive independents in metropolitan areas including the electorate of Mackellar in Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

On Monday, Mr Albanese went to the Labor-held New South Wales marginal seats on the Central Coast, Bennelong in Sydney’s north and Fowler in south west Sydney where Labor candidate Tu Le is trying to oust indepdendent Dai Le.

Mr Dutton also campaigned on the NSW Central Coast, pictured below.

The Australian Electoral Commission said that 2.39 million people have already voted.