From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. When Scott Morrison lost the last election, it was the worst result for the Liberal Party in seventy years. The cities deserted them as they lost ground in every state except Queensland. It seemed inevitable that it would take at least two terms in opposition to turn their fortunes around, and Peter Dutton planned to start by wooing the bush and the suburbs, with the cities seeming too far gone.
But that's all changed. Peter Dutton now sees a path to majority rule at the next election and is eyeing up the inner city seats. He thinks we'll get him there. Today Senior reporter at the Saturday Paper, Rick Morton on the surprising electorate Stutton hopes to win and whether he can do so while sticking with his hardline conservatism. It's Thursday, January twenty three. So Rick, for the last week you've been looking into whether the Coalition under Peter Dutton could
actually win the upcoming election. So after speaking to people, after doing this deep dive, how's it looking.
I think Peter Dutton thinks that they're in a much better position than anyone in the coalitions that they might be even a year ago. I think he can win. It's far more likely that it would be a minority government, or they'd be in a position as a coalition to negotiate for a minority government. But the calculus is still very messy and they still need quite a few seats to get into that position.
The coalition would need to win back eighteen seats as well as keeping the ones that they have at the moment. So tell me how they're thinking about that and where Dutton thinks that he might have the best chance of winning votes.
One of the things that has become clear in the last six months at least is that Dunton himself thinks that there's been a big shift in Victoria, which is a state that the Liberals have briviously not been doing very well in and has typically been a bit of a kind of albatross around their neck. He chose to soft launch his election campaign in Mount Laverley, you know, kind of relatively in a suburban Melbourne seat, last Sunday on the twelfth January.
Well, my friends, is great to be back in Victoria. Thank you very much for being here today. I want to repeat what I've said before on many occasions at the Liberal Party at a state and federal level is back in town.
It's in the federal electorate of Chisholm, which is a marginal seat, and the margin has actually is currently held
by Labor. The margin has nominally been halved to now just three and a bit percent after electoral boundary redivisions, so it's become kind of even more winnable if you like, for someone like Peter Dutton, but it's still a pretty kind of relatively progressive suburban seat, not yes in the Voice referendum, and Peter Dutton, you will notice when you're listening to what he's saying, he's not actually moderating his retric particularly about aborageal affairs.
We will start with a full audit into spending on indigenous programs and Indigenous communities, and in indigenous communities where drugs and alcohol are prevalent, we will reintroduce the casualist debit card for working age welfare is.
Suits, which to inside is evident interesting point because he thinks he's got a chance in those seats, regardless of what we were to think of as the previous kind of demographics of those electrics. But you know if you listen to what he's saying. He gave an interview with Neil Mitchell on Neil Mitchell Podcast in September last year where you know, in Dunton's own words, he said that.
In Victoria good swings and seats to us here and seats on the radar that we hadn't expected to be on the radar at this point in the cycle. There's no election this weekend, so it's a moot point. But there is a lot of encouragement for us in Victoria, a lot of encourage encouragement for us in New South Wales and in WI. I think he's coming back to us off for pretty low base.
Now if you look at Redbridge poling now there are nominally Labor linked research polling firm and they reckon in the last quarterly snapshot at the end of last year that the L and P were pretty well placed to pick up at least nine seats from Labor, not just
in Melbourne but in Sydney too. We're talking Gilmore Patterson, Bedelong, Ashton, Robertson and MacArthur Lyones, Lingiari in the Northern Territory and Bullwinkle, which is unimportant to our purposes here, but a great name for a seat, okay.
And as you say, these are kind of metropolitan seats that are not necessarily where you might think that Dutton and his message would resonate. But clearly he thinks that he has a chance for taking some of them from Labor. What about the Teals? Rick, are the coalition hoping to win some of those seats back as well?
