Sunday 22nd of June 2025
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scary shadows doing backflips....

Peter Dutton’s long-awaited military spending plan was supposed to be the Coalition’s chance to shift the election debate onto the former defence minister’s favoured terrain.

Instead, Dutton ran into yet more questions about his preparation for the election contest as he revealed the plan in a hot defence manufacturing factory in Perth on Wednesday, raising further questions over what his own MPs privately describe as a thin and rushed policy agenda.

“Leaving policies so late is a tactic that belongs in the Howard era, and we haven’t learnt our lesson from last time when Morrison’s super-for-housing policy should have come earlier,” one opposition minister, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss internal party matters, said. “We needed to offer more than just saying we’re not Labor, and we’ve so far failed.”

The Liberal Party’s campaign review found a similar thing happened in 2022, when Scott Morrison made his key announcement on home ownership in the last week of the campaign.

 

This time, the problem is more acute because early voting has soared since the last election, with 72 per cent more people voting on the first day of pre-poll compared to 2022.

After a stuttering first few weeks of the campaign, Dutton is running out of time to raise his game. His stronger debate performance on Tuesday did not flow through to a period of sustained momentum because contentious remarks on reversing tax cuts were followed by an apparent backflip over EV tax breaks.

Both the defence policy and the mortgage deductibility scheme announced on April 12had support among shadow ministers to be announced weeks or months earlier, according to senior MPs and other party sources who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely.

Dutton pushed back when asked about the delayed timing of the defence policy on Wednesday, saying: “People can argue the politics of it, but the more prudent approach was to see what the bottom line looked like, to make sure that we weren’t promising funny money.”

The Coalition leader has also found himself in an awkward position on income tax because, as this masthead reported in February, he decided against offering income tax relief during a campaign expected to be fought on reining in spending to tame inflation.

“We needed to offer more than just saying we’re not Labor, and we’ve so far failed.”

Liberal Party MP

When Labor surprised Dutton with a small tax cut in the budget just days before the campaign, Dutton opted to offer a halving of the fuel excise. But during the campaign, the party decided it needed a more forceful argument on household budgets so it reached for a Morrison-era idea to offer a $1200 tax rebate announced at the party’s launch.

Party officials said the precise figure and its cost to the budget were still being worked on just hours before its release.

This week, Dutton nominated reversing Labor’s small income tax cut as the way he would pay for his policy commitments. He labelled the tax cuts “recurrent spending”, an unusual way to describe them for the leader of a party philosophically in favour of lower taxes.

 

Recriminations are also continuing in the party about the reversal of its push to stop public servants working from home. This masthead has learnt that Dutton’s office and opposition ministers raised concerns about the risk of community blowback towards finance spokeswoman Jane Hume’s early March announcement before it was made.

Hume and shadow treasurer Angus Taylor were forced to release a statement on Wednesday afternoon outlining the Coalition’s revenue-raising measures after Dutton’s income tax remarks and days of confusion on whether he planned to reverse Labor’s tax breaks on electric vehicles. Dutton ducked a question about whether Taylor and Hume would keep their portfolios after the election on Thursday.

In the same way as Hume’s work-from-home backflip would create awkwardness for Dutton if she joined him at daily media events, defence spokesman Andrew Hastie dominated Wednesday’s military announcement when he was forced to clarify his earlier views on women in combat roles.

Senior frontbenchers, including Hume, Hastie, Bridget McKenzie, Barnaby Joyce, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, David Coleman and Dan Tehan have all either been fighting tight battles in their seats, made significant blunders, or not served for long periods in their portfolios, making them potentially distracting choices to flank Dutton at press events.

 

Several Coalition ministers and future ministers either retired or lost their seats to teal candidates in 2022. Albanese has made a virtue of the depth of his cabinet – Mark Butler, Penny Wong, Katy Gallagher and Jason Clare have all taken turns accompanying Albanese on the road.

By the middle of this week, Dutton was at his 13th stop at a petrol station for the campaign, his suit jacket removed and with a couple of his shirt buttons undone.

The bowser stops allow Dutton to talk about his fuel excise plans and add levity to his appearances, showcasing the humour and energy that reflect his off-camera personality. A visit to a rowdy Townsville RSL on Anzac Day showed off a more relaxed leader chatting and laughing with punters. And in press conferences, Dutton engages with reporters at greater length than Albanese, allowing follow-up questions that provide greater scrutiny of his policies.

But other aspects of the Coalition operation are not running as smoothly.

 

In Coalition circles, there is talk about an allegedly troubled relationship between Dutton’s chief of staff Alex Dalgleish, and the Parramatta-based party officials around federal director Andrew Hirst. Hirst worked for Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull and has run several federal campaigns. Gossip centres on a rift, but several sources say the reports are either exaggerated or false.

A less contentious claim in the party is that Dalgleish and Dutton both have a type of politics based on values and instincts, which can push Dutton away from the centre ground on some issues. Hirst is seen as having a more pragmatic, data-driven focus.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison’s media boss Andrew Carswell raised the alarm about this tension earlier in the campaign, writing in an opinion piece about poor decisions made by “advisers who think they know better than accomplished party bosses, or detachment between the travelling and campaign teams”.

The Coalition’s campaign headquarters and Dutton’s office were contacted for comment.

Party officials at campaign headquarters take over much of the political operation once a campaign begins, including policy announcements and the itinerary, after years of the leader’s office controlling the agenda.

 

A story in this masthead about the prospect of a referendum on deporting dual nationals caused the newly formed campaign unit in Parramatta to grow worried about the level of discipline and tactical nous in Dutton’s office. Dutton backed the referendum idea, despite the lukewarm reaction of some campaign staffers and shadow ministers.

One senior Liberal source describes some of the leader’s key personnel as the “f--- ’em crew” because of their alleged hostility to party moderates, perceived media enemies, and other forces deemed to be hostile. Such an attitude jars with Dutton’s more conciliatory personal style.

With one week left of the campaign, a narrative of rising support for Labor in national polling is masking some unique trends.

Most polls and the parties’ private research are showing a significant rise in support for One Nation, which recently amended its voting tickets to give more support to Dutton, including in his own marginal seat of Dickson.

 

The Liberal Party is also picking up unusually strong levels of support in very safe Labor seats such as Gorton and Whitlam, indicating that the shift in working-class outer suburban and regional areas might accelerate even if it does not result in many seats falling to Dutton.

Neither party has major policies left to announce, and Labor is preparing to ramp up its scare campaigns against Dutton. It is also preparing to start spending on ads in Liberal-held seats such as Deakin and Menzies.

With one week until polling day, Dutton could do with a surprise event to turn momentum his way – or a perfect week of campaigning to create a close contest on May 3.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/haven-t-learnt-our-lesson-inside-the-dutton-campaign-as-it-enters-the-final-stretch-20250424-p5lu4q.html

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

chook shit....

Is astrology a sound basis for formulating government policy? Or numerology? Reading chook entrails? The Coalition appears to think that sort of thing is a major vote winner, Michael Pascoe writes.

They’re all the same to me, all matters of self-deception at best and fraud more often. Certainly, none should be used as the basis of government policy, yet that is precisely what the Coalition is proudly proposing.

I don’t know what the LNP gets up to in the privacy of caucus meetings, what sorcery is used to keep resurrecting John Howard, but in public the Federal Opposition is wedded to numerology i.e. the belief “in a divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events.”

It was Scott Morrison as Treasurer in 2018 who first chained the Liberal Party to the cult of 23.9, a mystical figure to be used to set the parameters of the nation for all eternity.

Now Peter Dutton has added another number to the LNP pantheon of holy digits, declaring 3 as our magic shield, the number patriotic Australians should aspire to so that their children might sleep safely in their beds, the number that will protect them from the marauding hordes of the cosmos.

At least you get a chook to roast under the entrail reading system. Numerology merely befuddles the simple and distracts the commentariat.

Mine is bigger than yours

The 23.9 is what LNP true believers think must be the upper limit of the Commonwealth Government’s tax take as a percentage of gross national product. It is a nonsense number, as I and others have written about before, but it remains at the core of the LNP’s budget liturgy.

The Mighty 3 is the percentage of our economy Peter Dutton wants to be spending in a decade’s time on things that go bang. That would mean a bit more than $130B a year, in current dollars, compared with the $51B we’re splurging on defence this year.

This holy number has been handed down to the LNP by no less a shaman than the Donald. Already suffering from being known as Temu Trump, you’d suspect Dutton would think twice before embracing an edict from Mar-a-Lago, but numerology exerts strange power over its followers.

The Trump 3 is so special the local numerologists have to approach it in stages, promising the nation a 2.5 as the first step. In the way of numbers, that’s bigger than the 2.33 Labor is pledging, an obvious case of mine-is-bigger-than-yours when men who listen would have been told size isn’t everything, it’s what you do with it that counts. 

And that’s why Dutton aspiring to the Trump 3 is so silly. There’s no indication he has any idea of what to do with it. It’s just a number that has no intrinsic relationship to effective defence of the realm. 

Doing that might cost more or less than whatever 3% of GDP is in 2035.

Defence spending folly

If the nation’s very survival depends on adequate military defence, a party worthy of governing wouldn’t be playing with magic numbers. Instead, it would be defining what threats might exist, planning how to counter them and spending what was required to carry out those plans.

Adopting the Trump 3 means the LNP wants to be seen as being locked even more tightly than Labor into being part of America’s strategic apparatus, fitting in with America’s priorities in the hope that America might then care about little ol’ Australia if we needed military assistance.

