Trump ties become liability for Australia’s conservative party leader

US President Donald Trump is a factor in Australia's election. Photo / Demetrius Freeman, the Washington Post

A few days after United States President Donald Trump took office, just as Elon Musk was firing up his chainsaw to carve up American bureaucracy, a similar cost-cutting proposal was taking shape on the opposite side of the globe.

Australia’s conservative Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, promised to tackle government inefficiency if he became prime minister in the looming election, echoing many of the notes Musk hit with his US Doge Service.

Dutton also promised to fire government “cultural diversity and inclusion” officials and to cut similar programmes in schools, along the same lines as Trump’s anti-DEI agenda.

“I think there is going to be a new revolution that comes with the Trump Administration in relation to a lot of the woke issues that might be fashionable” in Australia, Dutton told Sky News.

Ten weeks later, however, it is the global trading system - and Dutton’s political future - that has undergone a revolution.

After leading in the polls for six months, the Liberal head of the Coalition suddenly finds himself trailing as Australia’s May 3 federal election approaches.

And while analysts say Dutton’s missteps have played a role, so too has his decision to at times emulate Trump - an already unpopular figure in Australia whose standing has plummeted further after he imposed a 10% tariff on goods from Australia, one of Washington’s closest allies.

Australia’s centre-left Labor Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has benefitted as differences between himself and Trump have become a virtue.

“Initially, the focus of the media coverage was on whether Albanese or Dutton could best manage Donald Trump,” said Emma Shortis, an expert at the Australia Institute think-tank who has written about the US-Australia relationship.

“But the way Trump in his second term has attacked America’s traditional allies - with tariffs but also his foreign policy more broadly - has put his right-wing would-be ideological allies in a bind.”

One-third of Australian voters said they were less likely to vote for Dutton because of their views about Trump, according to a Resolve Political Monitor poll released on Tuesday. That was far higher than the 21% who were less likely to vote for Albanese for the same reason.

Dutton and Albanese each declined to be interviewed.

As Trump’s tariffs have sown chaos around the world, the idea of having an ideologically aligned leader has soured for some Australians, said James Laurenceson, director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

“Once Trump started whacking tariffs left, right and centre, then Albanese could cast himself as a person of stability,” he said.

“No Australian is going to back a US president who is attacking our trade. That’s going to help the incumbent.”

Albanese’s Labor Government has had some success in painting Dutton as a Trump acolyte, labelling him “Doge-y Dutton” and accusing him of “importing” ideas from the US, Shortis said.

At the same time, the Trump Administration’s at times antagonistic attitude toward Australia - including imposing a 25% tax on steel and aluminium, a major export industry, as well as making belittling comments - has boosted Albanese.

A few months ago, the Prime Minister trailed in the polls and faced tough questions over how he would moderate his past criticism of Trump to get along with an American president who is, in many ways, his political and personal polar opposite.

Trump’s tariffs - not just on China but even on close allies - have turned that on its head, transforming the tensions between the two leaders into an advantage for Albanese, Laurenceson said.

Albanese has repeatedly called Trump’s tariffs “totally unwarranted”, illogical and “not the act of a friend”.

Those remarks pale in comparison with the pushback by Canada’s new centre-left Prime Minister, Mark Carney, whose opposition to Trump has helped him soar in the polls ahead of the country’s April 28 election. But the comments have nonetheless put Dutton and his conservative coalition in a difficult position, Shortis said.

“Ideologically, much of the Coalition is aligned to Trumpism but can’t express that in a straightforward way because that means endorsing Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda over and above an ‘Australia First’ agenda,” she said.

“That’s why we’ve seen a bit of equivocation on the side of the Coalition.”

The latest sign of that came over the weekend when Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a conservative senator from the Northern Territory and Dutton’s pick to lead his equivalent of Doge, or the Department of Government Efficiency, introduced him at a rally by promising to “make Australia great again”.

Price quickly tried to play down the comment before accusing the Australian media of being “obsessed” with Trump. But then a photo emerged of Price and her husband wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and holding up a Trump Christmas ornament.

In recent weeks, Dutton has tried to tamp down the Trump comparisons while pushing back on the President’s tariffs and decision to temporarily suspend military assistance to Ukraine.

But that has led to odd contortions for a conservative, as when a member of his team criticised Albanese’s fuel efficiency standards by portraying them as “subsidising Chinese EV manufacturers and Elon Musk”.

Despite the drumbeat of Trump- and Musk-related media coverage in Australia, it’s uncertain whether foreign affairs will sway a significant number of voters, said Paul Williams, a political scientist at Griffith University in Brisbane.

Instead, Australian elections almost always tend to turn on “pocketbook” issues.

“It’s a bad time to be compared to Donald Trump, and it’s a bad time to say you want government efficiency when Elon Musk is doing that in the US,” he said.

“But if people don’t vote for Peter Dutton, it will likely be because of his own issues.”

Peter Dutton is the leader of the Coalition parties. Photo / Getty Images

For more than a year, Dutton had successfully criticised the Government over the country’s cost-of-living crisis. But Dutton - a former police officer who, Williams said, is the Liberal Party’s most conservative leader - had failed to craft policies to attract centrist voters.

And in recent weeks, he also had “lost focus”, including a costly backflip on forcing federal workers to return to the office.

“They’ve won all the pre-season games, and now it’s the grand final, and they’ve dropped the ball,” Williams said.

Labor now leads the Coalition in a two-party-preferred vote, according to recent polls - a remarkable reversal from just a few months ago. Albanese is still facing the prospect of having to form a minority government with climate-focused “teal” independents.

Albanese might have a better chance of attaining a majority if he escalated his criticism of Trump, Williams said, though that is unlikely. “He’s trying to be the diplomat and walk both sides,” he said.

Whether Albanese or Dutton is Australia’s next leader, the nation’s alliance with the US is almost certain to endure, said Mike Green, a former national security official in the George W. Bush Administration who now heads the United States Studies Centre, a think-tank in Sydney.

While Trump’s tariffs have “empowered” the 15 to 20% of Australians already opposed to the alliance, they have not led to serious doubts in either government about the relationship, he said.

“What I hear from people in government and businesses is consternation about the tariffs and real worry about unpredictability, but not a sense that this is the new normal for the US,” he said.

There have been some questions about the future of Aukus, the trilateral security pact in which the US and the United Kingdom are helping Australia build nuclear-propelled submarines to counter China’s growing military assertiveness in the region.

Green said that he saw no evidence that either Canberra or Washington was getting cold feet, but that Trump’s tariffs do risk distracting the US and its allies from the common challenge of countering China.

“The US needs Australia and other allies more than it ever has,” he said. “We’re going to pay a price if we create doubt in large parts of the Australian public about our reliability.”

- Washington Post