Will Dutton be tempted by Trump’s ‘war on woke’?

What does a Donald Trump presidency mean for Australia?

Aside from preparing for tough fights over defence deals, climate and trade wars, Australian MPs may well consider taking elements of the political juggernaut campaign that was Trump.

Will Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, for example, be tempted to replicate Trump’s “war on woke” as an election strategy?

Senior writer Jacqueline Maley, chief political correspondent David Crowe and Nine’s national affairs editor Andrew Probyn dissect the implications of the US election on Australia in the latest Morning Edition: Inside Politics podcast.

To listen, click the player below or scroll down for an extract of their conversation.

Maley: I don’t know if it’s even possible to answer this question, but let’s try anyway. Is Trump in the White House likely to help Labor win the next election again? Or Dutton and the Coalition?

Probyn: That’s a really, tremendously difficult question to answer. I suppose the key to that will be how much of the Trump playbook does Dutton take?

But you can’t look at the Trump presidency, or Trump himself, as being a Republican. He has got the Grand Old Party to surrender itself to him. So, it is a party that is utterly contained within his grasp. And therefore every major decision will be made by Trump.

So there is no go-to playbook for Dutton, but he might want to play with some of those anti-woke themes that we hear and have heard from Dutton over the past couple of years.

Notwithstanding what people think about these things, there’s definitely a bit of a reaction against political correctness, as we once called it, a tussle with idealism over practicality. That is Trumpism.

I think that will be the temptation for Dutton. But at the same time, you know, the grand gift that we have as our Commonwealth is compulsory voting. That really does drag everything back into the centre, and it drags everything into the lounge room and everyone’s dinner table.

Maley: David, tell me what you think about that – taking elements of the incredible success of Trump as a political juggernaut, taking elements of that and importing them into Australia. Is that a winning strategy for the Coalition? We saw that play out a little bit with the abortion debate in the Queensland election.

Crowe: I think that highlights the fact that Peter Dutton can’t take an American recipe book and cook up a storm in Australia. We are such a different country ... So copying the Trump playbook won’t work for Peter Dutton here, but harnessing the frustration about the cost of living and migration is working for Peter Dutton and will continue to work.

And in a sense, the Coalition can be heartened by the Trump outcome because it showed that those big issues were working against the Democrats, and they were working for Donald Trump. That’s what Peter Dutton wants to repeat here.