2

Competing models of political leadership

Carol Johnson

Abstract

The 2025 Australian federal election highlighted the leadership contest between Labor’s Anthony Albanese and the Coalition’s Peter Dutton. Both leaders mobilised forms of identity politics. Dutton’s strongman leadership competed with Albanese’s softer, kinder image. Both leaders denigrated the other, evoking different conceptions of masculine identity. Dutton suggested Albanese was weak and woke and incapable of protecting Australians, uniting them or providing a prosperous future. Dutton argued Albanese had been neglecting the working class to pursue his woke objectives and failed to tackle the cost-of-living crisis. Albanese suggested that Dutton was aggressive, risky, fostered social division, picked on vulnerable Australians and had opposed Labor’s cost-of-living measures. This rhetorical contest positioned a weak male against a rogue male. Dutton’s top-down style of leadership contributed to campaign missteps. Albanese’s more collaborative style was praised by his colleagues. Meanwhile, US President Trump’s disruptive actions caused problems for Dutton’s strongman image.

Keywords: Peter Dutton; Anthony Albanese; political leadership; gender; identity politics; Trump

The 2025 election campaigns highlighted the leadership contest between two leaders who had been honing their identities for several years and articulating different forms of identity politics. Anthony Albanese’s image reflected a ‘new politics’ that emphasised inclusion, diversity, wellbeing and kindness. Peter Dutton’s image projected a strong leader, who would make the tough decisions, keep Australia safe and emphasise unity over diversity. Both promised a prosperous future, albeit Albanese’s was built on renewable energy and Dutton’s on nuclear power. Dutton depicted Albanese as divisive, weak and woke. Albanese depicted Dutton as fostering fear, division and picking on vulnerable minorities. Both leadership images evoked forms of protective masculinity in which a male leader promises to protect Australians, albeit taking significantly different forms.

Dutton’s strongman persona initially appeared to be cutting through in the polls. Although a minority Labor government remained the most likely outcome, there were times when a minority Coalition government also appeared possible (see Chapter 19, this volume). Albanese’s image had been damaged by the Voice referendum defeat. Government attempts to tackle the cost-of-living crisis were being undermined by inflation and high interest rates. It will be argued here that various issues, from a poor Liberal campaign to the impact of Trump, had major implications for the leadership contest and contributed to the Liberals’ massive defeat. Meanwhile, the exceptional result appeared to vindicate Albanese’s leadership image and strategy, confirming his place in the pantheon of Labor leaders (despite Labor’s low primary vote). The discussion in this chapter will begin by focusing on Peter Dutton as leader before progressing to discuss Anthony Albanese’s leadership.

The importance of leadership

The analysis in this chapter reinforces international and Australian research demonstrating the important role of political leadership, although policy continues to play a significant, albeit interconnected, role (Rhodes and ’t Hart 2014; Kefford 2013: 140–43). It reinforces longstanding research indicating that party leaders have ‘become symbols of who we are, personifications of our way of life and our deepest beliefs’ (Little 1988: 2) and that, as prime minister Alfred Deakin noted more than a century ago, the ‘personality of the leader’ becomes a major issue (Walter 2010: 110). The image, personality and discourse of political leaders are therefore particularly important as they mobilise competing visions and emotions (see, for example, Feldman 2020; Walter 2010: 341). Furthermore, while there is a long history of gender playing an important role in Australian political leadership contests (Johnson 2021), the 2025 election saw a particularly overt contest between different forms of masculine leadership, at a time when debates about the nature of masculinity are part of the cultural zeitgeist (see Chapter 6, this volume).

