Not winning in a landslide.

Peter Dutton's first week of the election campaign.

I can't understand it. Labor is just so bad. Why aren't we 10 points up and heading for a landslide?

That's the first line of my AFR column this week. It's word-for-word what a long-time Liberal Party member asked me a few weeks ago, and I've heard dozens of variations of the same theme. In the last month or so, I've attended or spoken at half a dozen Liberal Party campaign events. The disconnect between the sense of urgency of party members who so desperately want a change of government in Canberra and a campaign that 'half the time looks like its sleepwalking' (as a volunteer put it to me) is enormous.

Everyone in politics always says, 'This is the most important federal/state/local council election in my lifetime…blah, blah, blah….' Except this time in 2025 it could be true. This is not a Labor Party led by Bob Hawke, Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Bill Shorten, or even Mark Latham. (I'm deliberately not including in that list Paul Keating, who for all the economic good he might have done as treasurer, as prime minister set the country on a cultural course from which we haven't yet recovered. The origins of the Voice to Parliament and the attempt to divide Australians according to their race go back to 1992 and Keating's speech at Redfern. But that's a discussion for another day.)

It's one thing for the prime minister to be left-wing. It's something else again to hafve a prime minister that is both left-wing and weak. Albanese's weakness has allowed Australia's foreign policy to be run according to the ego of Penny Wong, our energy policy to be run by a climate change zealot in Chris Bowen, and our immigration policy to be run by Tony Burke who determines our migrant intake through the prism of the ethnic politics of Sydney. Of those three, the worst is Wong. Her refusal when she was in Israel to visit the sites of the massacre of 7 October is unforgivable and a deep stain on Australia. Not only did Albanese not direct Wong to go the scenes of what happened, he defended her decision, saying it was 'not about an opportunity for a photo op'. If that's what he honestly thinks such a visit was about, he's not fit to be prime minister. And all of this is without mentioning Jim Chalmers and the federal government budget.

A left-wing government relying on the votes of the Greens to pass legislation would be a disaster for the country. That's what's happened in Victoria, and the results of such a toxic cocktail speak for themselves. It's not complicated. I don't know why Dutton doesn't say 'If you want Australia to end up like Victoria vote for Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party.' The Greens are an extremist party. Dutton should make clear the Liberals will preference the Greens last and demand Labor does the same.

Of course, Peter Dutton could still end up winning the election. But a month from election day, the polls and the bookies say he won't. At this stage, a bigger problem for the Coalition campaign than its lack of policies is its lack of energy. If you genuinely believe the country's future is at stake, you should act like it is. Maybe the Liberals think the awfulness of Labor speaks for itself (although, given the polls, clearly, it doesn't). Maybe not enough Liberals believe that another three years of a Labor government, or three years of a Labor/Greens/Teal government will be as bad as I think it will be. Maybe the Liberals believe if they fight too hard and show too much passion they'll look too much like Donald Trump and frighten the voters. (The passion displayed by Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine during the Voice campaign energised 60% of Australians to vote yes to all Australians being equal. Six months before the referendum vote support for Yes was as high as 70%. Price and Mundine explained to Australians what was at stake at the referendum and Australians responded.)

None of what I've just written is anything new. Dutton himself acknowledged the campaign's listlessness and his supporters' concerns. This is from a media report on Tuesday.

Peter Dutton has sought to rally Coalition MPs nervous about the party's performance and the drop in the Opposition Leader's personal approval ratings, assuring those worried that the Coalition has not convinced voters of its message that 'You haven't seen anything yet'.

Mr Dutton on Tuesday hit back at suggestions his campaign has not started well, declaring it was too early to make any judgment on the Coalition's performance.

'I don't think you've seen anything yet - wait until we get into this campaign and you will see more of what we've got to offer,' the Liberal leader said when confronted with the critiques from within his own party.

We shall see. Hopefully there is more to come from the Coalition. This is some of the rest of my AFR piece.

