When Donald Trump told the world recently that he knew what he was doing, I was not alone in being reminded that he felt the need in July 2018 to assure the world that he was a stable genius.

His now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t tariffs were also a reminder of his boast in 2019 that no one knew more about taxes than he did, a claim vehemently denied by his tax accountant.

At a time when leaders in the world are bewildered by Trump’s tariff and mass deportation blusters, some of his international right-wing admirers are going to ground.

One of them is Australia’s Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, a longtime Trump admirer.

It’s worth recalling that Trump insisted during the 2024 election campaign that he knew nothing about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, nor was he interested in its long list of radical right-wing agenda items.

Items on the Project 2025 wish-list included; direct presidential control of all government departments, immediate appointment of Trump loyalists to all agencies, withdrawal of funds for reproductive services, building a more muscular border force that would deport millions of immigrants, ending the energy ‘war’ on oil and gas, closing down entire ‘woke’ public service departments, recognition of only two genders, and the abandonment of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Now that Trump occupies the Oval Office, he is implementing item by item, with gusto, the wish-list about which he not long ago denied all knowledge. It would be wise to assume that Dutton has been observing the brazen Trump about-face with considerable interest.

While Dutton’s policy utterances on the evils of Australian public servants working from home have now been officially reversed, his base has heard the message.

He knows they like the policy and they are hopeful he can be relied upon to reinstate and implement it if he wins government. The policy ticked plenty of Trump boxes, but is based on at least two false premises.

The first is that many private sector employees work from home, and they do so because that is what their employers have encouraged them to do.

According to a Korn Ferry article in March 2024, big international firms around the world had been reducing office space for years in order to cut lease costs. They now rely on part of their workforce working from home.

The second is the myth that workers slack off when working from home. It’s true that some employees have always found ways to ensure they work under the radar and their productivity remains low wherever they work.

There is no reason to conclude that working from home reduces productivity, in fact the extra hours of previously wasteful travel time that become available to employees working from home are likely to boost their productivity rather than diminish it.

Trump engaged in a spot of projection last month when he made a sweeping allegation without evidence about US federal public servants.

“They play tennis, they play golf, or they have other jobs”, he mused. Unsurprisingly, the media largely failed to notice that the assertions were made by a President who indulges in golf games up to four days a week during standard working hours.

Australian spin

That has not stopped Liberal Party Senator Jane Hume giving the Trump line an Australian flavour by throwing into the mix a story about a federal public servant taking a caravan holiday while collecting a taxpayer salary, suggesting that behaviour was a common practice.

Her assertion was a reminder that the Opposition leader’s walking back his threat to fire 41,000 Canberra public servants was not a misstep. 

The Opposition leader didn’t help the case by signalling that his preferred home as PM would be in Sydney’s Kirribilli House rather than the relatively modest Lodge in Canberra, the seat of government.

It was such a bad look for a Queensland-based party leader that ABC political commentator Patricia Karvelas suggested he should have lied rather than admit such a preference.

At least John Howard and Scott Morrison were Sydneysiders when they chose to live in the Sydney harbour-side mansion in preference to Canberra. Dutton has no such excuse. 

While his Labor Party opponents have taken some joy from Dutton’s ‘backflips’, the policy reversals can also be seen as a tactic to place an each-way bet.

His base hopes he will again reverse the backflips if he wins office, and many inattentive voters will simply assume that, as a person holding high office, Dutton’s word on his policy reversal should be respected and taken at face value.

The same could be said for his assertions that the Indue Card will not be imposed on social security recipients.

Pension, Medicare

He and other LNP leaders, such as Senator Anne Ruston, have made it clear often enough that the age pension and unemployment benefits, for example, are no longer seen by them as earned entitlements. They are welfare payments and should be treated as such.

Similarly, Dutton’s protestations that Medicare is safe need to be heard against his record as Health Minister in 2014 when he announced that concession card holders would be charged a $7 co-payment.

At the same time, he reduced government rebates to GPs who bulk-billed their patients, thereby putting pressure on doctors to stop the practice.

The tactic earned him the ire of GPs who complained about him getting them to do his ‘dirty work.’ It’s contested whether Dutton actually said that bulk-billing pensioners and children was ‘wrong’, as claimed by Mark Buttler on 13 January 2025, but there are sound reasons to suspect that is what he thinks.

A pet Trump policy, deporting dual citizens with brown skin, has long attracted Dutton, who was flying a referendum kite last month to give Australia’s immigration ministers the power to bypass the courts and deport at will.

That too is a policy that he has decided to shelve, once again persuaded by his advisers that while it would please his white male base, it’s a potential voter turn-off in a country populated by large numbers of dual citizens.

The situation now, with less than three weeks to go before the election, is that the policies dearest to the Opposition Leader are the very policies about which he must keep quiet until after the election.

Working from home, blanket sackings of public servants, institutionalising the Indue Card and deporting dual citizens are now off the table. As are any policies that reflect Trump’s distaste of progressive women, such as reversing DEI initiatives or restricting reproductive options.

Those Trump policies also reflect Dutton’s thinking but he is so worried about the Liberal Party ‘woman problem’ that he has banned party room candidates discussing gender issues during the campaign, reinforcing the message by revoking the endorsement of a candidate who called for females to be excluded from combat roles in the defence force.

What is left are policies that Dutton has never really warmed to, the biggest of which is the proposal to build seven nuclear reactors at a humungous cost to taxpayers because private industry is not interested in the idea.

Although he has stopped saying much about his nuclear power policy, it seems his male base in the outer suburbs still likes the plan, as does the anti-renewables gas enthusiast and principal LNP donor, Gina Rinehart.

His base also likes policies that relate to motor cars. Hence announcements about petrol excise reductions, and the possibility of abandoning vehicle emissions regulations, the Paris climate target, and promotion of electric vehicles.

Scott Morrison appeal

Dutton even stooped to reviving Scott Morrison’s appeal to tradies, reminding them that Labor’s renewable policies are putting the beloved Ford Ranger out of their reach.

While Dutton himself might be dissembling with his announcements about the apparent abandonment of policies dear to his heart, the Opposition’s Leader in the Senate, Michaelia Cash, has been honest to a fault.

Appearing on The Today Show in February, she declared: “Trump is a man of action. The American people expect action and that is what they’re getting. And they’ll get the exact same attitude under a Peter Dutton government.”

Senator Cash’s stake in the sand might have sounded like a thing of beauty to a Liberal Party loyalist in February, but it’s now April.

It’s anyone’s guess what the political landscape will look like next month, but it’s pretty certain that Donald Trump will have brought in the earth movers and the landscape is being transformed in front of our eyes.

Whether association with Trump will be a political asset on 3 May remains to be seen.

Paul Begley has worked in public affairs roles for three decades, most recently as general manager of government and media relations with the Australian HR Institute.