First Trump, now Dutton: Albanese road tests ‘weird’ attack on opposition

Anthony Albanese and his Labor ministers are taking a leaf from the US Democrat playbook and painting their opponents as a bunch of nasty oddballs.

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was catapulted into the limelight when he called Republicans Donald Trump and J.D. Vance “just weird” in a TV interview. The barb hit a nerve and his party latched on to the theme.

Albanese labelled Barnaby Joyce “weird” over comments at an anti-wind farm rally late last month in which Joyce likened voting to loading a firearm to say “goodbye” to Labor MPs.

Scrolling through social media posts (which have gained hundreds of thousands of views) and watching question time this week, it’s clear that Labor decided to seize on some of Dutton’s eccentric, fringe MPs to tie them to the opposition leader.

Instead of the “weird” line, ministers are using casual Australian vernacular like “old mate” and “this bloke”.

“If awards were handed out for cookers, this bloke would win a Michelin star,” Education Minister Jason Clare said of Senator Gerard Rennick on Monday, after he said Labor’s childcare policies were destroying the traditional family unit.

Albanese continued in question time: “Our friend Senator Rennick, personally endorsed by [Dutton] ... went on to say it ‘brainwashed children early with the woke mind virus’. I mean, this stuff is just extraordinary.”

With ‘weirdo’ jibes hitting the mark in the US, Labor is now getting on board to bolster its existing, wider narrative core to its re-election pitch: that Dutton’s conservatives are backward – on topics from climate change to social policy – and have not moved on from the Morrison era.

In a briefing on Albanese’s key message to colleagues on Tuesday, a party spokesman cited the prime minister as saying the election was nearing and a clear choice emerging between Labor and Dutton, who was “addicted to saying no”.

“He just says no to everything and is negative about everything,” Albanese said last month, one of a growing number of recent examples when he has pivoted from a question about Labor to a rehearsed knock on Dutton.

It’s not clear, though, if voters share Labor’s private sense that voters will view Dutton as too cold and cynical when they get a good look at him during the heat of a campaign. Labor said the same of Tony Abbott, and Dutton has led Albanese for three consecutive months as preferred prime minister in the Resolve Strategic Monitor.

A chief of staff to a Labor minister told this masthead they were worried that in regular meetings with all other ministerial chiefs, there appeared to be a lazy assumption that Dutton was too negative and not modern enough to win.

Putting Dutton to one side, Albanese is on more solid ground trash-talking MAGA-style backbenchers like Rennick and Alex Antic, as well as more obscure and underperforming shadow ministers.

On the Coalition side, there is worry about hard-right elements of the party in places such as Victoria – where Liberals are bizarrely accused of fraternising with gender-critical neo-Nazis – and South Australia, where state divisions have strong right-wing elements that do not reflect their more cosmopolitan states.

Rennick and anti-woke senator Antic showed they could create problems for the Coalition in Canberra when they threatened to stop supporting party policy over the issue of COVID vaccines.

Ridiculing opposition frontbenchers Angus Taylor, Jason Wood and Luke Howarth, Albanese displayed his confidence in what he sees as a more mature team that reflects modern Australia in its attitudes, tone and demographic make-up.

“I think that we could produce, say, a second or third cabinet that would be stronger than the shadow cabinet,” he said.

“I mean, there’s a bunch of people, if anyone here knows what portfolio Jason Wood has got, I don’t know, but he sits in the front, so I assume he’s got something.”

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