The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
As you might expect, since the election on May 3rd, the Think-Piece-Industrial-Complex has kicked into overdrive, with every lukewarm-IQ politics-watcher with a keyboard (myself included) writing lengthy dissertations (without final count data) as to why the Dutton campaign ran aground. Some say it was Dutton’s problems with women, some say it was his insistence on strapping on his Sky News armour and battling in the culture wars, and some mention demographics. These things are all true to a certain extent, but they don’t tell the whole story.
Most annoying (to me at least) are what I like to call the ‘why didn’t you say anything then?’ pieces, which talk about how (only in the light of his loss) the Dutton campaign was (and always had been, actually) hopelessly adrift, with internal squabbles and poor leadership, destined to lose. These inevitable pieces always cite examples that the journalist must have collected during the campaign, that they bravely kept to themselves until the point where Dutton as a political entity was spent, and thus it was safe to dish on him without losing future access—accountability journalism at its finest: Speak truth to power, yaas queen.
These kinds of pieces also give some credence to a notion that I had during the campaign’s final weeks: that some in the media more or less knew that the election was probably going to be a Labor blowout. The conclusion being that many in the mainstream media were feeding the ‘slim Labor majority’ or (god forbid) ‘Labor minority’ government narrative to maintain interest in a horserace that was already over, for ratings. Who will mop up all those juicy clicks if voters think the election is all done and dusted? Won’t somebody think of the CPMs! I thought this idea was a bit ‘galaxy brain’ of me, but hearing former mainstream journalists Osman Faruqi and Scott Mitchell float the idea has given me some confidence in this perspective.
Something that the ensuing flood of think pieces claim boldly is that ‘Australia rejected the Dutton-Murdoch agenda’ and Australia ‘rejects division’ by choosing Albanese. I don’t know, have you met Australians? Many of us are seemingly up for some dogshit culture war nonsense, what with the ‘woke issue’ saturating the airwaves with nauseating ‘debates’ for more than a few years now. This has not been a winning issue for the Left in Australia for some time.
Peta Credlin was right (in her way) when she said that Dutton didn’t go hard enough on the culture war politics. Not morally right (of course, it’s Peta Credlin), but in the sense that Dutton didn’t go after the most politically beneficial culture wars he could have. You could easily see a scenario where, like Trump, Dutton was simply smarter about selecting which culture war issues to go after to whip up the voters enough to carry him to victory. If it was less about ‘welcome to country’ ceremonies and ‘woke agendas in school curriculum’ and more about “protecting” women in sports from trans-women (a la the Americans), it might be a very different story. We had John Howard as our Prime Minister for 12 years, followed by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. We are not all of a sudden the Heroes of the Soviet Union that these writers seem to think we are.
Now that the dye is cast, reporters like to write about the outcome like it was pre-ordained, as though it was always going to shake out this way – but it wasn’t. Dutton and the Coalition were winning in February, with more or less this same platform of dogshit, divisive politics. Dutton has had a long (long) history of racist, incendiary politics over the last 24 years, and the voters of Dickson and the Liberal Party had no problem whatsoever electing, re-electing and elevating him to the front bench and eventually to Opposition Leader. The fact that he was a culture warrior wasn’t a downside; for many of his supporters, it was the point.
Ultimately, I think the Fin Review had it right (ew, hate that) when Associate Professor Paul Williams said:
“It was [Dutton’s] personal style, too small a policy platform, unpalatable policies and a shambolic campaign.”
There was a Trump Effect, but not in the way people are claiming – it wasn’t out of a rejection of divisive politics and ‘letting kindness win’ – it was simply a rejection of the kind of chaos that Trump (and by proxy, Dutton) have come to represent over the last few months. Labor ran a decent campaign and Dutton was an unlikable fuck up.
Lots of voters (unfortunately) like what Trump is doing (victimising deportees, arresting judges, mass deportations), it’s even gotten more popular over time, they just don’t like how he’s doing it. Hearing conservative commentators talk about it, you realise it’s not the substance of what he’s doing that bothers them, it’s the unconstitutional style in which he is doing it. Not enough to do anything about it, of course, but enough to publicly wring their hands on progressive podcasts, at least.
Australians are in many ways the same – they’re dissatisfied with the trajectory of our politics, and due to the cost-of-living degradation that’s occurred over the last few years, they’re right to be. Combine this with declining primary votes for the two major parties over the years, and it’s not hard to tell the story of an electorate that wants a significant shakeup in how their politics runs.
Voters want a shake-up – they didn’t want Dutton’s shake-up.
