Just days from the 2025 federal election, opinion polls are pointing to a Labor victory with the possibility of a majority government.

If those polls are right, it’s been an astonishing turnaround in voter intentions since early this year when the Coalition was ahead, as Bob Hawke would say “by the length of the Flemington straight”.

What has gone wrong for Peter Dutton and can it be fixed in time for a different result on Saturday?

Coalition strategists decided early in the new year to hitch their wagon to Donald Trump.

Australian historian Manning Clark famously said that there are two types of political leader: “the enlarger of life” and the “punisher and straightener”.

Dutton presented himself as a punisher and straightener.

It started with his promise ahead of Australia Day to establish a Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to be led by newly appointed shadow minister Jacinta Price. It was a direct copy of Trump’s DOGE led by Elon Musk.

Dutton’s DOGE would cut 41,000 public service jobs that – he clarified late in the campaign following a backlash in regional Australia – would all come from Canberra.

How many of those would come from the departments of defence and veterans’ affairs and national security agencies was never explained.

When Australia was hit with the lowest Trump tariff of 10 per cent, Dutton said he could do better – implying he had a special relationship, or leverage, with the American President who was wreaking economic havoc on the rest of the world.

As Australian voters saw images of prisoners being deported to El Salvador, Dutton announced he would hold a referendum to allow government ministers to strip dual citizens of their Australian citizenship if they committed serious crimes.

Almost immediately, Dutton’s shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash said the Coalition had “no plan” for such a referendum.

But what really got voters hostile towards Dutton’s punishing and straightening was his condemnation of working from home.

Public servants, the Coalition announced, would be required to turn up to the office for every hour they were employed to work.

Voters reasoned that if Dutton was opposed to public servants working from home, he must be opposed to anyone working from home, including them.

These are the very voters Dutton was hoping to attract to the Coalition – those living in outer-suburban seats who were under the greatest cost-of-living pressure. They feared he expected them to join the rush hour each day and forego looking after infants or grandparents at home.

It took Dutton more than a month to abandon the policy. By then the damage had been done – voters were convinced Dutton was against them.

Having pronounced that as prime minister he would live at Kirribilli House on Sydney Harbour in preference to the Lodge in Canberra, Dutton didn’t exactly exude empathy for voters under cost-of-living pressure.

And his choice of Kirribilli opened Dutton up to the critique that he was against working from home for everyone except himself.

By this time, if voters doubted that Dutton was emulating Trump, newly appointed shadow minister for DOGE let slip the phrase “Make Australia Great Again”, a direct copy of Trump’s Make America Great Again.

And if voters had any more reason to fear Dutton was against them, Labor has reminded them repeatedly that he and his colleagues voted against the revamped Stage 3 tax cuts that favoured lower- and middle-income earners and, as his last parliamentary gesture, against the further tax cuts Labor unveiled in its pre-election budget that were also tilted to middle Australia.

Add to that the Coalition’s exorbitantly expensive nuclear power proposal, Dutton’s statement that he would override local communities and state governments that opposed nuclear power stations, and his announcement he would dump Australia’s commitment to reduce emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 – which constitutes a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

The sensible centre

Australia’s federal elections are a contest for the voters who Malcolm Turnbull has dubbed the sensible centre.

Anthony Albanese has presented himself to voters as a progressive moderate – no one held back, and no one left behind.

But Dutton has vacated the sensible centre and campaigned from the hard right, emulating Trump.

That might have seemed like a good idea before Trump resumed the presidency in early-January 2025, when cost-of-living pressures drove global anti-incumbent sentiment. But when Trump declared his trade wars on the rest of the world, voters became fearful of a new era of risk and uncertainty.

Few Liberal frontbenchers were available to pull Dutton towards the sensible centre, most of the moderates having lost their seats to Teals at the last election and the likes of Simon Birmingham and Paul Fletcher deciding not to re-contest.

Craig Emerson is a former Australian Trade Minister. He is Managing Director of Emerson Economics Pty Ltd, Executive Chair of the APEC Study Centre at RMIT University and Adjunct Professor at Victoria University’s Centre of Policy Studies. He was an economic, environmental and political adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke