Editorial | And now Australia

In some respects, Peter Dutton was like Donald Trump long before Mr Trump emerged as a force in American politics.

In his first election in 2001 for the seat of Dickson in Brisbane, the capital of the Australian state of Queensland, Mr Dutton, the leader of the Liberal party, openly trolled Labour’s then incumbent, Cheryl Kernot. It is an approach to politics that has endured.

When Mr Dutton, 54, was in charge of immigration and home affairs in the Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison governments in the 2010s, he took a hardline stance against asylum-seekers who arrived in Australia by boat. They were sent to offshore detention centres.

He became a leading conservative voice in the Liberal-National Coalition, who railed against “political correctness”. In 2008, Mr Dutton, a former policeman, was among MPs who didn’t attend the apology for the government policy that over generations, up to 1970, removed thousands of Aboriginal children from their families. In 2023, as Opposition leader, he was the critical voice in the referendum to give special constitutional recognition to Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait people.

The verdict of most Australian commentators is that Mr Dutton and his party were too much like Mr Trump and America’s Republicans.

Up to a month ago, Mr Dutton, like Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservatives, seemed firmly on track to become Australia’s next prime minister. His Liberal/National enjoyed a healthy lead in opinion polls over Anthony Albanese’s Labour Party.

WHEEL FELL OFF

Then the wheel fell off his ambition, highlighting the Trump effect on global politics and providing another frame of reference for this region to consider its internal affairs and its engagement with Mr Trump’s administration.

In Saturday’s election not only was the Labour Party returned to power with improved majorities in the House and the Senate, but, like Canada’s Mr Poilievre, Mr Dutton lost his parliamentary seat, defeated by a para athlete, Ali France. It was Ms France’s third attempt at the seat.

Like Mr Trump, Mr Dutton was a long-standing critic of China. On the campaign trail, in the face of Mr Trump’s global tariff war, he pledged that his first overseas trip if he won the election would be a visit to the US president, rather than to Asia, as is the norm for Australian prime ministers.

“I will be able to work with the Trump administration to get better outcomes for Australians,” he said.

Mr Dutton had also promised to cut public sector jobs and had appointed a shadow minister – Jacinta Nampijinpa Price – for government efficiency, to scale back public sector waste.

In this, Australians heard echoes of Mr Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with the images of the chainsaw-wielding billionaire, Elon Musk, moving through US government agencies chaotically slashing staff and programmes.

It didn’t help that Ms Jacinta Nampijinpa Price wore Trump campaign-style caps and began using the slogan ‘make Australia great again’, a clear copy of Mr Trump’s ‘make America great again’.

Mr Dutton attempted late in the campaign to walk back his Trump image. After the loss he claimed the coalition, in the hustings, had been “defined by our opponents”.

WHAT IT DIDN’T WANT

But according to Arthur Sinodinos, a former Australian ambassador to the United States, the country was certain about what it didn’t want.

Writing in The Guardian newspaper, he said, “There was a clear choice and Australia opted for a version of relaxed and comfortable over a leap into the unknown. The risk of a prime minister Dutton was leveraged with none too subtle references to the ‘Americanisation’ of policies.

“Just as in Canada, the Trump factor played to the incumbent’s strengths. All politics is local.”

Frank Mols, a political science lecturer at the University of Queensland, essentially echoed those sentiments.

“The coalition will probably regret issuing messages that came across as supporting Trump and opposing the US Democrats,” he told the BBC.

“Once the stock markets started to drop in response to the uncertainty created by the [Trump’s] tariffs, it became harder for the coalition to profile itself as a safer pair of hands for the economy.”

One seemingly obvious take away from the Canadian and Australian elections is that it is risky to the ambitions of political parties and their leaders to be too closely identified or aligned with Donald Trump. Although Britain’s rightwing Reform party, which last week made significant gains in the UK’s local government elections, might dispute that analysis.

What is clear is that the small, poor countries next door to the US, like those that make up the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), must carefully manage that relationship. And acting separately is unlikely the best option. The risk in the singular approach is to individually, without the insulation of the group, face the caprice of Mr Trump and the anger of domestic voters.