Peter Dutton’s leadership image and style

Dutton built his authoritarian strongman image long before becoming leader (emphasising his former role as a police officer rather than as a successful property developer). His previous Liberal government ministerial roles in Immigration, Border Protection, Home Affairs and Defence saw him depicted as the Coalition’s authoritarian ‘hard man’. Dutton targeted ethnic minorities, from Lebanese Muslim migrants to African gangs, introduced tough measures against asylum-seekers, urged tougher policing of climate change protesters and deported criminal non-citizens (Blaine 2024). Dutton was a longstanding China hawk, despite (unsuccessfully) trying to not alienate Chinese Australian voters during the campaign (Sun 2025). Although promising to show a broader, smiling persona when first becoming leader (Evans 2022), Dutton increasingly contrasted his claimed strong, tough leadership with Albanese’s claimed weak one.

In short, Dutton depicted himself as a strong male leader who would make the tough decisions that were necessary to ensure a bright economic future for Australians, while also ensuring their personal and national security. His conservative identity politics potentially evoked both fear of and resentment towards outgroups while making socially conservative Australians feel protected. Like John Howard, whose influence Dutton (Clennell 2025) acknowledged, Dutton disagreed with views emphasising the structural disadvantage experienced by groups ranging from women to Indigenous Australians (see further Johnson 2025). For Dutton (2025a), ‘egalitarianism’ involved ‘pushing back on identity politics’ (which he identified only with the left) and largely treating people the same. Consequently, the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament was depicted as an anti-egalitarian measure that would give some Australians more political rights than others (Commonwealth of Australia 2023). Similarly, Howard government Indigenous affairs policy interpreted ‘social unity as a form of equality based on identical treatment and uniform political processes’ (Robbins 2007).

Dutton therefore depicted himself as a leader who supported the unity of the Australian people, while Labor policies fostered division. He declared that he would only stand in front of one Australian flag, rather than including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, because: ‘We are united as a country when we gather under one flag’, while multiple flags involved ‘dividing our country unnecessarily’ (Evans 2024). Similarly, Dutton claimed Welcome to Country ceremonies were overdone and potentially divisive (Butler and Belot 2025).

Such culture war identity politics strategies were central to Dutton’s plan for winning workers in the outer suburbs away from Labor. He declared: ‘Just as we are the party of small and family businesses, we are also the party of the worker. In this, we represent two constituencies who have been forgotten and forsaken by the modern Labor Party’ (Dutton 2024a). He claimed that Labor had supported elite ‘woke advocates’ while neglecting the economic concerns of ordinary Australians:

[F]or the first 16 months of their term, the Prime Minister and his Government were fixated on winning the Voice referendum. They spent $450 million on the ‘Yes’ campaign but did nothing to alleviate cost-of-living pressures for Australian families or businesses when they were crying out for help. (Dutton 2024a)

Furthermore, he said, such government spending increased inflation (Dutton 2024a).

Consequently, Dutton claimed to be more in touch with working-class values as a leader than was Albanese:

[P]eople in areas like Kallangur and Strathpine … they’re working class Australians, many of them voted for the Labor Party at the last election, but they’re not going to vote for the Labor Party at the next election because the Labor Party has left them and their ideals and their values … The Prime Minister has a seat, unlike mine, where he’s listening constantly to elites. (Dutton 2023)

The arguments evoking the people versus elites reflected the populism at the heart of Dutton’s leadership strategy (see Chapter 4, this volume).

Dutton also tried to address the Coalition’s ‘women problem’ by depicting himself as a strongman protector of women, arguing that ‘I’ve always been serious in my public life as a police officer and since I’ve been in Parliament … in protecting people’, particularly ‘women and children’ (Albanese and Dutton 2025). Dutton’s protective masculinity (Johnson 2021) also took other forms, including protecting Australians generally from the claimed depredations of wokeness, ranging from Indigenous issues to transgender women in sport. He would protect Australians from China, criticising Albanese’s claimed weak response to Chinese warships being close to Australian waters. He would protect Australians from asylum-seekers, including refugees from Gaza, whom he claimed had not been screened properly by the government for possible terrorist sympathies. He would protect Australians from criminal asylum-seekers being released from detention after a High Court decision. He would protect Australians from the cost of renewable energy, from high government debt and the resulting inflation. Overall, he would protect Australians from a weak Australian government that was incapable of standing up for them. He would be a good cop to those Australians he favoured and a bad cop to those he opposed. In short, Dutton (Lipson 2025) would be the strong male leader who would get Australia ‘back on track’—in the words of a slogan used in the 2023 New Zealand election, but also reminiscent of Trump’s ‘Make America great again’.

Dutton’s leadership and Trump

Dutton’s electoral leadership strategy was also reminiscent of John Howard’s campaigns against political correctness and ‘black-armband history’ to wean ‘Howard’s battlers’ away from Labor. Blaine (2024: 7), however, argues that where Howard used a ‘dog whistle’, Dutton used a ‘foghorn’ and Bongiorno (2025) suggests that Dutton’s vision was a particularly bleak one. Howard’s approach had longer-term US roots in Richard Nixon’s so-called Southern strategy and its subsequent developments (Maxwell and Shields 2019). The more recent US influence of Donald Trump was reflected in Dutton’s claim during the Voice referendum campaign that the AEC’s referendum process was ‘rigged’ (Basford Canales 2023). His opposition to multiple flags and work from home (WFH) also revealed Trump-style influences (Gedeon and Roth 2025; The White House 2025). Similarly, echoing the Trump campaign’s slogan against so-called gender ideology—‘Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you’ (McLaughlin 2024)—Dutton announced:

[W]hen I see a Government that is more interested in pronouns than they are in people, it starts to become a real problem. If you can’t pay your mortgage and you can’t pay your electricity bill, and there’s uncertainty at work, or you own a small business and numbers are down by 30 per cent, and you hear the Government talking about the Voice and all of these sorts of issues, well you get angry and you respond. I think that has happened in the United States and I think there’s a big likelihood that it happens here in Australia as well. (Dutton 2024b)

Dutton therefore initially positioned himself as a Trump-style leader. He claimed there would be ‘a near revolution’ against political correctness ‘that comes with the Trump administration’ because ‘a lot of the woke issues that might be fashionable in universities and at the ABC … just aren’t cutting it around kitchen tables at the moment where people can’t pay their bills’ (cited in Maiden 2025a). In other Trumpian moves, as well as appointing Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to a shadow government efficiency portfolio, Dutton initially advocated cutting ‘culture, diversity and inclusion adviser’ positions in the public service, claiming they ‘do nothing to improve the lives of everyday Australians’ (Dutton 2025b). Dutton also claimed that young men in the United States and elsewhere were angry and had ‘had enough’ of missing out to diversity hires and being depicted as ‘ogres’ (cited in Maiden 2025b; see further Chapter 6, this volume).

Dutton wanted the Albanese government to have a ‘man problem’ (see further Johnson 2024a) that would help counter the Coalition’s ‘women problem’, both by appealing to men directly and by emasculating Albanese. Similarly, Howard had tried to emasculate then Labor leader Kim Beazley by suggesting he ‘lacked a ticker’ (Johnson 2021: 15). However, the chaos, economic disruption and uncertainty arising from the Trump tariffs early in the election campaign soon made Dutton’s association with Trump’s form of strongman politics less desirable. Senator Michaelia Cash (2025) initially claimed that Trump’s trade policies showed ‘he’s a man of action’ and Australians would ‘get the exact same attitude under a Peter Dutton government’. Nonetheless, Dutton soon distanced himself from Trump, instead emphasising Howard’s influence (Albanese and Dutton 2025). Liberal advertisements belatedly—and largely unsuccessfully—tried to soften Dutton’s image (ABC 2025). A few days before the election, a senior Liberal MP claimed that ‘the single biggest factor is Trump … He has just smashed us’ (Maiden 2025c)—an analysis endorsed by some independent commentators (Brent 2025).

Here, as elsewhere, Dutton’s vision of protecting Australia from weakness and wokeness and getting Australia ‘back on track’ to being a unified, economically prosperous society failed to cut through.

Labor and Albanese’s leadership

While Dutton projected a tough, strongman version of protective masculinity, Albanese projected a softer, kinder version of masculinity like that of some other male leaders internationally such as Barack Obama, David Cameron and Joe Biden (Johnson 2022). Closer to home, he was also channelling Bob Hawke’s focus on bringing people together and Jacinda Ardern’s emphasis on kindness (Johnson 2021, 2022). He was, in the words of Blair Williams, a ‘state daddy’ (see Chapter 6, this volume). He emphasised his backstory as the son of a disabled mother who grew up in social housing and could therefore empathise with others less fortunate than himself.

Albanese explained how he saw his leadership role early in his period of office in interviews for a Quarterly Essay written by Katharine Murphy (2022). Albanese depicted himself as a leader who would best represent the ‘new politics’ of Australia. That ‘new politics’ involved a decline in primary votes for major parties but valued inclusion, diversity, aspiration and positivity, championed dialogue over division and acted on issues such as climate change.

Albanese (2025a) emphasised that Labor’s agenda did not mimic overseas developments, as he suggested the Coalition’s did, but would draw on Australia’s values to create a strong future in which there would be ‘[n]o-one held back, no-one left behind. Every one of us, Building Australia’s Future, together.’ Meanwhile, Labor projected Albanese as being a calm, considered and steady leader who was methodically fixing the economy, addressing cost-of-living issues and pressing ahead with a plan for Australia’s future in uncertain times (ALP 2025).

Labor introduced a raft of related policies covering areas including manufacturing, climate change, education, Medicare, building homes, foreign relations, social diversity, skills training for tradies and men’s mental health (ALP 2025). Consequently, Albanese (2025c) contrasted his government’s plans with the Liberals, who offered ‘[n]o proposals of their own, just militant opposition to our cost of living measures and mindless negativity’.

Albanese also repeatedly criticised Dutton’s leadership, countering Coalition accusations that he was weak and woke and promoting an alternative version of masculine leadership in the process:

Peter Dutton seems to think that bluster and yelling and interrupting and being rude is strength. It’s not. One of the things that you have to do as a leader is show kindness and compassion to the vulnerable. That’s part of who I am. It’s part of my character. That’s not weakness. Strength is having the capacity to go to the National Press Club, as I did, and say we are going to change the tax cuts that have been legislated because we don’t want some people to be left behind. (Albanese 2025b)

When asked, ‘What do you say to the opposition claims that you’re too soft, that you’re too wishy washy? Do we need more of a hard man in such uncertain times?’, Albanese responded: ‘[I]t’s just rhetoric. Kindness isn’t weakness’ (Albanese and Dutton 2025). Albanese also emphasised that he had made tough decisions to bring in a budget surplus, deal with Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and ‘you don’t get to be Prime Minister and to lead the Labor Party without a toughness’ (Albanese and Dutton 2025). In contrast, Albanese (2025c) accused Dutton of not being tough enough to face the National Press Club while making derogatory comments about journalists—for example, calling the ABC ‘hate media’, which ‘say[s] more about his temperament than anything else’.

When asked whether Donald Trump had advantaged him and disadvantaged Dutton by ‘darkening the brand of hardman leaders’, Albanese accused Dutton of divisively attacking the vulnerable, while he tried to bring people together:

I think Peter Dutton has darkened his own brand. He has made a career out of promoting division, about punching down on vulnerable people, about seeking to divide the community, engaging in culture wars. What I’ve done is to try and bring people together. (Albanese 2025b)

Nonetheless, despite his support for social diversity, Albanese also attempted to counter Dutton’s accusations that he was woke by defusing some potential culture war issues. For example, Albanese ruled out measures that would prevent religious organisations discriminating against LGBTQIA+ persons in the absence of bipartisan support (Razik 2025). Albanese initially tried to cancel proposed Australian Bureau of Statistics census questions on sexuality and gender identity, although eventually partially backed down (ABS 2024). Albanese was also accused of reneging on previous commitments regarding the Indigenous Makarrata commission process of Treaty and Truth-Telling after the Voice referendum defeat (Allam 2024).

However, Albanese highlighted his support for women while suggesting that Dutton was out of touch:

[L]ook at their proposal to ban Working from Home. Last month, Peter Dutton said that women who couldn’t be in the office 5 days a week should just ‘job share’. A statement that is so out of touch with the lives of modern families and the flexibility that working from home gives parents in particular. It also fundamentally misunderstands the national productivity benefit of supporting greater opportunity for women and the essential right of women to make their own choices about their own careers. (Albanese 2025c)

Albanese also repeatedly countered Dutton’s arguments that the government had not been standing up for workers, suggesting that the Liberals posed a major (American-style) threat:

[W]e’ve understood that we don’t want to go down the American road of people having to rely on tips to get by … A Labor government will always stand up for fairness in the workplace, not undermining wages and conditions. Or … sacking public servants so you can hire more consultants at higher rates, which seems to be their vision. (Albanese 2025d)

Labor campaign material suggested that Australians would ‘be worse off under Dutton’, who had opposed multiple government cost-of-living measures, and that ‘he cuts, you pay’ (Giles 2025).

In short, Labor’s campaign message emphasised that Albanese would protect all Australians and build a stronger future, while Dutton was depicted as a risky social and economic threat.

The outcome

As late as 3–4 March, Newspoll (Benson 2025) was showing a two-party-preferred vote for Labor of 49 per cent and 51 per cent for the Coalition. Australian Labor Party (ALP) National Secretary and campaign director Paul Erickson (2025) acknowledged such initial poll concerns but put Labor’s victory down to two key leadership messages: ‘Anthony Albanese was the only leader with a plan to make Australians better off over the next three years … And in uncertain times Peter Dutton was not a risk worth taking.’ Erickson also argued that Dutton’s attempt to frame the leadership contest as strength versus weakness highlighted issues with Dutton’s own character, and ‘the very aggressive approach in some of the debates actually turned a lot of people off’ (Boscaini 2025). Erickson claimed:

[E]ven before our campaign amplified these facts, our research identified some deeper reservations about Peter Dutton. One year ago, our target voters already believed they would be worse off under a Dutton government because of the risk posed by Peter Dutton’s character. His recklessness concerned them and made them worry about what kind of Prime Minister he would be. His aggression and intolerance unsettled people. And above all his hard-headedness, his lack of empathy and his lack of understanding of ordinary people’s lives kept coming to the fore. (Erickson 2025)

It was a message that Labor repeatedly hammered home, along with suggesting that Dutton was trying to introduce foreign ideas. In Erickson’s (2025) words:

Was he focused on Australians who were looking for the party with the best plan to make them better off over the next three years? Or was his priority winning over voters who were looking for an Australian variation on MAGA [Make America Great Again]?

In contrast, Erickson (2025) claimed that the ‘Prime Minister offered authentic, measured and firm leadership’ that was also ‘steady’, whereas Dutton’s ‘back on track’ slogan meant taking Australia ‘backwards’:

Back to the cuts of the Coalition’s decade in power, with a promise to slash billions that would put the Abbott–Hockey budget in the shade. Back to the relentless, confected division of culture wars and punching down. And back to the evidence-free, politics-first approach to energy that held the country back the last time the Coalition were in power. (Erickson 2025)

Erickson was not alone in praising Albanese. Treasurer Jim Chalmers gave a significant tribute to Albanese’s leadership qualities both in office, by facilitating ‘effective cabinet government’, and during the campaign:

[O]ne of the defining characteristics of our government is Anthony sets a tone of being an inclusive leader and we all enjoy working in that context … It’s probably never been a better time to be a senior minister … Anthony … has led from the front and when things were looking dicey towards the end of last year … he came out of the blocks … I think in 10 or 20 years’ time they will be writing about this Albanese effort in this campaign. (Chalmers 2025)

