Can Peter Dutton turn potential rout into strategic defeat?

The Liberal vote might drop in many safe, rich, inner to middle suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, which will still stay Liberal, Labor or Greens, for example, but rise in more working class seats, like say Lindsay, where the ALP has just made itself vulnerable.

At the moment Dutton may be relatively unknown in these areas, but that will be fixed by his enemies. GetUp, the Greens and the ALP will put a lot of money into painting him as an inhumane monster for stopping the boats, and Dutton should encourage them to.

One thing Dutton shouldn’t do is try to show us the “real” him. He needs to define himself by what he says and does for us. He is not a reality TV contestant, but a potential democratic leader.

Once he’s secured the base he needs to reach out to other voters, and he needs to do that by reframing the debate and fixing the policy morass that we are in.

The most urgent of these areas is climate change, of which electricity policy is only one aspect. The electorate is stuck, wanting lower emissions and lower prices. No politician has been game to tell them this is impossible, and reality is now colliding with fantasy.

This is the issue that has so far claimed 2 out of the previous 3 prime ministers, and now potentially Turnbull.

Then there are the economic issues, like company tax, intergenerational debt, housing affordability, superannuation. How does he neuter Bill Shorten’s pitch that the coalition favours the big end of town over schools and hospitals?

He hasn’t started well in the social policy area, promising higher spending on health, education and aged care. Labor already owns this territory and these promises are not credible.

And how will he deal with education, particularly school funding, where the key Catholic vote is offside?

If Dutton doesn’t have good answers to these questions, and more, then the LNP may be headed for the massacre.

It’s not that Turnbull has answers either, but the key reason for dumping a leader has to be change, and if that can’t be delivered straight away, then it won’t be delivered, particularly with an election a mere 8 months at most away.

Ultimately the challenge for Dutton, or any other aspirant, is to change the substance of the government, not to just revoice the current script. That’s hard for any former senior minister to do because they’ve been one of the script writing team.

And if Dutton wins, and fails, then the failure could be such, that his own, very marginal, seat might be in jeopardy. It’s a very high stakes gamble.