Peter Dutton has gone from putting everything into the Coalition’s flailing election campaign, in a matter of weeks, to fighting for his political life as the Member for Dickson. Andrew Gardiner reports.
Will Peter Dutton be the first ever Opposition Leader to lose his own seat? What a difference a month makes. In late February, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was riding high in the polls, jetting around the country, prepping for a national campaign and largely ignoring his own seat of Dickson (during a cyclone, no less) to go visit wealthy donors in Sydney.
“The money and effort they (the LNP) were putting into Dickson was very 2022,” one operative close to an opponent’s campaign told MWM. “The mail-outs were standard and the pamphlets were upbeat, with his smiling face all over them, if you can believe that”.
Enter Climate 200-backed “Maroon independent” Ellie Smith, who announced her candidacy in late January. Just like that, Dutton found himself in a three-cornered contest with two women (his kryptonite, if the polls are a guide) in a three-cornered contest that has spooked the LNP camp.
Then came the polls
Then came the polls, which seemed to show voters weren’t impressed with the Cyclone Alfred fiasco, the cross-country trips to see Gina Rinehart and the general sense of neglect by someone preoccupied with getting into The Lodge. Dutton leads on a two-candidate preferred basis (2CP) but that doesn’t factor in the real possibility he winds up in a 2CP battle with someone other than Labor’s Ali France.
“With Greens and Legalise Cannabis preferences, Ellie Smith needs about 1,000 more votes to go above Labor (whose preferences will go her way) get into a two-way race with Dutton and – believe it or not – win,” one operative said. “This is doable.”
Teal prefs threat
The Dutton campaign sees Smith as its major threat, focusing just about all its fire on the independent, a former Lock the Gate activist who they’re desperate to paint as a closet Green.
One throwaway quote about being a “greenie at heart”, and a few hours handing out Green how-to-vote cards in 2022, have been catapulted into the conversation via eleventh hour messaging thought to have cost the Dutton campaign at least $250,000.
In a matter of weeks, Dutton’s smiling countenance (below left) had disappeared from Dickson billboards/ pamphlets, attack ads have sprung up in their stead and, in an as-yet-unsolved mystery, blue t-shirt wearing strangers, their faces unknown to folks in Dickson, started turning up at local polling booths.
IMAGE: Smith Campaign.
Shades of Josh in tight race
For those of us who covered Kooyong 2022, when upstart Monique Ryan stunned PM-in-waiting Josh Frydenberg, the echoes in Dickson are downright spooky. There was copious, almost giddy excitement in the (admittedly smaller-than-Kooyong) Smith camp, together with an influx of pamphlets, corflutes and doorknocking volunteers.
There was also, just like Kooyong 2022, a simmering ill will among Dickson’s conservative, cohort, seen by the author on Wednesday at a pre-poll centre, from LNP voters and some volunteers alike. Their attitude can be best articulated as: “how dare you have a serious crack at our Pete”.
Dickson, a combination of outer Brisbane mortgage belt, large parts of Moreton Bay and the beginnings of the bush, is fairly affluent but heavily populated by voters from Generation X (40-60) which keeps the seat perpetually close.
Its demographics may put it in the ‘marginal’ column, but that hasn’t stopped Dutton from winning it at eight successive elections since unseating Cheryl Kernot in 2001. The confidence engendered by this impressive unbroken run may help explain his initially ho-hum approach to contest number nine.
Of course, ho hum turned into ‘Banzai!’ in late March, but Dutton’s “Greenie at heart” narrative on Smith may have backfired. Intended to put a lid on the number of moderate LNP voters defecting to her, it had the unintended effect of energising Smith’s campaign.
Are the smears working any more?
“They’ve tossed $250,000 at Dickson in the form of negative ads, aimed largely at Ellie,” one Smith operative told MWM. “But it’s not working. We saw a big uptick in volunteers and raised $100,000 of our own off that.”
Speaking to MWM, Smith said Dutton was “desperately trying to cling on in Dickson. Not because he wants to help people here, but to help his own political career”.
From the author’s temporary digs at Kallangur in Dickson’s east, it appears Smith’s “Maroon Independent” campaign has more resources, numbers and enthusiasm than Dutton’s other opponents. It remains to be seen whether she can turn that into enough primary votes to have a real shot at winning.
Image: the author
The author visited an early voting centre at Strathpine (in Dickson’s south east) on Wednesday afternoon. At first, all was quiet and polite between the various, equally-represented major camps of how-to-vote volunteers (see picture at left) but at around 3pm a group of young and boisterous group of LNP supporters (centre picture) literally surrounded the centre from both sides.
Affectionately dubbed “the troops”, MWM was told they travel between early voting centres. The newcomers initially mistook this scribe for a voter.
Friendly ‘journalists’ only Mr Journalist
Offered an LNP how-to-vote card, I told them I’d already voted, only to be asked: “Did you vote Liberal?”. I told them I was a journalist covering the Dickson campaign, and asked whether they were local. The interview abruptly ended. “No comment, Mr Journalist”.
So who are they? Theories from rival camps range from outsiders bused in from other seats to paid interstate operatives to members of the mysterious Plymouth Brethren, a secretive and sometimes extreme religious sect who made headlines on Monday for their over-the-top, pro-LNP campaigning in other states.
A Brethren-linked sign like the one pictured below was spotted on a major road used by Dickson voters on Tuesday. What’s more, “some of the tactics ‘the troops’ employ at early voting centres – the blocking of other candidate’s volunteers, and talking over other candidates when they visit and interact with voters – seems reminiscent of what we read about the Brethren ,” one booth captain told MWM.
At first glance, the issues of greatest concern to Dickson constituents are boilerplate Australia. 72 hours out from polling day, Jane, a Strathpine shopper, was ever mindful of the cost-of-living, while interest rates and the environment were front-of-mind for Paul as he queued to vote early at Kallangur Scout Den.
“It’s like our major parties are only interested in the now, and not the legacy they leave,” lamented Paul, as he picked up how-to-vote cards from volunteers for Smith and the Greens’ Vinnie Batten.
But dig a little deeper and it quickly became clear that, among some voters at least, pride at having a high-achieving local MP had given way to disillusionment with Dutton the Opposition Leader.
“We’re hearing a lot about neglect … stuff about traffic and transport … I think the local member is really focused on what’s happening in Canberra and the factions and fighting Labor”, Smith said.
But the ‘neglect’ went further than that. Dutton snubbed a Dickson candidates’ forum, phoned in to debates on the ABC and commercial radio and, at the time of writing, had visited Dickson twice during the campaign.
The latter stands in stark contrast with his preparedness to jet across the country last year, in the middle of a crucial by-election campaign, to spend an hour with Gina Rinehart on her 70th birthday. “The neglect really broke through into dinner table conversations when Dutton flew to Sydney for a fundraiser while we were left to fend for ourselves during Cyclone Alfred,” one operative told MWM.
“If he loses Dickson, that moment was the turning point.”
An Adelaide-based graduate in Media Studies, with a Masters in Social Policy, I was an editor who covered current affairs, local government and sports for various publications before deciding on a change-of-vocation in 2002.