How can you tell you’re in a teal seat? Dutton is nowhere to be seen

Liberal loyalists are adamant that Peter Dutton has been visiting teal seats in the run-up to the election to reclaim the prized territory that helped their party hold power for decades. But the opposition leader’s flightpath over the past few weeks tells a very different story, because there is no doubt he is avoiding the leafy seats where voters put the Liberals in the doghouse three years ago.

The independent MPs who won these seats – let’s call them the teals, even though they have different colours and characters – are being targeted by vigorous Liberal campaigns to paint them as proxies for Labor or the Greens. But there is a missing element in these local campaigns: the man who aspires to be prime minister.

Dutton is absent for good reason. Liberals admit that he will drag down the vote for a Liberal candidate in a teal seat if he turns up at a polling station. “It would not be doing them any favours to be seen campaigning with him,” says one. The Liberal campaign admits this every day by sending the leader to regional and outer-suburban Australia, well away from those blue-ribbon seats.

On Tuesday, for instance, he was in the NSW town of Orange to help the Nationals win the regional seat of Calare. Ten days ago, he was in the Macedon Ranges in Victoria to try to win the seat of McEwen. But he has not held an event in the Melbourne seats of Kooyong or Goldstein since the campaign began, nor held one in the Sydney seats of Mackellar, Warringah or Wentworth.

It is not that he has never been to a teal seat: he clearly has, and he has had a full term of parliament to do so. But he is keeping his distance during the campaign, when voters are paying more attention.

This is helping the teal candidates because 45 per cent of voters name Dutton as the top reason for being hesitant about voting Liberal – a key finding in the Resolve Political Monitor this week. Only 24 per cent name Anthony Albanese as a concern in voting Labor. It is now very clear that Dutton is a drag on the Liberal vote.

It has been left for others to come to the aid of the Liberal candidates, most of them women. The Liberal deputy, Sussan Ley, is figuring in social media posts for several of the candidates, while health spokeswoman Anne Ruston and finance spokeswoman Jane Hume are also visiting. Dutton is absent from the social posts.

Liberals will not talk on the record about this problem in the middle of the campaign, but they clearly need more high-profile women in positions of power to help them win back these seats – and save the ones they hold. In Bradfield, a Liberal seat on Sydney’s north shore, Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian is up against Nicolette Boele, a teal backed by Climate 200. The star appearance in Kapterian’s social media last weekend was not a federal Liberal leader; it was Gladys Berejiklian, the former NSW premier.

This is a danger sign for the Liberals if the polls are right and Albanese stays in office, whether in majority or minority government. Dutton has made no secret of the fact that he believes victory lies with the “battlers” in the outer suburbs, but there is no path to power without success in at least some of the teal seats. So Dutton looks too aloof to talk to the voters he needs. Can a Liberal leader who cannot visit a teal seat remain a Liberal leader?

The campaign against the teals has relied heavily on personal attacks. In Bradfield, again, the Liberals have a truck-mounted billboard that circles the railway stations and polling booths to remind voters that Boele once made an off-colour remark at the hairdresser. Every candidate is accountable for what they’ve done or said, and it is no different for the teals.

What is missing is a value proposition to convince the teal voters to return to the Liberals. The teal message at the last election was about climate change, integrity in government and empowering women. This year, the Liberal flyers in the same electorates are about a strong economy, cheaper energy, affordable homes, safer communities and quality healthcare. There is nothing customised for a woman who likes Boele’s message about “saying no to party politics” and getting action on climate.

One Liberal is privately worried about Team Dutton’s offer to the teal voters: “There’s nothing. They didn’t even try.” It is worth noting that the frustration over the economy might work for Dutton in these seats just as it works in others.

“The anger we saw towards us at the last election is certainly not there,” says one Liberal familiar with the teal campaigns. Dutton may not be hugely popular, but this is nothing compared to the anger at Scott Morrison as prime minister three years ago. A second difference, he says, is that Liberal supporters were too complacent about the threat in 2022 and are alive to that mistake in 2025.

There is another shift this time: the Liberals have been smarter in choosing candidates. More than half are women, many have backgrounds in business and most are socially liberal. None is like Katherine Deves, who spoke out against transgender rights as the candidate for Warringah at the last election – and suffered a 5.7 per cent fall in the Liberal primary vote.

Anything can happen in the final week of a campaign. Dutton outplayed Albanese on the Voice referendum and may do so again on May 3. So far, however, the opposition leader has run a very ordinary campaign. In week one, he sounded too ready to move into Kirribilli House. In week two, he had to retreat on working from home. Then he verballed the Indonesian president. In week four, he sounded confused about cutting $3 billion in tax breaks for electric vehicles. No week has gone clearly his way.

Albanese has been more disciplined. He fell off a stage in the first week, and finally admitted it in the fourth week, but he has been steady on policy. Dutton, in contrast, has slipped on a series of policy banana peels, raising real questions about whether he and his team have done the work required to govern.

Dutton’s absence from the teal seats will be remembered if the Coalition falls short of victory. Could he be doing more to win back those teal voters? Could he bring himself to tell them he wants their support? That would mean taking a few steps toward them, rather than expecting them to rush back to him. There’s an old saying for this: “History is made by those who show up.”

David Crowe is chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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