By not acknowledging this virulent, ugly side to our politics and proceeding forward by thinking that we’ve ‘put it all behind us’, and that we’re some kind of Star Trek post-racial, egalitarian society all of a sudden, is inherently misleading. Don’t forget, we’re the same nation that gave the People’s Elbow to The Voice 19 months ago—a non-binding, unpaid body that would provide ignorable advice to parliament on a small number of indigenous issues. Suppose we forget the existence of these strains in our politics. In that case, we leave ourselves open to the same kind of Trumpian politics in the next election cycle, as long as the salesman speaks like Malcolm Turnbull rather than Peter Dutton.
The right-wing populist backlash hasn’t been denied, merely delayed.
Tune in to this episode of Unnatural Selection for an inside look at ABC’s on-air drama, expert breakdowns and the unforgettable moments that defined Australia Votes 2025. This episode has been edited down from a longer live stream.
Early in the evening, Antony Green called a Labor majority.
Antony Green delivered his final on-air analysis after 36 years, walking viewers through seat-by-seat results.
Mid-evening saw Opposition Leader Peter Dutton unseated in Dickson by Labor’s Ali France—the first time an opposition leader has lost their own seat in 125 years.
Dutton’s concession speech and his first show of human emotion.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s emotional victory speech promised cost-of-living relief, healthcare expansion and accelerated climate action.
The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
So we did it. We destroyed the final horcrux and prevented the rise of Dark Lord Dutton. Whilst full results for all seats are not yet available, it looks like Labor is in for a thumping victory with at least 10 seats picked up from the LNP and the Greens. Whilst Labor’s won what’s been described as a ‘historic’ victory, it’s important to note that several factors contributed to the party’s success.
Labor’s Campaign
I don’t want to take it away from them; Labor ran a tight, disciplined campaign. As discussed on 4 Corners this week, journalist Louise Milligan explicitly noted how controlled the media scrum was. How tightly staged each interaction Albanese had with the public was. Despite a single pro-Pallestinian protester accosting Albo on the campaign trail this week (big slay), it’s notable that there weren’t many more of these kinds of instances on the trail. Probably not great for accountability journalism, but great for the Labor campaign pushing a clear, disciplined message.
On messaging, Labor’s was clear, entertaining and lighthearted. The party took a millennial-driven, meme-heavy social media strategy, spending more on digital media than the LNP or Clive Palmer(!). They made early missteps with weird AI slop videos, but they ironed that out quickly. Labor’s national campaign manager, Paul Erikson (or P Erikson, as he is now fondly known on social media, due to his authorisation appearing at the end of these ads) has become a rallying cry for Labor’s social media faithful since the election, which should tell you something.
As a quick aside, I think Simpsons and Star Wars memes are funny, but I do slightly despair at the coarsening of our discourse. Are our attention spans so shattered by TikTok that we’re doomed to 6-second vertical video memes rather than serious policy discussion driving elections? Rhetorical question, I know the answer’s yes.
The policy that Labor advocated was also straightforward – not ‘stop-the-boats’ clear, but clear enough. Classic Labor fare: increasing bulk-billing at GP’s, helping with cost of living concerns, building homes, modest tax cuts, HELP Debt relief, etc. The plans were sensible, costed, and resonated with the Australian public’s concerns about their cost of living. All in all, a solid campaign.
In just nine weeks the LNP managed to turn a four point lead into a three point national loss; the kind of bollocking I’ve never seen in electoral politics in fifteen years of watching. Dutton was a very effective attack dog in opposition during the last term, punching down on Albo is easy (and fun, I often find) but these last few weeks have showed a desperate side of Dutton. He’s excellent at making things unpopular (like the Voice Referendum) but is less good at making things popular (like his dumb potato head or bad policies).
Dutton also saw the success of the Trump campaign in America, and in November, immediately started cribbing some of the same talking points: cost of living, ‘are you better off than you were three years ago’, government efficiency, cutting the public service, etc. This strategy might’ve seemed like a winner at the time, but given how toxic and gross the first 100 days of the Trump administration has been since January 20th, this branding has seemingly bitten him in the arse. After Trump’s needless trade war, disastrous economic forecasts and illegal renditioning of people to El Salvadorian mega prisons, his approvals have unsurprisingly taken a nose-dive.
It also doesn’t help that in the last few weeks, Dutton, realising the adverse effect this was having on his campaign (after months of leaning into it), started to backpedal. But not before Jacinta Price could shriek “Make Australia Great Again!” next to him at a press conference, alongside well-publicised stories of her pictured wearing a MAGA hat. Providing a clear signal to voters that this walk-back from Trump was purely for optics.
