By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

This election has been too long coming for the Albanese Labor government. As February turned to March, it has been shedding supporters.

Events, local, regional and global, have overtaken it, and time and again, its responses have been untidy or slow. Sometimes both - as with the NSW caravan "filled with explosives" in January and the Chinese warships last week.

This has helped Coalition-captured "news" media to cement a corrosive narrative of a government marked by tremulousness.

Now, even its election timing serves the image of a show that instinctively hesitates, preferring to gauge the community mood before finally acting.

The election, let us not forget, might have been held before Christmas, before the mercurial Trump tempest began on January 20. And before the PLA showed up further south than ever, conducting "live-fire" exercises just to make the point.

Their demonstration of new naval capability in long-range projection also turned into an uncomfortable demonstration of our relative shortcomings in near-range monitoring.

This was a provocative act, to be sure, but ask yourself, how does Beijing view our naval ships and planes on permanent rotation in the South and East China Seas including freedom-of-navigation passes through the Taiwan Strait?

Back on election strategy, the idea, evidently, was to use the warmer early months to implement key policy initiatives and hope for an interest rate cut or two before the poll.

These additional "days of governing", to use Julia Gillard's distinction, would allow Albanese to do what oppositions can only dream of - to govern. Thus, Labor could arrest declining support and have a fighting chance of winning the rest back during a well-executed official campaign.

Nobody it seems, thought much about the mounting risks. Contingencies like being slammed by our closest ally with steel and aluminium tariffs and compromised by the other Trumpian outrages from "cleaning out" Gaza, to cutting off the world's poorest, to betraying Ukraine while cuddling up to Putin. And hip-pocket risks like hefty private health insurance hikes announced last week.

The electorate is sour, fractious. In the new digi-scape of TikTok, podcasts, multiple news platforms and saturation social media, governments are kidding themselves if they think the formal campaign period means anything special or discrete to voters. Much less, gives PMs an element of surprise.

Rather, virtual campaigns rage continuously on a million micro-fronts. And rage is the right word. An overwhelmingly plaintive discourse has flipped the fabled advantage of incumbency enjoyed by governments into something that feels more like a burden, heaving with the cumulative disappointments of office.

The venomous rejection of the competent first-term Biden-Harris administration was a warning. Voters simply aren't impressed with taming inflation and "governing well" with its implicit "public goods" of systemic stability and mild economic growth.

They're interested in being seen and in having their grievances validated. Many such voters neither know nor care what you've "achieved" in office and may even see your priorities as the reason they cannot afford insurance, have low job security, and feel homeownership is a cruel hoax.

Enter the populists. With scandalously little costed policy in play, Peter Dutton's standing has risen as the PM's has tanked, largely by running the most singularly "political" opposition in federal history.

Perhaps the canniest retail politician this century, Dutton has been in campaign mode since April 2023 when he came out formally against the Voice. Now, it seems, a combination of his incessant sound-bite sniping about a "weak and ineffectual" PM, and the overall circumstances, have fused. An election dominated by the cost of living and national security is his happy (read, angry) place.

Three years ago, Dutton's task of unseating an ascendant first-term government was considered Herculean. Now it is at least possible and perhaps probable.

Clearly, Dutton has taken comfort and cues from Donald Trump but he has also been careful to maintain plausible deniability. When he does ape the American populist, he also builds distance. He called Trump "dead wrong" on Zelenskyy, for example.

Yet their methodologies are unmistakeably common. He named Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa-Price as his shadow minister for government efficiency just days after Trump had appointed the execrable Elon Musk as head of the invented "Department of Government Efficiency".

Both have been tasked with slashing public servants and waging a culture war on wokeness including public posts concerned with diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI.

Dutton also uses Trump's personalised anti-Biden derision against Albanese's mental acuity.

"I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence," Trump sneered during the June presidential debate that all but finished Biden's career. "I don't think he knows what he said either". It was excruciating.

Now read Dutton on Albanese's handling of the Chinese warships' affair:

"I don't know whether he makes things up, but he seems to get flustered in press conferences. You hear it - the umming and ah-ing, and at the end of it, you don't know what he's actually said".

Two things at least are clear: A cautious Albanese needs a big new theme to animate Labor's re-election. And the second? Dutton believes Australian voters will be just fine with his tissue-thin policy offerings and bitter Trumpian insults.

This will be a test of values for Australian voters, too.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.