Politics

The very low bar of not losing the Fadden byelection the previous week, and the evident polling success of the aggressive, colonial-tinged ‘No’ team in the Voice campaign, has buoyed Peter Dutton’s Coalition.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was desperate to claim a ‘win’ in the Fadden byelection. This was evident in a number of ways – most conspicuously, the negativity of his behaviour in the days leading up to the vote, his focus on trying to blame the government for the cost of living and housing crises, and his anti-Voice strategies.

If you can believe the opinion polls, regional Australia has gone very cold on the idea of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Rebel Liberal ‘Yes’ campaigner Julian Leeser certainly found a warmer reception in the New South Wales city of Wagga Wagga on Monday, where he attended a number of events promoting the referendum.

When Donald Trump was elected United States president in 2016, one of the many entrenched right-wing Liberal members in Victoria posted on social media a photo of himself proudly wearing a red baseball cap emblazoned with the words ‘Make Victoria Great Again’. I immediately suggested to several people in the party that this would not bode well, given Trump’s overt racism and sexism, and that they should ‘lose the caps’.

The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme has identified appalling dishonesty and lapses in government processes that had serious consequences for the innocent, and their families, who were hounded for non-payment of fictitious ‘debts’.

No one was happier in the federal opposition than Peter Dutton when the embattled Stuart Robert quit the parliament a couple of months ago. Sure it triggered today’s byelection in Robert’s Gold Coast seat of Fadden, but it made clearing out the Liberal stable that much easier.

Coalition strategists have tended to assume that an ageing population is to their advantage, electorally. It is obviously a factor behind their support for Peter Dutton and his strategy to drag the Coalition to extremely conservative policy settings, as their best chance of winning the next election.

There’s a new party game in Canberra, sparked by the arrival of the National Anti-Corruption Commission. The game has a simple enough name: Who’s for the NACCery?

The byelection in Stuart Robert’s old seat of Fadden is becoming a proxy battleground for the fortunes not only of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton but also for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Anthony Albanese is furious the ‘Greens political party’ – as he insists on always calling them – is blocking his signature Housing Australia Future Fund in the senate and he is now raising the prospect of using it as a trigger for an early election.