Dutton pays for defiantly empty policy cupboard

Appearing with other Senate candidates in an ABC Radio forum, the Liberals' Senate hopeful Jacob Vadakkedathu admitted his leader's promise to slash 41,000 public service jobs was neither realistic nor practical.

Take a moment to grapple with the true bizarreness of this situation. Weighed down by a nakedly Trumpian policy directed squarely at punishing the capital bureaucracy, Dutton's candidate pledged to oppose it, albeit belatedly.

Note, he didn't withdraw from the race, nor resign from the party. Rather, he wanly asserted that he would speak up loudly in the party room against a policy that would gut the public service and hammer the local economy.

In this, he would inevitably fail or else humiliate his leader into immediately breaking a clear promise. No prizes for guessing which.

Vadakkedathu's pitiable contortions put him in the absurd position of appealing to ACT electors to vote Liberal in order to empower him, uniquely, to block the delivery of official Liberal Party policy.

"I will stand up and I will strongly argue the case for Canberra, that's why we need a Liberal senator from Canberra representing Canberrans in the party room." he said.

As an act of brazen deflection, arguing that "we need to elect Liberals to protect us from the chief Liberal" is up there with "aside from the shooting, Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the play?"

Unlike the hapless Liberal candidate, clear-eyed ACT voters knew there was a faster route to defeating Dutton's undisguised drain-the-swamp intent - simply vote against it.

This exquisite little farce played out on Thursday.

It was a day by which around seven million Australians had already voted, and yet it was then also that Dutton's team rolled out an ostentatious plan to raise $3.6 billion in revenue by liberalising vaping laws. The harmful products would once again be available in general retail stores.

Given the failure of current efforts to combat black market sales of a pernicious product popular with children, the alternative approach promised by the Coalition was at least worth considering. By legalising and then taxing vapes, authorities may have more success in undermining illegal distribution networks run by organised crime.

And there's a new revenue stream to be considered, which could fund public education against a gormless habit-forming practice increasingly popular with children. The proposed savings would be among the larger budget repair measures identified in the Coalition's election platform.

But like his half-trillion-dollar nuclear energy adventure, his $21 billion defence spending increase, and the aforementioned assault on the public service jobs and work from home, the timing of the proposed vaping policy, and the energy put into its sales job to voters seemed ultra-defensive and designed to minimise its public cut-through.

This fitted a pattern of Dutton's badly misjudged campaign, which was heavy with mistakes and reversals, light on policy substance, and strangely tremulous on all but its aggression towards Labor and the other voter groups it desperately needed to win over.

When it came, the campaign proper exposed the program of the Coalition to be as sweet and unsubstantial as a freshly exhaled lungful of vape smoke.

This hadn't mattered so much mid-term when people routinely told pollsters how unhappy they were with inflation, interest rates, high energy costs, etc, as they blamed the government of the day for not doing enough.

But experienced politicians know that as an election nears, these voters start looking also at the alternative government, many for the first time.

And they start thinking about the next term of government. What are your plans? They begin to wonder. Where will you take the country? Show me your vision.

Dutton should have known this reckoning was coming, but had, it seemed, fallen for his own subterfuge in which the appearance of purpose had been substituted for the real thing.

The Coalition's platform reminded one of the main street set in a Hollywood Western - all saloon-front and no whisky.

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Labor had its Medicare boost already in play - an $8.5 billion commitment perfectly on brand. Ditto with fee-free TAFE, PBS price caps and more.

Dutton had what exactly? An aggressive war on the public service, on households balancing work and home life - predominantly women - and on what he branded the "hate media"?

The OppositionLeader had even snookered himself into opposing Labor's modest but permanent tax cuts, which in the end would see him surrender the mantle of the lower taxing of the two candidates and the one with the bigger short-term deficit.

As the wheels fell off, he'd also launch a fresh round of divisive rhetoric over welcomes to country ceremonies in a re-heated anti-Voice debate that was actually kicked off by neo-Nazis. In a moment requiring moral leadership, Dutton lent voice (ironically) to the worst among us.

As Australians entered the polling stations, most concluded that Dutton wasn't merely unready; he had failed to grasp the nature of national leadership.

The avoidance of homework was a calculated gamble that failed. It delivered the worst campaign in living memory.

A total politics approach had bought him party-room obedience and much airtime, but it proved no substitute for considered policy.