Looking after number 1

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton self described ‘strong and decisive’ image has a lot of risks coming into the election.

Recently a Chinese research vessel sailed to the south of the Australian continent. Dutton was quick out of the blocks accusing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of weakness without saying what the weakness was. It turns out the vessel was involved in a research project with New Zealand scientists and doing nothing ‘wrong’. This The New Daily report discusses the New Zealand incident and a number of other examples that could be considered fear mongering by the Coalition against the Chinese. The premise of the article is that while the Coalition sees potential in creating fear around China, there is a large number of people from China or of Chinese ancestry that legally and in some cases for a long period of time have called Australia home. Don’t forget the African ‘gangs’ in Melbourne some time ago and even the ‘children overboard’ affair orchestrated by former Prime Minister Howard. It’s really easy to cheese people off by inflaming redneck hatred of people that look like they do.

Two weeks ago, the Coalition told the world that, like the current administration in the USA, public servants would be required to work from the office full time and 41,000 workers won’t have a job after they assume power. The policy morphed over the next week to ‘well it might only be the public servants in Canberra that have to work from the office’, the job losses won’t affect (undefined) ‘front-line’ services and then the policy shape shifted again to public servants will be able to keep their flexible working conditions and the job losses will be from a hiring freeze and natural attrition.

It’s amazing that a political party who claims to be looking after the working people (and specifically targeting seats in outer-suburban areas of our large cities) was so tone deaf they make the announcement anyway. The large property owners and developers who prefer to see buildings fully tenanted might have been consulted as if the building is full the return on investment is better due to increased leasing income. The policy development process almost certainly didn’t consider those who have flexible working arrangements with their employer for a variety of reasons including providing care for members of their family, geographic location, not having to waste hours in the commute from Dutton’s targeted ‘outer suburbs’ or a multitude of other reasons. 

It should also be noted that non-government entities large and small are also promoting flexible working arrangements. If nothing else, the employer benefits because they can reduce their leased ‘footprint’ in expensive central city office buildings – which directly improves the company’s balance sheet. Regardless, if the employee was always ‘down the pub’ instead of working, the arrangements around flexible working always have provision for addressing any performance issues. Its really easy to cheese people off by claiming that flexibility around your work arrangements mean you are not doing your job properly.

The internal polling must have been really dire to take the risk of performing a triple backflip with pike change in policy during an election campaign and Jane Hume, who announced the policy, is obviously ‘taking one for the team’. Dutton claims they have listened to feedback, but is this accurate or is it another case of saying whatever is necessary at the time, in a similar manner to the second referendum on a Voice to Parliament and the various other ‘non-core’ promises (to steal a phrase from former Coalition PM Howard)?

If it’s a genuine change of heart, that is a good thing and demonstrates that Dutton can adapt to changing circumstances. Based on previous history it probably isn’t. Fortunately we have a recent example of what happens when a Coalition Government gets elected. The Queensland LNP Government came to power promising to continue the current programs of the former Palaszczuk/Miles ALP government. Since then:

• They have announced a review of Queensland’s legislated emissions reduction program which the LNP voted for while in opposition
• They have announced an independent review of a number of public hospital expansion programs
• They have announced a review of the children’s gender clinics across the state
• Despite promising no new stadiums, commissioned a review of the venues for the 2032 Olympics and then announced the main arena would be a new stadium to be built in a parkland area close to the Brisbane CBD

The reviews sound like finding a smokescreen to enable implementation of typical conservative dogma – don’t they?

We should be electing our politicians based on past performance and policies as we can’t expect them to know or necessarily have the immediate answer for what is coming our way in the future. While all sides of politics have a long history of broken promises, sometimes external influences force a change (such as Albanese’s power price reductions) while others were never going to happen (such as Dutton’s second referendum on ‘the voice’ to Parliament).

Dutton is probably correct in stating the backflip on the ban on working from home was due to public outcry. However, he doesn’t have a record of long term commitment to anything except self advancement. A Doctors group has named Dutton as the most disliked Health Minister in recent times (to ‘Sky after darks’ disgust) and when Dutton was Home Affairs Minister, the department certainly wasn’t open and honest in its dealing with others. When you add to that a dearth of proper policy development and research in the Coalition’s back office demonstrated by the ‘working from the office’ policy you’d have to be worried if the same group of people were in charge of policy development for the country for the next three years. 

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