When Peter Dutton lumbered on to the national political stage in 2001 with his stiff policeman’s gait and hectoring manner, few saw him as prime minister John Howard’s heir and successor.
That this is what he has become is a measure, two decades later, of just how effective Howard’s remaking of the Liberal party has been. Under the Howard government, guided by Crosby Textor, and with a nod to the carceral logic of the penal colonies, cruelty became a badge of honour. Those affected were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, refugees, the poor and those historians who asked awkward questions that could only be answered by challenging the prevailing orthodoxy.
With the departure of two leading moderate Liberals (can Julian Leeser be far behind?), a new guard who learned their politics in right-leaning libertarian thinktanks now stand shoulder to shoulder with the leader.
A leader who now dresses better and has learned to moderate his tone but, as the occasional glower reveals, is still a Queensland cop at heart. Some welcome the certainty this suggests, many others recoil, remembering the damage a politically directed police force in his home state once did.
Howard was an astute and tactically clever prime minister – and he changed the nation almost as profoundly as Gough Whitlam had done decades earlier. The individual and his family became king, the market ruled, egalitarianism was jettisoned, the fair go was available only to those “who had a go”, as Scott Morrison, another of Howard’s heirs, used to say.
One of the tactics in Howard’s toolkit was to use the summer holidays to reshape the national agenda for the following year, seeding ideas that would be discussed when family chat ran out.
Howard called them barbecue stoppers, and they worked like a charm for years – until he overreached with Work Choices, the final tranche of his industrial relations reforms, which stirred the dozing trade union movement into action and prompted very different conversations.
It was the basic lesson that Morrison flunked by being absent during the black summer fires, a mistake his successor is determined not to repeat.
Dutton has been refining his use of the barbecue stopper ever since he became opposition leader – helped, it must be said, by the inability of the Labor government to sell its successes, and its readiness to embrace some policies that could have originated in the opposition.
Dutton’s first foray into the barbecue conversation zone came in early January 2023 when he asked a series of questions about the voice referendum. This built on the announcement by the National party six weeks earlier that it would oppose the referendum.
Dutton’s disingenuous questions hung in the ether for weeks, before a well-intentioned attorney general attempted to answer them on ABC’s 7.30.
Too little, too late, the seed had been planted.
Last summer the cost of living was the go-to subject in families not split asunder by opposing views on the voice referendum, but this year with an election looming, shaping the conversation is more important than ever.
Leaders amplify what their pollsters believe people are ready to hear. Meanwhile on the ground, something else is happening
The hares are off and running.
Nuclear power, jettisoning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, cancelling windfarms, blaming migrants, playing politics with local manifestations of geopolitical tragedies.
While professional political players rightly obsess about the dodgy economics of the nuclear mirage, bamboozling big numbers rarely change opinions. As the Donald Trump election campaign showed, if the sentiment connects, the detail is irrelevant – the vibe carries it. Even if the outcome will only be delivered in the never-never.
As anyone who has ever struggled to generate conversation relying on the quiz questions in Christmas bonbons knows, there is an undeniable skill in distilling topics that will draw everyone in.
Focus groups and polls are crucial in making sense of what people are thinking but are also useful in planting ideas to create a self-replicating circle.
So leaders amplify what their pollsters believe people are ready to hear.
Meanwhile on the ground, all around the country, something else is happening.
People are gathering in bookshops, libraries, community halls and pubs to talk about the issues that matter to them. Organised by community independents, interest groups, professional associations and friends.
Having attended about a dozen of these events this year, it is striking to see that the list of issues people come up with is different to the received wisdom of the mainstream political discourse.
What sort of country do we want Australia to be? What can we learn from the past to better imagine the future? Can we do truth-telling locally? What lessons emerge from the rise of Trump? How can we act on climate change to prevent more local catastrophes? How can we ensure that high quality education is accessible, housing affordable, women safer? Is AI a threat or opportunity? What needs to change in the processes of government to make things better?
These would seem to me to be more interesting conversation starters than debating the charade of emptiness we are being encouraged to consider.
Then again, you could just go to the (still free) beach and daydream.
Julianne Schultz is the author of The Idea of Australia
