But last week, a widely followed poll had Albanese’s approval rating at its lowest point since he came to power in 2022. Fifty-seven per cent of respondents in the NewsPoll survey said they disapproved of his performance. A head-to-head comparison showed Dutton closing in on Albanese, a sign that his political messaging was getting at least some traction.
“What I like about Dutton is he doesn’t sit on the fence,” said Louise Pridham, 57, a retired nurse who lives in the Sydney suburb of Cronulla. She and her husband, Nigel Pridham, a 57-year-old builder, said they were not Trump fans but felt validated by some of Dutton’s messaging, which Nigel Pridham acknowledged had a Trump-like quality.
Louise Pridham said more people she knew seemed to be appreciating Dutton’s bluntness. “He says as it is. There’s no wokeness in it.”
The parallels between Trump and Dutton, a 57-year-old former police officer known for his tough stances on immigration and asylum-seekers, are drawn by both supporters and critics. Dutton has not shied away from the allusion; on Friday, he railed about the Government’s diversity and inclusion efforts, hours after Trump, without offering evidence, blamed DEI policies for a deadly plane-helicopter collision outside Washington.
“Positions advertised have included culture, diversity and inclusion advisers, change managers and internal communication specialists,” Dutton said, referring to job openings in the Government. “Such positions, as I say, do nothing to improve the lives of everyday Australians.”
Dutton’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump’s return to office has emboldened a range of right-wing politicians across Europe to harden their rhetoric, solidify their bases and expand their ambitions.
But in Australia, the influences are more muddled. In 2019, a survey found that the conservative base in Australia was far more ideologically aligned with Hillary Clinton backers in the United States than with Trump supporters. Last year, barely a fifth of Australian voters said in a survey that they would have chosen Trump over then-Vice-President Kamala Harris if the US election were up to them.
Dutton made clear his distaste for “wokeness” as early as 2021, when as Defence Minister he banned events where staff members wore rainbow-coloured clothing to support LGBTQ+ awareness.
Two years later, conservatives were energised by a watershed moment in Australia’s culture wars. In 2023, a proposal to give Indigenous Australians a voice in Parliament in the form of an advisory body was rejected soundly by voters in a referendum. It had been a landmark effort for Albanese, and its defeat, his opponents argued, meant a majority of Australians felt that placing too much emphasis on the country’s colonial sins was divisive.
One of Dutton’s rallying cries has been his defence of Australia Day, the annual January 26 holiday marking the day British settlers first landed in the Sydney area. In recent years, people who see it as a celebration of brutal colonial oppression of the Aboriginal population have called for abolishing the holiday or moving it to a different date.
But a survey conducted last month by The Sydney Morning Herald found that 61% of Australians supported keeping Australia Day as it is, up from 47% a year earlier.
Mark Kenny, the director of the Australian Studies Institute at the Australian National University, said Dutton’s rhetoric appealed to a working-class base, which, like its American counterpart, sees itself as having been abandoned by economic shifts, including the decline of manufacturing. Those voters felt let down by their traditional political leadership on the left, he said.
“What you’ve got there is a kind of long-simmering sense of dissatisfaction, of being ignored, of not heard, being left behind,” he said. “When Dutton says ‘woke,’ it’s lazy and imprecise, but that doesn’t matter. People can attach to it what they think.”
It is unlikely that Dutton can win just by mobilising single-issue voters. That’s because voting is compulsory in Australia, with the threat of a fine for non-compliance, and turnout typically exceeds 90%.
As readily as he has adopted some of Trump’s language and priorities, Dutton has drawn the line at others, resisting pressure from a coalition partner to campaign on transgender issues. He has also indicated that he would not consider withdrawing Australia from the Paris Agreement, the international climate accord.
To Graeme Turner, emeritus professor of cultural studies at the University of Queensland, Dutton’s use of Trump’s words and rhetoric seems a lot more opportunistic than substantive.
“I doubt you could find a politician who could define the word ‘woke,’” Turner said. “It’s become a really handy slogan as a way of smearing any idea they don’t like, as a way of pre-empting it from serious analysis.”
The sniping over Australia Day continued last week. Sussan Ley, the deputy leader of Dutton’s party, marked the holiday by likening the arrival of British colonisers to Elon Musk’s ambitions to settle Mars. “They did not come to destroy or to pillage,” she said, in comments that were promptly criticised and lampooned.
The day before, at the spot where Captain James Cook first landed in Australia in 1770 – now a national park – a smattering of families sprawled out on grassy knolls and enjoyed a leisurely, sunny afternoon.
“It wouldn’t matter to me if you change the date because it’s not that big a deal,” John Gallop said of the holiday that was causing so much fuss among politicians. He said it was his first visit to the site in more than 50 years of living in Sydney, and that he had only come at the urging of his wife, who is from the Philippines.
“There’s so much more we need to change in Australia,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Victoria Kim
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
