As mid-election mea culpas go, it was a big one.
After campaigning for months on a crackdown on those “entitled” Canberra public servants, those fat-cat bureaucrats supposedly taking hard-working Aussies for a ride with their generous work-from-home conditions, Peter Dutton’s latest policy backdown has seen the Coalition spectacularly concede defeat on plans to “bring our public servants back to work”, and apologise for raising it.
What’s more, after months of conflicting, contradictory answers on how many public servants the Coalition would cull if they won office and how exactly they would do it, Dutton has now conceded there won’t be job cuts in the APS – just a long period of hiring freezes and waiting for 41,000 government employees to quit of their own volition.
The opposition leader ripped off a big Band-Aid on Monday, trying – and failing – to downplay the significance of the backdown in a few painful media appearances. He front loaded his announcement by admitting it was a “mistake” and that the Coalition had listened to concerns. But the Coalition frontbench, from Dutton down, has grumbled that their climbdown was due to Labor scare campaigns and “weaponising” of the policy.
This brushes over the fact that Dutton, at any point in recent months, could have explained the plan to reshape the public service – and at each opportunity, declined to say.
Polling on the issue must be heinous for the Liberals for Dutton to have to so prominently suck on this lemon and make clear to voters that it’s not going ahead. Labor sources thought they were making headway with concerned women and working families and it was clear the Coalition backbench was worried. (“Flexible work arrangements are cherished in many households, and it looks like we [the Coalition] don’t get that,” one Liberal told Krishani Dhanji last month.)
Dutton and his team say the WFH changes were never going to extend to the private sector, that they were limited to government workers, but Labor publicly accused him of seeking to unwind flexible work for everybody, arguing the private sector could take its cue from the public.
The information vacuum left by the Coalition on a number of key policies is echoing through the election campaign. In the absence of answers, Labor fought to fill it. Dutton can hardly complain about that tactic, after he used a supercharged version to sow doubt about the Indigenous voice when Labor hadn’t yet figured out how to talk about it.
Like Labor in 2023, the Coalition could have simply answered some questions, rather than letting public sentiment run free.
On 6 February, two months ago, Guardian Australia asked Dutton at a rare Canberra press conference how the Coalition would trim the public service: hiring freeze, redundancy or some combination.
“We’ll make announcements in relation to our policies in due course,” he replied.
Batting away a follow-up, he repeated: “I’m happy to make the announcement at the time.”
Ten days into the campaign, after a week of swatting away questions about his public service plan, Dutton threw in the towel.
“We’re listening to what people have to say. We’ve made a mistake in relation to the policy. We apologise for that,” he told Channel Nine.
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This isn’t a minor political backtrack – like the cosmetic surgery to the “meals and entertainment policy” that became just the “meals policy” once people started asking if if it included footy tickets and golf days. This is a great honking about-face.
This is a trapeze artist doing a triple backflip in a packed circus tent; it’s a fully laden semi-trailer slamming on the brakes in peak hour and ripping a U-turn from the far left lane of a six-lane highway.
In the 150 weeks since he became Liberal leader, Dutton has stuck to the safe spaces of 2GB and Sky News After Dark, rarely subjecting himself to noisy press conferences in front of the federal press gallery. This deliberate strategy of avoiding tough interviews and press conferences has served him well in opposition, keeping scrutiny on Labor. But after just one week of the five-week federal campaign, as he flounders on detail and blinks in the spotlight of vigorous follow-up queries, it has been exposed as a major miscalculation.
He seems unprepared for basic questions; even surprised that he is being chased for detail.
And there are still some critical questions to be answered: whether the Coalition would have enough money without the APS wage savings to pay for its election promises (they say they will); how quickly they could shed the 41,000 jobs they say they want to; which departments are in their sights; and who, exactly, Dutton defines as a “frontline” worker – which roles are safe and which are “wasteful” spending.
My colleague Sarah Basford-Canales, who has led the coverage of the APS confusion, reported on Monday that the Coalition can’t meet its downsizing target over the next five years without losing positions in departments it has pledged to protect.
With 26 days left on the campaign, Dutton is under pressure. Junking a signature policy to focus on his pet areas might be the circuit breaker his rocky campaign needs.
Or it could be the moment where the Band-Aid, ripped off, exposes an ugly wound underneath.