Admittedly, such sentiments may not have been shared by those Labor figures Albanese did not favour, such as Tanya Plibersek. Nonetheless, such celebrations were very different from many comments made about Dutton’s leadership. Dutton did make key mistakes (discussed elsewhere in this book) that undermined his own leadership pitch—for example, flying out of Queensland to attend a Sydney fundraiser in the days before Cyclone Alfred was projected to hit and saying he wanted to live in Sydney in Kirribilli House rather than the Lodge in Canberra. In particular, the WFH policy debacle—meant to be a populist attack on public servants—just made him seem out of touch with women and modern families, while the subsequent backtracking made him seem indecisive and weak. He admitted wrongly attributing comments to the Indonesian President regarding Russian bases. The failure to adequately justify, explain or cost his nuclear policy similarly counted against him as Labor repeatedly suggested that Dutton’s nuclear plan was not only risky but also would need massive cuts to fund it; as did backflips on energy policies such as tax breaks for electric vehicles. Admittedly, other members of the Liberal leadership team, such as shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, also failed to present Dutton with ideas and a persuasive narrative. Furthermore, any leader’s strategy would have been hampered by spectacularly poor Coalition polling.

Nonetheless, some errors were related to Dutton’s strongman leadership persona. A Liberal insider reportedly complained that Dutton ‘wanted to steer the ship. He wanted to design the ads. He wanted to set the agenda. He wanted to run the campaign. He basically steered the ship onto the rocks’ (Campbell 2025b). Other insiders complained that shadow ministers had been excluded from decision-making (Chambers and Brown 2025); that the culture in Dutton’s office encouraged a bunker mentality and groupthink, while Dutton ‘surrounded himself with uber right-wing advisers and blokes. It’s all monotone opinion in the leader’s office … no one challenges or puts an alternative view’ (Campbell 2025a). Even allowing for senior Liberals wishing to distance themselves from such a spectacular campaign loss, it seems clear that there were dysfunctional elements in both Dutton’s leadership style and his office, although admittedly, lack of policy detail may sometimes have resulted from Dutton’s unenviable task of trying to hold together a very divided party room.

Meanwhile, according to one insider, staff did not want to tell Dutton that his own seat was at risk because Dutton performed best when he was confident and ‘we didn’t want to make Dutton nervous and he was already a nervous wreck. We were trying to manage him’ (Campbell 2025b). That comment resonates with Lech Blaine’s (2024: 114) claim that Dutton was ‘[t]all and strong at first glance. But when you watch him for a long time, you can see that the man is small and scared.’ Dutton may not have been quite as tough a leader as he tried to portray.

Dutton’s strongman leadership played particularly poorly with women (see Chapter 6, this volume). However, Dutton’s strategy of using culture war arguments to try to win over working-class voters in the outer suburbs (thereby neglecting inner-city Teal seats) also did not work. This may not just be due, as pollsters such as Kos Samaras suggest, to WFH policies alienating working women and their families or to demographic changes, from the increasingly multicultural nature of working-class communities (Giannini 2025) to the increasing youth vote. After all, not only are some similar demographic changes taking place overseas with different electoral outcomes (Chowdhury 2025), they also cannot fully explain the Coalition’s more favourable position in earlier polls. So, while such factors may partly explain what happened, another part of the answer may lie in a key difference between the Howard era and Dutton’s.

Howard did use culture war identity politics strategies to try to lure socially conservative working-class voters away from Labor. However, Howard-era Labor was committed to a neoliberal-influenced policy that had resulted in wage restraint and real wage cuts—albeit with claimed compensatory ‘social wage’ government benefits (Johnson 2019: 119–20). This enabled Howard to boast that wages had risen more under the Coalition than under Labor (Howard 2005), thereby making it easier for him to argue that Labor had neglected workers by favouring politically correct policies and minority groups. By contrast, wages had stagnated under the most recent Coalition governments and Dutton had opposed key Albanese government attempts to improve wages and conditions (Johnson 2024b: 207–12).

