The Chaser Report - R.I.Peter Dutton - 2025 Election Recap

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

In the wake of a Labor landslide, Charles and Dom hold a political post-mortem for a man who tried to bring nuclear power to Australia, and ended up exploding his party's vote instead. Plus, Charles sees echos of the old headkicking Albo in the PM's election night speech – will he be bolder in his second term? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gattigall Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to this special edition of The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. History in the making, Charles, because if you look at the graph, and I did, someone put together a graph of all the first term governments in certainly recent history. So for decades and decades, all the times that governments have switched from one party to another. Yes. that party went to an election and asked the Australian people for a second chance every time their majority was reduced.

Yes, since 1901. It's never happened before. Every time, Charles, until Peter Dutton, yes. Steped up to the leadership of the coalition. Yes. Anthony Albanese somehow from no one knows where stepped up from the stage that he fell off. Got a new lease of life and became all confident and optimistic. mystic and started talking about hope and kindness and stuff.

Yes. And then Labor, it still seems strange to say this, Charles, won a massive landslide on Saturday. Is that actually something that really happened? Yeah. Are we sure that that's... This isn't just some sort of fever dream that we've had under a new Dutton government. Is there not a court of disputed return?

I mean, are we sure that the postals and the pre-poles have come in? Because Senator James McGraw is pretty clear on Saturday night. He's still there. We shouldn't jump the gun. I don't want to jump the gun. Can you tell me, can you tell me for sure? Is Anthony Aberdezzi the next Prime Minister of Australia? Well, what I can tell you is I actually think that what we saw,

especially on election night, is much closer to the elbow that everyone knows. That actually was there 20, 30 years ago. Like, rats in the rank elbow, the guy that turns up and gets stuff done. The original, it's OG elbow. The guy on the toilet wall, it's. Metro? And it makes me quite intrigued about what's going to happen over the next. Because, like, I've known now since, like, I was very young, right?

Like, I've seen him. Labor royalty. Yeah, no. I don't have royalty in Labor. But I've seen him working the floor at young Labor conferences and things like that. He was always a bit older than me. But, you know, like, there's a sort of bastard cunning and a back, a fighter, street fighter, back against the wall.

Now we're just going to fuck everyone. type sort of thing that he just has not had for the last three years. The guy that likes fighting Tories, supposedly. But you saw that, like he sort of felt like this year culminating in his amazingly good election speech, that was the elbow that you used to see on conference floor, where he had whitened determination, but also passion and courage. So can we just just take a moment to note? This is a terrible result for satirists around the time.

Charles went to conference floor, which means that his perspective is already. Nothing like that of the ordinary Australian who wouldn't go near an ALP conference to say they'll ask. Let's take some ads and then we'll get into it. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore?

FIS is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. Now, Charles, I should clarify my incredulity. at the result. It's not out of any overwhelming joy or disappointed at the result.

Well, of course, I'm highly neutral in all these matters. But can I just, can I clarify, the reason I'm surprised is because I think Labor was surprised. The polls were wrong. They were really wrong, just as in 2019, but in the other direction. But, Dom, I'm surprised that you're surprised because, and I'm putting you on record here, which is you called the election three years ago. Did I?

Yes, you and Andrew Hanson. had an episode of The Chaser Report three years ago, and the episode title, and it was to commit, like, the episode was all about Peter Dutton had just been elected opposition leader, and the episode title was he who will not be prime minister. That was the name of the title of the episode. And for 15 minutes, you just, you and Andrew spent the whole time just explaining why Peter Dutton was completely and utterly unelectable. He's a little grab from it. the job, though, because

I don't know, political scientist went back and looked at all the election records in the past, and whenever government's changed, the first opposition leader out of the gate has always lost every single time forever. Every single one. Every single one, pretty much. Well, that's encouraging for those who don't want nothing for PM, isn't it? Charles, that doesn't sound like me. I think that may have been some sort of AI.

I think that's the before Dom was constrained by ABC Editorial Guidelines, Dom, wasn't it? Or something? I don't know who that person was. All I know was tough. I'm just happy that the election was the winner, that the Australian people chose who they wanted to choose. But no, but look. And for balance, you're also not happy.

Oh, no. I'm just neutral. I'm completely neutral. But look, let me be really clear about it. Because nobody saw this coming. I mean, there's lots of wisdom out of after the event. But what I saw on the face of Anthony Albanese on Saturday night and of his colleagues was a bunch of people who for their entire lives had felt that they weren't popular or cool.

Like I think even when our. I became prime minister. Yeah. It was such a sort of narrow thing and so driven by Scott Morrison. Yes. But the idea that there was a giant popular wave going, Labor, we love you, you're amazing. You'd have a landslide. Like, that was a deep shock to them.

And look, I think I'm going to fess up and say, I too was suffering from a PTSD of believing that Australian elections were all about having the worst possible outcome where just the most horrible people tend to get elected, right? Like, we've just been trained to expect the worst of the Australian public that essentially the most racist homophobic sort of, I don't know, or marketing sales, use car salesman will just end up being the prime minister that, like, we just sort of had to adjust to the fact that actually people would much prefer to have just a mediocre middle of the road, unambitious government, rather than the racist. This is the thing that interests me most about you saying that that was conference floor elbow, the elbow with Vim and Vigar. And he certainly has been looking as though, I don't know, someone gave him adrenaline shots every day of the campaign.

It's certainly true. But it is interesting because you've been so down on him for being middle of the road and cautious. But now I'm reading analysts, you know, a lot of commentary saying what a brilliant stance that was. Yes. Because the Times favor of him. And, Charles, look, and can I say one aspect of it that I think is absolutely.

genuinely good and I admit just I didn't pick it until now is that by playing a dead bat for the last four years to all this cultural stuff like the trans stuff that they tried to do at the last election and to a certain extent even some of the sort of Australia Day and you know welcome to country stuff this election like what you didn't see Albo do even with the welcome to country stuff is sort of lean into it and start going, no, no, no, we've got to defend it. He just sort of went, oh, come on, let's get over this. He played a dead bat to all those things.

And in some ways, you want him to be a better leader than that. You want him to actually get out there and... Well, he did, having just won the election, he was very clear about that in the country. But by having a dead bat to that stuff, it's taken the power out of all that stuff. Like, actually, it's the perfect antidote to bullshit questions that are completely confected and designed to divide. Instead of getting in and mucking around in that division.

We're taking the bait. You just sort of, you just leave the bait and just go, okay, well, whatever, you know, Europe, you go and do you, but I'm just going to actually look after the country. But he also said, what he said repeatedly, and this is a, he said, look, we're focused on cost of living and that's the thing. And it's been fascinating watching Sky News, Peter Credlin and Sherry Markson and a whole bunch of them, Andrew Bolt. Their solution is, well, he didn't get enough into the culture wars. They're all these opportunities for culture wars and he didn't take any of them up.

And so they've got exactly the wrong answer to that because they're saying that about they're saying that and didn't do enough culture wars and that there were all these opportunities that he didn't. He should talk more about that stuff. Well, I think, I agree. I think, I think clearly the solution is to be even more out of touch with the centre. I think that's what the Liberal Party should learn from this. Go further to the peripheries. Yeah, yeah. The interesting thing about all this, Charles, is do you remember one of the most controversial

jokes we've ever written in the first series of election chaser? Oh, yeah. Going back way back to 2001, that we had this graphic of Kim Beasley's, yeah, Kim, it was Kim Beasley's poll numbers, and then Howe was next to him, and then Kim Beasley was doing much better in the polls, and a plane flies into one of the two graphs. Now, that was an edgy joke at the time. We were slammed for it somewhat, although not as badly as the graph was. But it did correctly summarize what happened.

I mean, we were going along. People didn't like John Howard. He had two terms. He was on the way out. Kim Beasley seemed like a kind of elbow-esque centrist figure, or the way elbows made himself, a kind of bumbling, person you can have a beer with. And that's always interesting in an Australian election.

And then, yeah, things became uncertain. There was 9-11 and the Tampa, and there was nothing that Labor could do. And in this case, Stutton really was riding high in the polls. taking advantage of the economic crisis that we had and the cost of living problems and all this sort of stuff and saying so. But he really did get screwed over by Donald Trump doubly.

Firstly, because Donald Trump, you know, has cast the world into such dramatic uncertainty in recent weeks that it's not surprising that incumbents are favourable, but also Petit Dutton did try out some Trumpian policies. Yes. And so he essentially based a lot of his strategy on someone who suddenly became toxic. Justina Price was the shadow minister.

government efficiency. Yes, she was going to run the doge, and she's the one who got up and didn't get the memo and said, make Australia great again. I mean, not helpful. Yeah. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore?

FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. I think it's absolutely true that thank God for Donald Trump, right? But I think part of it is also it made all those sort of cultural stuff feel not funny anymore. Like there's a point of weird.

Oh, yeah. So it made. It sort of has, it sort of crystallized what the action will be that follows that thought. And it's not actually, it's not sort of just funny things you can make jokes about. This is really bad stuff that sort of. is unpleasant and nasty and things are there. When you've got a policy of sacking 41,000 public servants and we've seen in America a huge number of public servants sacked, and we've heard those stories are filtered down.

We've heard lots of quotes from people who've lost their livelihood from Elon Musk. And when you've got that same policy, I mean, who are the people that wanted 41,000 public servants sacked? And this is the biggest problem that Peter Dutton had, and as we've discussed on the podcast before, he has spent the past three years in a filter bubble. He's been talking to people who cheer anti-trans statements, who cheer anti-woke crusading, who think that Canberra is a toxic mess and don't like it.

And so if you only talk to 2GB and Sky News, and I mean, Paul Murray ran this incredibly favourable one-hour special on how great Peter Dutton was. If that's your yardstick for normal, you actually are going to lose touch with what people want and lose touch with the cost of living stuff. But also, you lose touch with being matched fit. You're not match fit because,

Because you haven't faced hardball questions for the last three years. And I think that was, I mean, seeing Peter Dutton taking those press conferences, you know, on the hustings each day, he didn't really know how to deal with difficult questions. Whereas Alba did do, not Scott Nognees, but he did do 2GB and all that stuff a lot. And he was used to the thorny question. Yeah. And you knew how to navigate it. Yeah.

Yeah, just to navigate around it. And, but I think the other thing is it would have been. It's been entirely possible, even with Trump, for Labor to fuck this up, right? Yes, we shouldn't rule out that. Because as we said, the moment they came into office, Labor are good at stuffing things up. But not this time. The focus and discipline was surprisingly high. And a really good demonstration of the ability to fuck this up is the Kamala Harris campaign was also running against Donald Trump.

Yes. And she lost, right? And it's interesting because as I understand that the ALP went over, sent some people over to the and learned a lot about what went wrong with the Kamala Harris. Like kind of car crash investigators. Yeah. What's that show? Air crash investigation.

Yeah, yeah. Basically scraping stuff off the runway of Kamala Harris's campaign. And the one thing that they came back home with was we should have just focused on cost of living. Like, actually, we all got bound up in all these culture wars and stuff like that, all these left-wing culture wars. Like they took the bait from the right, but also they ran their own sort of stuff. It was so devoid of grounded experience that actually normal people want to hear from their politicians. And that is, and I mean, it was remarkable in the closing weeks of the campaign how on message and Disneyland the entire Labor Front bench were. Every question came back to, and that's why we're doing.

I mean, it was boring, right? It was boring. And the talk and the Medicare thing. I mean, this is the thing, the most on-brand Labor thing that they can claim. And even though, I mean, if you've tried to use Medicare or whatever to go and get bulk billing recently, my God, like the point made in one of the debates where someone went, you'll also need this credit card is completely true. Although admittedly Alba had a policy on that. But yeah, they were very much leaning into the things that they were known to be grew up. It's going to cost $17 billion.

Yeah, yeah. That policy. But, Charles, I want to play two things that you said back to you. The first thing is for my enjoyment. This is when Charles, I don't know, a year or so ago, called the election for Dutton. And I can tell you that what will happen at the next election is that Anthony Albanesey will be defeated

and Peter Dutton will be the next Prime Minister of Australia. To be fair, that's what everyone thought at the time. Yeah, in fair, look, look, Dom, you know, that was AI, right? Well, I just think people placed too much, you know, there's too much emphasis nowadays on what you've said on record. On consistency. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think what you've got to do is sort of broaden out.

Like, think of me as somebody, think of the truth behind the truth in that, in those statements. Okay. Yeah. The truth behind the truth. Yeah. Yeah. What a helpful view.

So then I want to give you a more positive view of something that you said for a very long time. And it's absolutely true is that you've got to look at what the narrative is. what is the story being told? How does this fit into? Yes. And, I mean, this is a, you know, a thing people do in political science. And Peter Dutton's story was incredibly incoherent and changed constantly throughout the campaign.

