Australia’s right-leaning opposition leader Peter Dutton lost his parliamentary seat Saturday, adding humiliation to a night of crushing defeat for his conservative coalition.
The double-loss shattered the 54-year-old conservative’s prime ministerial hopes, and abruptly ended a parliamentary career that began in 2001 and led him to challenge for the highest office.
He is the first opposition leader to lose his seat at a federal election.
Dutton, who ran home affairs and defence in previous governments, said he had called Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to concede defeat.
“We did not do well enough in this campaign — that much is obvious tonight, and I accept full responsibility for that,” he told Liberal Party campaign supporters in Brisbane.
The former police detective said his Queensland seat of Dickson, which he lost to a Labor Party challenger, “had a one-term curse — it was only ever held for one term at a time”.
The loss of Dutton’s seat ejects him from parliament, ending his tenure as opposition leader.
Elated Labor backers swigged craft beers emblazoned with Albanese’s face at an election party in Sydney, chanting his “Albo” nickname as results were declared on TV.
Dutton had been accused of borrowing from the Trump playbook in the campaign, outlining plans to axe thousands of public service workers in a drive for efficiency.
The hard-nosed politician wanted to slash immigration, crack down on crime and ditch a longstanding ban on nuclear power, doing away with the need for renewables.
– ‘Stoking division’ –
And he told voters he would not stand in front of the Aboriginal flag — an official flag alongside the Australian national flag — if elected as prime minister.
“We can’t be as good as we can be if we’re separating people into different groupings,” he argued.
Albanese accused him of “stoking division, trying to turn Australians against each other, trying to start culture wars”.
As sentiment soured on Trump after he slapped Australia with trade tariffs, Dutton and Albanese both promised to stand up to the US leader in defence of Australia’s interests.
But the opposition leader’s perceived “Trump-lite” policies had turned some voters off, said Henry Maher, politics lecturer at the University of Sydney.
“Of course, there are other concerns — cost of living, defence, health and everything else,” he told AFP.
“But if we want to understand why a good chunk of the electorate has changed across the election campaign over the last couple of months, I think that’s the biggest thing.”
Dutton was also forced to abandon a short-lived, coolly received plan to stop public servants working from home, which would have hit women voters in particular.
– ‘Flipped and flopped’ –
But that and other shifts in the Dutton campaign’s policies opened him up to accusations that he could not be relied on to govern.
“They have not gone through a single week of this campaign where they have not flipped and flopped,” Albanese said.
The married father of three adult children, Rebecca, Harry and Tom — Dutton speaks with pride of his blue-collar roots.
“I was born into an outer suburbs working-class family — mum and dad, a secretary and bricklayer, didn’t have much money, but they worked every day of their life,” he said in the run-up to the election.
He worked after school delivering papers, mowing lawns and working in a butcher’s shop, and said saving enough money to buy a house at the age of 19 was “one of my proudest achievements”.
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