The LNP also had the unenviable task of selling the Australian public an absolute bill of goods. With all that coal money, the IPA, and all the other think tanks carrying foul intellectual water for them, you’d have thought they’d emerge on the stage in 2025 with a series of thought-out, costed policies that would blow the socks off the Australian public. They, of course, did not – which begs the question: what were they doing for the last three years? They announced a bevvy of unpopular policies that damaged them with key constituencies that they needed to gain ground with to win, including:
This, unsurprisingly, alienated, in turn, government workers, women, Canberrans, working families, rural communities, environmentalists, and anyone with brain cells. Dutton then abruptly reversed course on all but the nuclear policy, futher alienating these cohorts and creating the impression (correctly) that he had no fucking idea what he was doing.
Presumably, these ideas were loudly applauded at the LNP fundraiser dinners filled with male, small-government, small-dicked, small-brained, small-business owners, and they didn’t decide to poll the actual favourability of any of those issues before they announced them as policy. Getting rid of WFH is about as popular as syphilis, as it turns out. It’s almost like they didn’t want to win. They know it’s a popularity contest, right?
To that point, there was also a little something at play that I like to call the ‘Dutton’s a bit of a Cunt Effect.’ He’s always been a divisive, racist, culture-war figure in Australian politics who doesn’t (fortunately as it turns out) resonate with the majority. Despite the two-party preferred polling always having the ALP and the LNP within roughly 5 points of each other, Dutton went into the vote with a negative 16-point preferred prime-minister margin against Albanese, suggesting even dyed-in-the-wool LNP voters couldn’t stomach this rancid spud.
Finally, the decision to release the policy costings two days before the election probably mattered to nobody except me, but I found it extremely underhanded and gross. Here’s a party looking to reshape this country’s financial future in ways that, if you read their proposed platform, were as radical as they were poorly thought out. They decided to oppose Labor’s tax cuts and pledge to repeal them, which Treasurer Jim Chalmers on election night called “One of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen” in electoral politics. They also, for a party that relies on its strong economic management bona fides, managed to bungle their return to surplus, suggesting a path that was worse on the deficit than Labor’s.
It was also just a fundamentally unserious policy document. The return to surplus was largely predicated on enormous assumed savings from cutting the public service, which is directly at odds with the ‘revised’ position that the LNP had put forward the week earlier that the plan was ‘never’ to cut 41,000 public service sector jobs (some of which don’t even exist yet – huh?), but simply to rely on a hiring freeze and natural attrition to thin the herd. $1.7 billion of savings in year one is a lot of public servants choosing to resign completely voluntarily.
Ignoring, of course, that in the final year of the Morrison government alone, the LNP spent $21 billion on external consultants, to artificially paper over the freeze that they had on hiring in the public sector. Needless to say, all the work that the public sector is doing wouldn’t dematerialise; it would, presumably, be outsourced again to the big four consulting firms, who would charge you a 5x multiple to complete the work. Thus, not actually saving any money in reality, but in all likelihood costing even more. They revealed themselves as cynical, unserious liars – and I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed.
External Factors
Several external structural factors also played against the coalition this election cycle.
Millennials are now the largest voting cohort against a waning Boomer power base, giving us a larger say in who represents us on a Federal level. Given that the largest portion of LNP voters are 65+ and (I don’t mean to upset any Boomers in my readership here) are going to be dropping like incredibly wealthy flies over the next 15 years, the Coalition is faced with an increasingly bad set of national circumstances, if they’re looking to take back government.
Progressives are also nominally more popular with Millennials, which may not surprise you – who amongst us didn’t find themselves in a Che Guevara t-shirt in their youth before googling who Che Guevara actually was. What might surprise you, however, is that Millennials are also, notably, a generation that’s not getting more conservative as we age – bucking the usual trend of rightward drift, providing some structural difficulties for the LNP to overcome.
These factors don’t mean that the LNP can’t ever win again, by any means – all one ever needs in opposition is a bad recession or a juicy sex scandal (cough, Peggy Sue), and any sin can be electorally forgiven. What it does mean is that if the Liberals want to be in serious contention for national two-party politics they need to get their shit together and start speaking to the issues that their voters are interested in.
So while Labour ran a solid campaign, much of their success can be attributed to the missteps of Peter Dutton, the Coalition’s weak policy platform and structural demographic factors. Labor has won a substantial victory this week, no doubt, but given the major risks confronting the global economy for the next three years, they may grow to wish they hadn’t.
This week it has emerged that everyone’s favourite Horcrux owner and narrative antagonist of ‘the boy who lived’ Peter Dutton has been fortunate indeed with his share purchases. In what can only be described as Olympic-level, Buffett-ian levels of deep market intuition, Peter Dutton went on a “share-buying blitz” across the banking sector between the 11th of November 2008 and the 23rd of January 2009, in the depths of the GFC.
The remarkable thing is that on the 24th of January, 2009, the Rudd government’s proposed $4bn bank bailout package was announced, sending prices of those exact shares skyrocketing. Of course, we don’t know how many shares he bought or at what exact price – but given the dates, we can assume he made a tidy profit.