Yes. And it started with the premise that Anthony Albanyi was a disaster. He was the worst politician. He was terrible. He'd taken Australia into the red disastrously. But I kind of think he was too new for that. Alba had only been there for a few years. Yes.

He'd done a few things that directly benefited people's cost of living, like costing prescription drugs. Huge reductions to the cost of childcare, which wasn't discussed at all during the campaign, weirdly enough. But for people like me with kids in childcare, it's gotten much cheaper. And the idea that this guy was a massive disaster who was ruining everything, I don't think the Australian people ever bought. But didn't like him very much, probably much at the time. But that didn't work. And so if you don't believe with that premise, why are you going to change your vote? And then what was the offering by way of an alternative?

When they came out with their defence policy, their big signature $21 billion defence policy, They're asked what they're going to spend the money on. And the answer was, well, we're going to have an inquiry to work out what we're going to spend the money on. But we're going to spend $21 billion more on defence. They just hadn't done the work in so many areas of policy. Yes. It did feel like part of it was they felt that they could skate to victory. They could voice it.

Yeah, they could voice it. And I really think that the 2010 election was very much in their mind the whole time. I don't know whether you remember, but in the 2000... The first Abbott election. No, this was the first Kevin Rudd. Oh, no, wait a minute. No, the 2010 was when Julia Gillard got... It was Julia Gillard.

It was Julia Gillard. And she basically... She didn't lose, but only by the narrative margins. Yes, and they sort of went... Oh, chaos and disfunction. And they had lots of money from fossil fuel companies and from mining companies because the mining tax had been on this thing and there was a carbon tax on the agenda and there was all this sort of carbon pricing stuff.

Yeah, but Labor had actually learned, hadn't they, this time around? Because Alba was there. Yeah. There was no internal division, except for poor old Daniel Plibersec, having to approve coal mines. But there, but there was no leadership stuff at all. Yes. And they did actually run, from what we've heard, a cabinet-style government where it wasn't the command and control Rudd stuff.

So, whereas the, yeah, the Rudd-Gillard stuff, of course, that was massively chaotic. You brought in a new prime minister, then dumped him two years later. Yes. Of course, voters were going, hang out. We voted for Kevin Rudd. What are you doing? But so, so I think almost one of the disadvantages that Dutton had was that he had such a long memory that he thought he'd seen it done easily before.

So he thought it could be done easily again. And he just completely misread his opponent. Well, to be fair to Dutton, though, being relentlessly negative worked very well with the voice. For Tony Abbott. If you don't know, if you don't know vote, no. I mean, that line was incredibly effective. But that was fairly specific to the circumstances of that situation where people didn't know what the proposal was and still probably don't really understand what would have happened if they voted yes. But also I think it taught Alba a lot.

Like, you know, like Albo then spent the next two years back to the wall absolutely fighting his way out of a ditch, which is actually the thing that Albo has done his entire life. Well, when you're in the Labor left and you know this very well, Charles, with your family. You're always the underdog. You're always the underdog. Yeah. And the fact that he, you know, would, yeah, be able to actually succeed and climb the ranks of the ALP from that position is exactly sort of metaphorically what he did, you know, after the boys.

So Charles, we've, let's leave that one here. And let's be honest about what we're doing here. We're going to record another episode about what happens here. What's the new Albanese government going to look like? Who might run the coalition? We're going to record it now because you're going to Melbourne tomorrow. We can't do one tomorrow. So it might be out of date by the time you hear it.

But I think the broad themes will still apply. This has actually been a fairly serious analytical episode. What's wrong with us? But also so's tomorrow's episode because I've got a real theory. I've got a absolutely proper theory. Who's going to be the coalition? Who's going to be the new opposition leader? Still frankly who's going to be in the opposition.

But also what will the second term of the Albanese government look like? Yeah. And what is their agenda going to be? Did you see the report on the day of saying that they're already starting to think about a third term? Well, that doesn't look like an act of hubris anymore. That's probably what's given the size of the majority, it would be very hard for them to lose the next election. That said, there's still labour. So let's remember, like, you know, anything's possible.

But we'll take a look in tomorrow's episode at the future from here. Thank you for bearing with us if you've bothered to wade through this quality analysis from people you can trust because at least. least one of us called it to Dutton. We're part of the Icona Class Network. We'll catch you tomorrow. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore.

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