They're not giving up on the Teal seats. Now there's
this apparently unerligned group called Australians for Prosperity. Now they're not really underligned because their executive director is a former federal MP for the Liberal National Party in the seat of Ryan and they're essentially running attack campaigns against every element of politics, Labor, the Greens, the Teals and in fact their biggest thunder certainly last year in the Queensland election was Cole Australia, who, according to the Queensland Electoral
Commission returns, provided them with seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I was still going to one Liberal MP who suggested that the Australians for Prosperity group is affiliated with the LMP, but not quite enough that you could actually pin it down on anyone, and so there's this idea that they've
got Plauds wild deniability. Now they've been running ads, betner ads, to the billboards, et cetera, specifically in Teal seats, with a focus on Manique grinding Kujong and a Leegori spender in at Worth.
The federalation has yet to be called, but already I and a number of my independent COI leagues have been subjected by the Liberal Party and their friends in various lobby groups to misleading information campaigns. We're talking about some really nasty big billboards and an attack pamphlet which was distributed to every person in Quong a couple of weeks ago.
By Dutton's own reckoning. Their strategy seems to be to at least paint the Teals as some kind of fringe hippie group like the Greens in their eyes.
Since the last election, Teal independent MPs have voted most often with the Greens, followed by Labor, and so.
They're essentially trying to paint what they think is a likely scenario that Labor will have to form some kind of minority government with.
The teals the next election will be close, with many commentators predicting a hung parliament. Are Labour Greens teals minority government, don't risk it authorized.
Alboy would rather chew off his left foot, I think than former might already government with the Greens. That's certainly the prevailing view within Labor and certainly the l ANDP think that's so they're going pretty hard on the tills as a perhaps a two term strategy in that sense where you know they might not necessarily win back all the Till seats they want this time around, but they're
going to make life hard for them. And of course, talking to TiAl MPs at the moment, they say that it's already a market change from twenty twenty two when things were not easy but better, and things are much harder this time around, they're telling me because things are already very.
Toxic after the break. Howeveryone else in the LNP feels about Dutton's divisive election strategy. So Rick, you've been looking into the Liberal parties electoral calculations ahead of the next election, and as well as needing to take seats from Labor and the Tills, they all also have to hold on to the seats that they currently have. So can we talk a bit about the seat of Bradfield in North Sydney. What does the pre selection that happened there over the weekend, what does that tell us?
Bradfield is fascinating because it used to be the jewel in the crown of the Liberal Party, used to be the safest Liberal seat in that country, and it's currently held by senior I guess you would call them moderate faction p Paul Fletcher, former minister in the Morrison and Turnbull governments. It was once described to me by people within the coalition as the most boring man in Parliament
and he's retiring now. The Teals have changed the approach in a lot of these kind of North and Northwest Sydney seats because what used to be an enormous margin has been eaten away by very persistent voices. At Bradfield Independent candidate nicolete Buller, who has some funding from Plumate two hundred.
People of Bradfield have a choice now between a community independent who's local and genuinely working for the people, or a party politician who is going to have to vote the way that Peter Dutton tells them Every single time.
People know that and so maybe poor Fletcher read the right in the room. Times are changing. He's not contesting this seat anymore now. Of course, there was a lot of talk about who was going to replace him, and the pre selections hadn't been held until the weekend just gone and Warren Mundine decided he was going to run in Bradfield. He's an anti Voice campaigner, big in the No campaign, very affiliated with Advanced Australia and all the rest of it.
The ES campaign is out there every day accusing the No campaign of lying, but the S campaign is built on a.
Pack of lies.
One lie is that Indigenous people don't currently have a voice, that Indigenous people aren't listened to in making laws and policies.
It's the opposite.
Indigenous Australians have many voices.
Radfil voted yes in the Voice referendum. They were one of the only Liberal seats in that area to do so in the metropolitan groups. So on Saturday the Protection results were announced and BACKI went to Gazelle Captarian, who's a tech executive had a career with Salesforce, which is a major winner of government contracts. She was backed by the Liberal Deputy Susan lay So Captarian one. Mundane didn't get it. No one serious thought he was going to
get it. It was a crazy choice. I don't know who thought that was a good idea, But it does tell you that there is still this ideological divide in the party when you've got these kind of public displays of disunity.
