This opinion piece by Georgina Downer was originally published in the AFR on Jan 14th 2025.

It would be foolish to write off the opposition leader’s values-based election pitch. Economic conditions might hit home in the post-material seats he must win.

Australia’s most successful political leader, Robert Menzies, did not try to win the votes of those living in the “fashionable suburbs”. But win them he did.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in 2024 needs to heed this if he wants to have a chance of winning this year’s federal election.

The electoral calculus is that Dutton must win 18 seats to form government. Some of those wins must (absent a landslide elsewhere) come from the six teal seats lost by Liberals in 2022.

But do the traditional Liberal values Dutton espouses resonate with those living in these seats, if they ever did?

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton must win 18 seats to form government, including some of the six Teal seats lost by the Liberals in 2022.  Dominic Lorrimer
The wisdom of mid-20th century Australian politics was that blue-collar workers religiously voted Labor, while the Liberal Party was the party of the middle class.

But the Menzies middle class was quite different to that of 2025. These “forgotten people” of the 1950s were of modest means. They had little in the way of luxuries.

With a post-war consciousness that also remembered the Great Depression, they revered the virtues of frugality and saving. They valued education but were not necessarily educated themselves.

They loved their country and had been willing to die for it in World War II. They valued good economic management because they knew the consequences of mismanagement.

Menzies campaigned and won the pivotal 1949 election with a pitch to this middle class and their values – family, small government, private enterprise and freedom.

But, as LP Hartley famously wrote in 1953: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”

“Australia’s worsening economic conditions might soon catch up with the post-material class, particularly those with children fleeing the nest into an inflated property market with cost-of-living headwinds.”

Under Gough Whitlam, Labor finally recognised that it would need to win over the middle class if it wanted to end the 23 years of successive Coalition rule.

Bob Hawke and Paul Keating continued this, burning sacred Labor cows to deregulate parts of the economy and liberalise trade.

John Howard and Peter Costello won back-to-back elections with an agenda that continued to focus on deregulation, smaller government (including reduced government debt), lower taxes, affordable energy and housing, and the promotion of the private sector, including small business growth.

However, in the decades following the Howard government, Australia has suffered an erosion of home ownership, ever increasing federal government bureaucracy, regulation and spending – a list that includes the NBN, NDIS, environmental and workplace red-tape, bans on gas exploration and nuclear energy – anemic productivity growth, a surge in migration masking a per capita recession, and ballooning house prices.

In response to these trends, and channelling Menzies, Dutton said at the campaign rally in the must-win seat of Chisholm on Sunday that “the family is the most important unit in society”, that he believes in “egalitarianism”, “individual freedom and the rule of law”, that the “main sources of enterprise and wealth creation are businesses and industries – not governments”, and that “Australians are best served by smaller government”.

While these commonsense arguments may resonate in Chisolm, will they attract voters in the formerly heartland Liberal, now teal-smeared seats of Kooyong, Curtin, Wentworth, Goldstein, Warringah and Mackellar?

Voters in the teal seats are a varied mix. However, they are, relative to the general population, more affluent, professional and highly educated.

Those at the top of the ladder (invariably living in teal seats) have been beneficiaries of rising asset prices as the economy has been inflated.

More insulated from rising energy prices and mortgage costs, voters in affluent teal seats may be more willing to underwrite government spending in the name of climate justice. More highly educated teal voters may also swing with the pendulum of identity politics, illustrated by a number of Teal seats voting Yes in the failed Voice referendum.

Is there any hope for Dutton and his Liberal values in these seats?

On economics, enterprise and wealth-creation: yes. Australia’s worsening economic conditions might soon catch up with the post-material class, particularly for those with children fleeing the nest into an inflated property market with cost-of-living headwinds.

The Liberals in the 1940s appealed to young people. Their ideas were fresh, they aspired to a future of social mobility as well as opportunity and freedom.

Dutton’s appeal for nuclear energy, a form of energy adopted or being considered by all top 20 economies except Australia, is an appeal to a climate-conscious younger voter as much as cash-strapped mortgage holders. It also opens the possibility of a new home-grown private sector in Australia with jobs in nuclear science and industry.

Housing affordability too is an issue of intergenerational fairness. Offer a genuine solution to the housing supply and you can win a generation of voters, just like Menzies did.

Dutton’s appeals to individual freedom and the rule of law should also cause voters in teal seats to reflect on the record of teal MPs on issues such as the 7 October terrorist attack on Israel and the subsequent ongoing acts of antisemitism.

It would be foolish to write off Peter Dutton’s chances to win teal seats. It’s just that the weakening economic conditions might have to hit home in teal seats for him to win them.