Labor has no greater ambition than that either. It just wants to do it a little more cheaply. Neither side wants to face up to independence, wants to face up to the US being of declining importance and less reliability.

It’s so much easier to just keep doing what we’ve been doing for decades. It would be hard work involving real decisions, some involving political capital,

to work out what threats might actually exist and how best to counter them.

For example, if, as according to our present adoption of America’s priorities, we must assume military conflict with China, such a threat could be countered by not making Australia a target in the event of war.

We would be better served by concentrating on our own defence, returning to the “echidna” strategy instead of hosting offensive military bases and making our biggest defence spend nuclear-powered submarines designed to lurk in the South China Sea.

The wedge

Labor, being haplessly wedged on national security, is not capable of that. It’s not even capable of being honest with the population about the security threats arising from climate change.

Dutton’s LNP, being behind in the polls close to the election, has everything to gain by playing up what the electorate strangely sees as its national security strength.

There’s no contest here about spending wisely, just spending more. If the department and its several ministers over the years hadn’t been so incompetent, we wouldn’t need to spend as much.

Crikey’s Bernard Keane gives the coalition some credit for being upfront about the need to significantly increase spending. “Even without the withdrawal of the US security guarantee, Australia’s defence spending needs to be increased to make room for the AUKUS disaster, which the major parties are stubbornly clinging to despite the array of evidence that it will fail,” he writes.

“The two questions that must be answered about any increase in defence spending are where exactly the money will be spent in service of which strategic goals, and how can we have any confidence that the Department of Defence won’t simply waste some, most, or all of the additional funding? After the Thales debacle, the Hunter-class frigates, bungled contracts for ADF health services, the deception around the LAND 200 combat management contract, the Anzac frigate servicing contract or the ONESky project, does anyone have any confidence in defence’s capacity to spend money with integrity and competence? It can’t even recruit enough soldiers, sailors and airmen and women, leaving the ADF in crisis.”

A fair summary. But in the absence of answers to such questions, numerology will do for the Australian electorate.

https://michaelwest.com.au/chook-entrails-coalition-looking-to-win-the-election-by-any-means/

 

DON'T ALLOW DUTTON AND HIS MAD TONY ABBOTT DEVOTEES COME INTO YOUR PLACE.... VOTE FOR BLAND ALBO... HE MAY NOT BE PERFECT BUT THE LIBS ARE THE PITS....

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

EV levy....

A Dutton government would consider making electric vehicle drivers pay for using roads, although the Coalition's transport spokesperson Bridget McKenzie could not say how this would be done and insisted it would not be a "tax".

Senator McKenzie told the ABC's Insiders it was a "pretty simple concept of equity" that EV owners should contribute to road maintenance, given that other motorists do so through the fuel excise.

"What we've made very clear is everyone who uses our roads should contribute to making sure they're maintained to the proper standard," she said.

"When we get into government, that's something we have to look at."

The issue has been sitting on the Albanese government's desk since the High Court decided that only the federal government could impose such a charge, vetoing a charge imposed by the Victorian government.

While fuel excise revenue is not quarantined to be spent on road maintenance, it is often framed in that way, and the shifting towards EVs risks eroding a lucrative source of federal revenue, hauling in $23 billion last financial year.

"What the Labor Party is expecting is low- and middle-income earners in [outer urban] seats like McEwen, seats like Hawke, in Bendigo … they're effectively subsidising wealthier individuals in Kooyong, in Brighton and other areas who can afford to pay for an EV. We don't think that's fair," Senator McKenzie said.

But asked how EV drivers would be made to pay, such as a road use charge, she did not offer an answer, saying only that the Coalition was "not proposing any new taxes".

The admission comes in the same week as Peter Dutton backflipped on repealing Labor's fringe benefits tax concession for EVs purchased through novated lease, which he had earlier said he would leave untouched but now says is "wasteful".

"We didn't agree with the fringe benefit tax exemption, we've been really clear on that," Senator McKenzie said.

The Coalition will also water down the National Vehicle Efficiency Standard introduced by Labor.

Don't touch backpacker visas, Nationals say

Senator McKenzie, who represents junior Coalition partner the Nationals, said a Dutton government would not cut the number of working holiday-makers granted visas.

That exemption is not something that Mr Dutton or fellow Liberals have announced as their policy, and would make it harder to achieve the unspecified cuts to net migration the opposition says it intends.

While the Coalition's calls to reduce net (temporary) migration have focused mainly on international students, the number of backpackers in the country on working holiday visas has surged since the pandemic thanks to a rule that allows British and Irish travellers to stay for three years rather than two.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-27/coalition-puts-ev-drivers-on-notice-over-road-use-tax/105221034

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.