An election run any time in Australia's history under the same economic and financial conditions as today would see the Coalition win easily. But the country has changed.

To begin with, around half of the adult population now pay no net tax. That's half the country largely immune to tax increases and unconcerned about tax cuts. It's a group of Australians particularly impacted by inflation. Still, the paradox is that those reliant on benefits and transfer payments amid a cost-of-living crisis are more likely to trust the ALP to keep their benefits secure, even if they might suspect that Labor helped cause the crisis in the first place. Or as one Liberal MP put it: 'The worse it gets, the better it gets for Labor.'

Then there's COVID-19, the consequences of which will take decades to comprehend. During the pandemic the government paid people not to work, and sometimes even paid them more than they were getting in their regular job. JobKeeper might have ended four years ago, but the mindset it created, not just among recipients but within the community, is difficult to undo.

The Liberals' traditional strength in economic management doesn't rate how it used to, a problem that also affects the party at the state level. Similarly, through no fault of the Liberals, their appeals to aspiration and success, a message that until now has been central to its brand, rings hollow when families are struggling to manage to the end of the week.

In the absence of an alternative narrative, the Liberals are reduced to emphasising relatively minor policy differences while leaving unchallenged the central premise of Labor's campaign, which is that the problems caused by higher government spending will be solved by even more government spending.

To many voters, what the Coalition would do differently to Labor is not immediately obvious. Over the next four weeks, that may change.

Recommended Reading

A few months ago I mentioned some of the authors and sites on Substack I subscribe to like David McGrogan's 'News from Uncibal', Matthew B Crawford's 'Archedelia', and Bari Weiss's 'Free Press'. Another site to which I subscribe is Michael Shellenberger's 'Public'. Shellenberger is an astute and perceptive critic of the left and understands the left, because as he talks about he once was of the left. He's very good on all the big things like freedom of speech, government censorship, climate change, and Covid authoritarianism.

Shellenberger also hosts a podcast and last week he spoke to Russell R Reno, a former professor of theology in America who is the editor of the journal, 'First Things'. In 2019 Reno wrote a book, 'Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West' that attempts to explain what's happened to the West. The book received some publicity when it first came out, but in the last few months, it has got more attention after Trump's election victory and N.S. Lyons wrote an extended analysis of it on his Substack in February that provoked a lot of discussion.

In his conversation with Shellenberger, Reno talked about the importance of the 'Strong Gods' of family, faith, and flag - all concepts attacked by the left. To listen to the podcast, you need to be a paid subscriber to Public, but you might like to consider a subscription. This is Shellenberger's summary of what Reno talked about in the podcast.

'The security and pride of knowing that you belong to a great nation is a powerful compensation,' Reno told us in a podcast we recorded last week, 'and I think it's wrong to diss it as merely a psychological compensation. 'Make America Great Again' — however much may be derided in faculty lounges — is heard by many Americans as a word of encouragement. Half of Americans have zero net worth. For them, their identity as Americans is a very precious thing.'

While nationalism is at the centre, faith and family are also essential, explains Reno. Liberal and conservative thinkers in the postwar period emphasised so much flux and change that they left the current generation unmoored. 'I have baby boomer friends that complain about young people,' said Reno. "They're so safety oriented. They don't take risks. They don't have a sense of adventure.' I want to hit them in their heads and say, 'That was a luxury for us because we had a set pattern of life that we could deviate from.'

High levels of anxiety among young people stem not just from social media but their huge number of choices in terms of what to do with their lives, whether to marry and have kids and even whether to change their gender. When Reno was young, he said, 'I knew people didn't always get married, but I just assumed that was the cultural jig, the template, and that gave confidence to take all kinds of risks because they weren't ultimate risks…'

'Young people are spiritually exhausted treading water endlessly in this liquid world with no dry land in sight.'

Thank you for your support.

kind regards John