Dutton might once have been ‘unelectable’, but that may change if he draws Labor into a race to the right

Peter Dutton is a politician born of desperate times.

When he was preselected to run for the seat of Dickson, before the 2001 election, the former Queensland police constable wasn’t considered much of a chance of winning. Labor had won the neighbouring seat of Ryan at a byelection with a 10% swing.

But three events reshaped Australian politics in the weeks before the poll: the Tampa affair, the September 11 attacks and the later found to be false claims of children overboard.

Dutton entered parliament then as the only MP to flip a seat in 2001. He brought with him a lesson about how conviction politicians – even supposedly unpopular or “unelectable” ones – can succeed by helping to shape their times, rather than needing to twist in the wind.

The first time Dutton campaigned to become prime minister, he quipped that he might need to “smile more” and show a softer side. This year, as a federal election nears, the opposition leader is out to convince the electorate they need the sort of leader who wears a permanent glower.

“As prime minister, I will be a leader who doesn’t shirk the hard and necessary decisions which must be made in these tough and precarious times,” Dutton said at his soft campaign launch last weekend, where he spoke at length about crime, criticised state bail laws and promised uniform national knife laws.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said Dutton was seeking “to promote fear in the community”.

“That’s something he’s done his entire political life.”

There is plenty of recent evidence – in Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory – to explain why Dutton will seek to put crime at the centre of the national discussion in an election year.

In Queensland, David Crisafulli built a four-year opposition strategy around convincing the state it was in the grip of a “crime crisis”. He held regular press conferences alongside victims and his office distributed CCTV vision of incidents to journalists.

The data showed youth crime was actually at record lows. But statistics don’t matter to voters who have become conditioned to seeing nightly security footage of children breaking into homes.

The true success of the political strategy, however, is how gormless it rendered the Labor government once the perception of a crisis took hold.

In Queensland and the Northern Territory, consistent shifts to the right to placate voters counted for almost naught at the ballot box. Victoria is heading down the same path, trying to neutralise the crime issue by backing down on plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility and reform bail laws.

Labor enters dangerous territory when it abandons the contest of ideas and enters a race to the right on crime that it cannot win.

The logic (and it was true to some extent in Queensland) is that there are few meaningful votes to be won on the progressive side of that ledger.

Queensland’s Labor government imprisoned disabled children in police watch houses, sometimes for weeks on end, in violation of their human rights. Brisbane’s left-leaning city electorates voted for Labor’s cheap bus fares.

But the voters in the outer suburbs – where Dutton is focusing his election pitch – have showed there is also little to gain for Labor by trying to be hardline, either.

In Queensland and the NT, Labor legitimised the idea that a “tough” approach was needed by claiming to offer it. Then those governments got thrashed by an opposition promising to be even tougher.

Whether these sorts of tactics translate to a federal campaign remains to be seen. Crime is, of course, a state issue. Defeated state and territory Labor governments had the significant disadvantage of having been in power for several terms, and having shifted away from policies backed by experts and evidence.

But if Dutton can co-opt the national narrative, as Crisafulli did in Queensland, then Albanese’s response this week – that “primarily, law and order issues are the responsibility of state and territory governments” – will only serve to feed the sorts of weak man/strongman narratives the Coalition will try to push this year.

Having forged his national profile as the intransigent home affairs minister – the man responsible for hardline immigration decisions and miserable offshore detention centres – Dutton is now leaning into those parts of his political persona that might have led people to think, like they did about Tony Abbott and John Howard, that he was “unelectable”.

Elections can be contests of ideas. They can, like the Tampa election of 2001, be reshaped by events beyond the control of politicians.

This one is likely to become a battle to define the times.

The government will attempt to speak about the cost of living. The opposition will be out to convince us that we live in the sorts of “tough and precarious” times that might require desperate measures.