Dutton’s Register of Interest Updates 2008-9
Prior to the bailout, for example, shares in NAB were trading around $16, down from a high of $41 before the crisis. After the bailout announcement, shares in NAB recovered quickly to a high of $22 by April 2009 and then a high of $30 by October 2009.
Relevant share price charts
Peter Dutton, of course, denies any claims that he traded on any insider information and expects us to believe that this just happened to be the luckiest coincidence ever. Gee whiz, couldn’t have happened to a gooder boy!
It is worth noting, however, that when a party in government is crafting a broad package of legislation, especially something as consequential as a multi-billion dollar bailout, it would be sensible (and very normal) for them to confer with the opposition party. It’s reported that:
“While Mr Dutton was in opposition at the time, the Labor Government was regularly briefing the opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull on major stimulus packages, prompting Labor questions about what he knew when he bought the shares.”1
Samantha Maiden, news.com.au
Governments often share this kind of information with their opposition, as it has several benefits:
Bipartisan Support: If you can strengthen your legislation by obtaining the support of both major parties, this would virtually guarantee passage of the bill through both the upper and lower houses, without dealing with those pesky independents or speaking with Pauline Hanson. Ugh.
The Appearance of being Bipartisan: Voters are oddly horny for bipartisanship. There’s nothing they love more than their pollies getting along in Canberra. Unless, of course, they’re getting on too well, in which case it’s a secret cabal, and they’re all just as bad as each other – bloody pollies! In any case, it looks good for the party in power if they’re seen as consultative and moderate by conferring with the opposition. And of course the most important…
Not Being Held Responsible if Things go Tits Up: Fairly straight forward, if both major parties vote for the thing it’s very difficult to get hung out to dry for it later. It’s the grown-up equivalent of getting your sibling to steal the cookies from the cookie jar with you to diffuse the blame when you get caught: “Yes, we’re all in the wrong. Equally. Together.”
So it’s not unreasonable to assume that Dutton could have known that the bailout was coming, or at the very least should have known that a bailout was in the offing, given that the foundations of capitalism were being rocked in a once-in-a-generation cataclysm that can only be explained by the awesome powers of Margot Robbie in a bath.
In any case, Dutton’s denied all insider knowledge, and there’s no way of crawling into a man’s brain to know his true intentions – and even if there were, there are brains that I would have higher on my list than Peter Dutton’s. Gross.
If P Duds Did Make Share Trades with Insider information, Would that be Legal?
Well, in a word, no.
Australia’s insider trading laws are comparatively strict, especially when compared to the wild-west-free-for-all-fuck-and-suckfest that is the United States Congress. Insider trading in the USA’s congressional system is not only not illegal, it’s downright celebrated. Go to CapitolTrades.com if you want to mirror congressional share trades; they tend to outperform the market for some mysterious, unknowable reason.
Australian law, however:
“…encompasses a broader prohibition because it operates on an “information connection” rather than a “person connection” – meaning that individuals who possess information that they know, or ought reasonably to know, is both material and nonpublic are prohibited from trading or from passing the information to others who might trade.”2
To my mind, it should be less relevant to voters whether he knew directly about the bailout; the key question is whether he should have reasonably expected that a bailout was going to occur based on his privileged position in Parliament.
Even if we give the most charitable possible interpretation of events and assume that he was sitting quietly in a room, alone, twiddling his thumbs during the maelstrom of the global financial crisis and not involved in any way in discussing the potential response with his colleagues across the ailse, it still tells you something grotesque about Peter Dutton’s character:
When he should’ve been focused on helping the Australian people, he was focused on making a bag for himself. An admirable quality in independent rappers, less so for a member of parliament.
Even if it’s not insider trading (which for legal reasons, I again repeat that he denies engaging in) it’s still really fucking gross. Do we want a guy to lead our country who sees impending financial collapse and thinks, “How can I make some money out of this? Daddy’s gotta get his beak wet, num num num.”
That’s the real problem with these share trades, not that it’s necessarily illegal, it’s that it bespeaks a complete lack of character from a man who seeks the highest office in the land. It’s fucking grubby and gross.
Also, to have the audacity to get caught out and then complain that it’s “ancient history” and this is the result of Labor’s grubby “dirt unit” is just astounding. That’s called playing politics, mate and this round, you lost. The LNP owned a whole news cycle last year because Anthony Albanese (checks notes) legally bought a house with his own money – the idea that LNP wouldn’t act on this information if the roles were reversed is laughable. Expect much dirtier politics from the LNP than this come election time; just watch.
Nagy, Donna M., and Juliette Overland. “Insider Trading Law in the United States and Australia: Fiduciary Breaches, Market Abuses, and the Harshness of Penalties.” The Cambridge Handbook of Investor Protection. ↩︎