Yeah, it points to this ongoing eternal tension between the Conservatives and the moderates and the party. And I mean, how significant do you think it is that the party couldn't get the conservative wing of the party couldn't get its candidate or a candidate up in this seat. Does it say that that perhaps the coalition is less united behind Dutton's vision than he might hope.
It's there's an interesting moral kind of arithmetic going on here, I think with a lot of the moderates, I mean a lot of moderates are retire and Simon Permingham is retiring, not that being a moderate did much for him and the last kind of term of parliament, because a lot of them have had to kind of fall in lockstep behind Peter Dutton. As Peter Dutton has refused to moderate his own behavior, which you know he will go out and say, look, I'm just being a very fair and
sensible person. In fact, Neil Mitchell asked him, you know, didn't you ever go through a left wing phase at university? And Peter Dutton said.
No, I wasn't never, no, no, no. I was born sensible and I've maintained it since then.
So now that's his kind of branding, right. You've got the Peter Dutton who obviously deliberately didn't turn up for the apology to the Solo generations, later apologize for not doing that, but who then comes out just weeks ago and says I'm not going to stand in front of an aboriginal tyrest threat island a flag. The Overton window is shifting on what you can and can't get away with in public life. Trump has changed the world. There's no doubt that Pitter Dutt has been tying a little
bit of that here. You know, you've seen him in press conferences attacking journalists, particularly from the ABC, and so Dutton's approach seems to be that he doesn't need to win over every voter in a tail seat or an inner city seat. He certainly doesn't need to win over the ones who are progressive and would never change. But there are enough in the middle who can flip a seat, who might actually be like.
You know what.
And this seems to be the report I'm getting from moderate MPs who are like getting approached in their election by their constituents who are saying, well, I do I like Australia Day, and I don't want to change the date, and no one can tell me not to tell a rut Australia Day. Now. I think that's a mean spirited kind of approach to things, but it's certainly happening. I
think you would be a fool to deny that. And part of it is that the things are kind of forged by degrees and we've been witnessing this shift over many years around the world, and Dunton's approach seemed to be that there might actually be enough in it to flip a few seats.
And just finally Rick. For the last few months, the common thought on this election has been that Labor will prevail, but not by much. They will end up having to form a minority government. Do you think that that is still the most likely outcome or does it seem to you like the kind of common wisdom on that is shifting.
I think there is a prevailing view, certainly even among labor supporters, that this federal government has been pretty disappointing, even on the things on which they ran. Integrity. The National Antiicruption Commission is literally a joke at this point. I think, I don't think I'm being unfair in saying that, but they can still do the thing where they actually
point out you know who Peter Dutton is. This guy's trying to reinvent himself as his kind of working class hero, and he keeps saying, really that he believes the coalition of the Party of the working classes these days. He might mean that, he might actually believe it, but he's also someone who's worth a lot of money and who spent more time in property investment than he ever did as a cop in Queensland, neither of which are particularly
progressive pastimes. But if the retric wins, then it doesn't matter what the state of play is in terms of the facts. The rehetric has won. And I think this election, I guess, like all of them, but perhaps the stakes are higher will be fought in one on RETRIC because there's not a lot of policy details floating around.
On the other side, Rick, thank you for your time.
Thanks Ruby, it's always a pleasure.
Also in the news today, Australian Federal Police say they're investigating whether overseas actors have paid local criminals to carry out anti Semitic attacks in the country. AFP Commissioner Rhys Kershaw says there is intelligence to suggest that Australians may have been paid using cryptocurrencies to execute hate crimes domestically. And the Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, has had one on one talks with newly sworn in US Secretary of State
Marco Rubio, downplaying concerns about trade sanctions. President Donald Trump has already flagged imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico. The Senator Wong says she had positive discussions with her US counterpart about trade as well as the Orchist partnership, stating our alliance has never been stronger. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. See tomorrow.