Dunkley shows the Liberal party’s ‘more of the same’ is not a path to government

There is something for everyone in Dunkley’s byelection result.

For the Albanese government: Jodie Belyea has held on to what is traditionally a marginal seat, even after the death of a popular local MP and in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis.

For Peter Dutton and the Liberals: a bit of a swing, showing that attack lines about a tax on cars can do real damage, and the suggestion a path back to office through the outer suburbs is more than just a conservative fever dream.

Over on Sky, Peta Credlin said the bullish early results showed “the strategy’s right, the positioning is right”. Of course the strategy is to falsely claim that a fuel efficiency standard which will give Australians choice of more efficient cars amounts to a tax. But, hey, there are votes in it.

When the results soured for the Liberals and it became clear they would fall short, Credlin’s prescription was that the opposition needed “more of the same” to go one better next time.

On Thursday, Dutton said that a swing of 3% or more would be disastrous for the government, an overstatement that indicated that’s what he expected to receive.

The swing that materialised was about that, maybe a little more, not a disaster for either Dutton or Anthony Albanese. More like par. It was a typical swing against the government in a byelection.

The deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, concocted the most bizarre metric to declare victory: if the swing were replicated at the federal election (they never are – byelections are their own beast), the Coalition would win 11 seats, “enough” to form government, she said.

That a minority government is the Coalition’s best-case scenario says a lot about their desire to put a brave face on a lukewarm result.

But Labor cannot afford to be complacent. And, in fairness, they have not been.

Albanese returned from the Christmas break determined to do something significant to help struggling households, and smashed the stage-three income tax cut piggy bank to redistribute more to low- and middle-income earners.

The deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, said early on Saturday night before a single vote count had been reported that Labor would continue listening to the electorate regardless of the result.

The subtext was clear: win or lose, Labor knew going into Saturday’s context that it needs to offer more cost-of-living relief. Marles and Belyea confirmed as much when they took to the stage to declare victory.

There is reason to cheer for Labor. If Dutton can’t win a seat after 13 interest rate rises and after Albanese’s side lost the Indigenous voice referendum, maybe the regional and outer suburban strategy isn’t the panacea for Liberal woes that Dutton and Credlin think.

Or maybe it is the right strategy, but Dutton is not the right leader to execute it, not outside the core demographics of Queensland, blokes and over-55s.

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With inflation softening, Labor’s hope is that the Reserve Bank will have started cutting interest rates by the time of the next election, due by May 2025. Saturday night’s result shows that if Labor’s management of the economy comes good in the second half of the term, it need not lose seats to its right.

The Greens vote went backwards by about 4%, a result blamed on the presence of Victorian socialists and Australian Democrats. Despite the long-term decline in the major party vote, majority Labor government is still possible.

But as the once in a hundred year win for the government in the Aston byelection showed, these are just snapshots that say a lot about one moment in time and very little about how the next election will go.

You can bet Dutton’s scare tactics – on the new car and ute tax that’s not a tax, the cost-of-living crisis, and immigration – will continue.

Perhaps one of the great remaining wildcards will be when and how much policy Dutton will actually get around to announcing.

In Dunkley, Labor campaigned not just on having done something significant with income tax cuts, it hammered Dutton for offering negativity and no real solutions of his own.

Where will the nuclear power plants go? Who will pay for them? What is the ideal level of migration? Just how will the Coalition restore stage-three tax cuts when Labor has already given the dosh away to those doing it tough? Can the Coalition stay united on net zero emissions by 2050, let alone agree to the more ambitious interim targets the Earth needs? So many questions remain to be answered.

Labor won the byelection not just in the narrow sense of retaining the seat, but also because it already knows what it needs to do with the result and every day to the election.

The danger for the Coalition is that a swing of a bit more than 3 or 4% is just enough to convince them they’re on track to shake the Albanese government loose, but not enough to prompt them to craft any solutions of their own.

Perhaps they won’t need policy, perhaps the scares will be enough. All we can say with certainty is: tonight, they were not.