Uncertainty and pessimism abound. Will fear be sufficient to push Dutton to power?

Tony Abbott was formerly without electable. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson too.

And Peter Dutton too, not so long ago. But opinion polls on a large part of 2024 and at the beginning of 2025 indicated the opposite, and a night aggression of pre -electoral political advertising as my wife and I looked at the reruns of the law and the order: criminal intention suggested that the liberals had done their research and had to humanize their man.

The faithful of the detectives Goren and Eames in this venerable program were able to briefly benefit from time as the copy agent of the constable as the splendid business career (who has received a more in -depth examination since) and his more recent meeting and greeting of ordinary Australians like a good man and a good guy.

The announcement sometimes played twice in a particular break: the saturation cover suggested that the liberals had rather successfully successfully with the donors. Unfortunately for Dutton, we then acquired a more in -depth preview of the very high priority which he attaches to the rattling for the Liberal Party. The decision of Duttons to attend a fundraising in Sydney while a cyclone was descended on Queensland made him immense damage, recalling his predecessors, I do not hold a pipe, a response from companion to black summer bush fires of 2020-2021.

If a historic precedent is a guide, the Duttons task should be somewhere between great and impossible. When Australians elect their national governments, they can normally assume that they do it for at least two terms. The last soldier was the Labor government of James Scullin, elected in October 1929 and sent into oblivion by an election held a few days before Christmas in 1931.

Scullin was the victim of the largest international economic crisis in centurys; Governments everywhere failed or disintegrated under similar pressures. The economic challenges faced by the current Labor government were more modest. But will it suffer a fate similar to the administration of the era of the depression of scullins?

Normally, the scarcity of the only terms could have provided Anthony Albanese with reassurance measure. But we live in a time when the previous history seems to count for little.

It was quite clear even in the 2022 elections. It was unprecedented in several respects. There was nothing resembling the atmosphere of excitement of 1972, 1983 and 2007 or, moreover, 1929 which had brought the governments of work to the power of the opposition and awarded them solid or important majorities.

The majority of work on the ground of the House of Representatives after the 2022 elections made only three seats, and only two after the election of a speaker. Its main vote was around 32%. He won only five of the 30 seats available in the third most populous Australian state, Queensland.

There had never been a victory in work like this. Its exceptionalism haunts work efforts to obtain a re -election in 2025.

The Labor Party has won in 2022 a bit like numerous oppositions of labor of the States have won in recent decades. The margin was narrow. The unpopularity of a government and its leader was there to be exploited. Really, state labor oppositions fell above the line during a first election, sometimes capable of forming the minority government: Bob Carr, Mike Rann, Peter Beattie, Steve Bracks and Annastacia Palaszczuk were all examples.

The voters seemed to the best contrary in their support, but he was sufficiently ready to try the work and to look at the results when a new election arrived a few years later. In each case, governments were able to consolidate, sometimes winning landslide victories by establishing their diplomas, operating the holder and building new constituencies.

There were signs that Albanese could make the same after May 2022. His thin majority with three places became an advantage of five places when the work of Mary Doyle won the partial part of Aston on April 1, 2023, a seat in the traditional liberal heart. Until the end of Dunkley on March 2, 2024, also in Melbourne, the basis of electoral support which had seen Albanian in office almost two years ago seemed to be more or less intact.

Part of the problem of the coalition seemed to lie with Dutton himself. Would Australians vote for him? Or to put it more precisely: the types of voters in the continental capitals who had suddenly turned against Scott Morrison in 2022 would transfere their votes to a figure as conservative and as dark as Dutton?

This gloom has always struck me as a more important problem than conservatism. The Australians regularly elect the preservatives. They elected Malcolm Fraser when they thought he was a curator (as he was). Then they elected it twice more. They elected John Howard, who had proudly called himself the most conservative leader in the liberal parties. Then they elected it three times. They elected Abbott, even if buyers quickly followed. They elected Morrison when the coalition had seemed dead in the water.

But leaders like Howard and Morrison were much more optimistic than Dutton. They both seemed to think that Australia was a very good place full of people quite good and that all other things being equal, the future was probably quite good too when there were very good guys in charge (but, of course, it would be much better under a coalition government, which had the best guys).

Abbott, of course, was more pessimistic his description of the Syrian conflict as a struggle between the bad guys and the bad guys, and his references to the cults of death, said more about his habit of reducing complexity in the melodrama than on this Middle East. However, the prospects for abbotts, at least expressed publicly during their mandate, were far from being as dismal as they were due.

For Dutton, the enemy is near us, threatening us in the dark. His dark is in a separate league.

Portrait of Lech Blaines in his quarterly test Bad cop was convincing: Dutton was a man trained and perhaps damaged by his experience as a police officer, and a hard political man in the habit of painting whole groups of generally vulnerable people as a threat to society. Dutton evokes a vision of good people besieged by Bad, decent and respectful of laws as in constant danger of being overwhelmed by the immoral and the criminal or perhaps attacked on the way back of a restaurant in Melbourne.

While 2024 took place, no one doubted that there was sufficient dissatisfaction with the construction of the workforce, especially in many external Australian suburbs, to seriously make government damage during an election. The constantly high interest rates had increased the cost of a mortgage. Inflation had moderate, but the standard of living had taken a hit. The chattering classes began to speak of the inevitability of the minority government, but they generally meant the government of minority labor. Then they started talking about the government of a minority coalition, while the polls became harder for work.

Labor spirits have relaunched in recent weeks after Duttons is mistaken on Cyclone Alfred, a comfortable victory in the elections of Western Australia, and an opinion survey that shows the upcoming ALP on a favorite count with two shares. However, uncertainty abounds.

Albanese has often campaigned the last time badly: will he waver again? Dutton, on the other hand, is not tested as the leader of an electoral campaign, has little policy on the table and is used to disappear when there are questions that are difficult to answer.

For me, the key to this election is whether there is a sufficient number of voters, concentrated in the right places, who share enough pessimism of Dettons about their own situation and, to a lesser extent, on the general state of the country. If, in fact, there is enough congruence between Duttons Bleakness and theirs, Australia may well have a new government and a new Prime Minister in winter.

But DUTTONS BOURSED RUN may well have ended. Inflation has moderated, the reserve bank has dropped interest rates, and a feeling of skepticism seems to have settled on Dutton among voters who seriously consider it as a potential Prime Minister a few weeks ago.

He now looks more like the old mother Hubbard with a naked political closet, desperately looking to consolidate the difficult vote against the depredations of Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer, that Australias responds to Donald Trump.