Liberal Party machine campaign is in self-destruct mode

Among the gaffs, backtracks and walk-backs, the faltering competency of Liberal back-room strategists threatens to undermine Peter Dutton’s struggle to make his case for getting Australia back on track.

Since the election campaign started, the spectre of Donald Trump has re-emerged from the vault, Liberal candidates have displayed an economy with the truth, and Dutton himself has run into problems selling his keynote policy, thanks to the distraction of conflating his wealth and his family with Australia’s housing crisis.

On Monday, Dutton took his 20-year-old son Harry on the campaign trail to spruik the Coalition’s plan to offer tax breaks on first-home loan repayments. But when Dutton, who reportedly made $30 million of property transactions across 26 pieces of real estate over 35 years, was asked if he would be a guarantor as the bank of mum and dad, he fudged the answer and suffered the consequences of looking foolish and playing voters for fools. After the media erupted, Dutton came out on Tuesday and said he’d help with a deposit “at some stage”.

Earlier in Victoria, a Liberal candidate, Amelia Hamer, the grand-niece of former Victorian premier Rupert Hamer, repeatedly pitched herself as a renter to appeal to frustrated young voters in the teal independent-held former Liberal blue ribbon seat of Kooyong, only to be revealed by the Herald as owning an apartment in Canberra and a flat in London.

Dutton’s decision to use his son as a policy explainer was unwise. Not least because it exposed his family to ridicule, but his wealth showed him curiously detached and remote from the realities facing most Australians trying to buy homes. And Hamer’s self-delusional or hypocritical empathy with renters has made a fool of her campaign.

Meanwhile, on Trump, Dutton, in the early days had evoked the Liberals’ proven track record of dealing with the US president until he went rogue. His malign influence was swept under the carpet, but on Sunday Country Liberal Party Senator Jacinta Price stood at Dutton’s side and breathed life into Trump when she was filmed saying, “Make Australia great again”. Photos also unhelpfully emerged of her wearing a MAGA cap at Christmas.

On Tuesday, the Herald reported on the questionable fund-raising history of the Liberal candidate for Bennelong, Scott Yung and the series of anonymous leaks against him aimed at destabilising his candidacy.

It is difficult to recall a federal election campaign so full of self-inflicted damage.

But the Liberal Party rot has been festering awhile. In Victoria last year, the party machine failed to stop a damaging defamation saga between a backbencher and the state leader. In NSW last August, the party headquarters failed to submit nomination forms for up to 140 NSW local government candidates.

Political party machines used to work to avoid such mistakes. They assiduously vetted parliamentary hopefuls, ensured candidates and leaders stayed on message and protected them from making fools of themselves and the party, attributes sadly absent from the Liberals playbook this election.

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