The reasons for the Coalition’s defeat were therefore varied and complex. However, Albanese’s election night victory speech suggested that the result was an outcome of the ‘new politics’, and his leadership strategy for addressing it, which he had outlined to Katharine Murphy back in 2022. His vision, message and values had triumphed over Dutton’s:

Today, the Australian people have voted for Australian values. For fairness, aspiration and opportunity for all. For the strength to show courage in adversity and kindness to those in need … A future built on everything that brings us together as Australians and everything that sets our nation apart from the world. In this time of global uncertainty, Australians have chosen optimism and determination …

[N]o matter who you voted for, no matter where you live, no matter how you worship, or who you love. Whether you belong to a culture that has known and cared for this continent for 65,000 years or you have chosen our nation as your home and enriched our society with your contribution. We are all Australians. (Albanese 2025e)

In short, Albanese argued that his vision of a present and future Australia had soundly defeated Dutton’s retrograde vision of getting Australia ‘back on track’ and that he was advocating an inclusionary identity politics versus a claimed exclusionary one. (While this chapter focuses on the Labor–Liberal leadership contest, Dutton’s socially conservative leadership strategy clearly also had implications for the Liberals’ poor performance against the Teals, with only one seat being won back and another lost.)

Conclusion

Election outcomes are determined by numerous factors. Nonetheless, this was an election in which the issue of leadership was emphasised by both the Coalition and Labor. The leaders also evoked different forms of the politics of identity, ranging from contrasting masculine personas to attitudes to social diversity. Both leaders depicted themselves as protecting Australians in ways that their opponent would not. Dutton’s leadership strategy and style were derivative of Howard and Trump but arguably lacked Howard’s skill and nuance, while his evocation of Trump eventually proved a liability. Dutton attempted to sell himself as a strongman leader, facing a ‘weak and woke’ opponent. However, his leadership pitch was unsuccessful, sometimes due to own goals as policy vacuums and backflips undermined a sense of reassuring consistency and sometimes due to Labor’s attempts to frame Dutton as not a strong leader but a cruel, bullying one who punched down on vulnerable groups, backflipped on policy, was out of touch with ordinary Australians, particularly women, was reckless and did not have the temperament, including calmness and stability, that was required for a leader in uncertain times.

Dutton had wanted Albanese to have a ‘man problem’. However, in the end, it was Dutton who had a ‘man problem’, in terms of both a protective masculinity failure that saw him constructed as risky and being too closely associated with an increasingly alarming US strongman leader. By contrast, Albanese framed himself as an inclusive male leader who was kind, not weak; a protective leader, who would stand up for all Australians in their diversity while sensibly and calmly managing uncertain, uncharted times. Furthermore, his leadership style had facilitated an incredibly disciplined and competent Labor campaign, whereas Dutton’s had contributed to a dysfunctional one. Meanwhile, Albanese seems convinced that his strategic vision of a new politics, so badly dented by the Voice referendum defeat, is alive and well again.

The Liberals are now potentially moving away from strongman leaders, with new leader Sussan Ley proclaiming: ‘Peter Dutton and I have different styles, we’re different personalities, and I will bring a different approach to my leadership’ (cited in Maiden 2025d). Whether that leadership style can help rebuild the Liberals after a disastrous election defeat remains to be seen, particularly given ongoing policy and ideological divisions within the party and Coalition, including over the effectiveness of Howard-era culture war strategies. It also remains to be seen whether Albanese’s assessment of the ‘new politics’ is correct and whether it will help consolidate a long period of Labor rule. The answers depend on multiple factors, including how much Labor’s victory was due to its own efforts and demographic change or how greatly factors such as an unpopular leader, a poor campaign and Trump contributed to the Coalition’s massive defeat.

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