Not only is Dutton failing women, he's used one of his best as a shield for his numpty policy

Wondering why I'm writing him off with still two weeks to go? Polls are definitely trending in the wrong direction for a Coalition victory. Even The Australian Financial Review's Phillip Coorey says Dutton has squandered his lead.

How weird that a party which looked to be relaxed and comfortable in December looks like a shadow of its former self a few months later. And how amazing that the Leader of the Opposition was interrogated by a young reporter, Canberra Times alumna Olivia Ireland, on these very issues and Dutton sounded *very* back-footed.

Ireland is clearly as bored with Dutton hooning around petrol stations as the rest of us and she asks him what he's doing for modern working women.

He replies he's helping them buy a house. Right. He's helping them as much as he's helping women. And as Ireland put to the Opposition Leader, "When you speak about female-dominated industries like education, you talk about the 'woke agenda'."

Can we please never let another political leader in this country use that phrase? It's so dull, so wedgifying, so predictably culture war gaming.

How did this happen?

Here's my take. I have a really strong feeling that the Coalition learned absolutely nothing from the last election. You remember? The one where women blew Scott Morrison out of the water?

Why didn't they like Morrison? Rather than me providing my own take on that, let me take you to the details of the review of the election loss, conducted by Brian Loughnane and Jane Hume.

Even as I type Hume's name, I have a tiny frisson of sadness. Hume read over 600 submissions to the Liberal Party's review. No matter what you think of her because of her ideological position, she is smart. She gets across her issues quickly.

So when she managed to wrangle all those submissions and deliver, with Loughnane, the final review within six months, that was impressive work. It was the biggest number of submissions the Liberal Party had ever received - obviously, members had something to say. We all did.

Here's the bit which baffles me in light of the way Peter Dutton has run this campaign. "In the 12 months prior to the federal election, there was a loss of political capital and an accumulation of negative issues impacting on the government. This included ... allegations of the poor treatment of, and attitude toward, women within the government and the party, and by associated figures."

I'm loving the heavy lifting the word "allegations" does in this sentence. I mean just the fact that Morrison found he could not empathise with former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins until his wife told him to do that takes you to the heart of the problem. Anyhow, thanks Jenny Morrison for your service, for your emotional and cognitive labour on behalf of all the women in Australia and beyond.

But that wasn't all. The report uses the word women nearly 40 times.

Here we go: "A series of national political issues prosecuted aggressively against the government were not sufficiently and effectively addressed in a timely manner ... very importantly, that the Prime Minister was not attuned to the concerns of women and was unresponsive to issues of importance to them."

Oh my god. It's like Peter Dutton was given access to a manual, co-authored by a Liberal woman, and never consulted it. Wowza. The sheer arrogance of the man and the party behind him.

So let me share my conspiracy theory right now.

We've all seen the way Angus Taylor hasn't really succeeded as a salesperson in this election. He's a bit too shopfronty, nothing seems real or authentic.

So Taylor's out of the running to step up into a leadership position. Which brings me to Jane Hume.

Why did Dutton get Hume to deliver the whole "you will never work from home again in your lifetime" message?

You'll remember this one. It will now be on the leaderboard for being among the Liberal Party's worst mistakes in the 2025 election campaign.

As I wrote earlier this year, Hume announced that we must all return to the office for the sake of productivity. Apparently, she meant it only for public servants. And despite her sizeable intellect, she never read to the end of the Stanford University paper she cited, where it explained clearly that hybrid work is absolutely fine.

READ MORE:

In any case, the backlash was so hard that Dutton had to dump the policy (in the same way he's still trying to find ways to dump public servants). Labor did a hilarious job of reminding people that WFH was at risk under a Coalition government. And of course, this whole fiasco has dumped Hume right in it.

Hume, the co-author of the report, who knows that women have been deserting the party since 1996. Hume, who knows all too well that women are not joining the party. Hume, who knows this from her own report, there's "a sense that the Liberal Party is failing to adequately represent the values and priorities of women in modern Australia".

Did Dutton get Hume to deliver the bad news to protect his own ambitions? Surely not. Surely.

Hume must have predicted the response - and if she didn't, then the shadow minister for finance, pretty good with numbers, didn't learn a single thing from that review. That's hard to believe.