By Mark Kenny

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

If the Peter Dutton who showed up on election night had turned up consistently over the last three years, he would have had a decent chance of becoming prime minister.

Instead, Dutton has been ejected from Parliament and Australia's most successful party has experienced an electoral catastrophe, retaining fewer than 50 seats in the lower house.

A dozen years ago, Tony Abbott stormed into office with 90.

In defeat, Dutton's generous and dignified concession revealed a side of him kept tightly hidden - institutional Dutton, constructive Dutton, kind-hearted Dutton, and what we might call strong-vulnerable Dutton.

The abruptly privatised former public figure who fronted shattered Liberal volunteers on election night, was a model of pluralist grace and civility.

Importantly, he shirked nothing. Barely three hours into the election count, Dutton exemplified the quintessence of Australian democratic best practice - reinforcing the primacy of reading the people's verdict clearly and validating it swiftly. Free-and-fair elections, no quibbling.

At a personal level, that cannot have been easy given the thrashing his party received nationally and which extended, humiliatingly, to blunt rejection by his own constituents of Dickson.

"I said to the Prime Minister that his mum would be incredibly proud of his achievement tonight, and he should be very proud of what he's achieved," Dutton told the party faithful in Brisbane after calling Anthony Albanese.

He offered equally warm and encouraging words for Ali France who, on her third attempt, had finally seized Dickson for Labor. The Brisbane seat had been Albanese's very first stop on day one of a well-executed campaign.

Cynics branded that first visit and subsequent ones as a stunt but Albanese insisted he was about trying to win Queensland's most marginal opposition electorate. His attention paid off. Big time.

One couldn't help but notice in Dutton's election night demeanour the sharp contrast with the relentlessly negative figure who had ruthlessly skewered the Voice to Parliament in 2023 and then skited about it.

Nor could one miss the favourable comparison between Dutton's unhesitating acceptance of his election defeat, on the one hand, and the infantile anti-democratic tantrum unleashed by his erstwhile idol, Donald Trump in 2020.

This was all the more pertinent because Trump 2.0 (the uncut version) was on the ballot in this election too, after Dutton had first welcomed the new Trumpian milieu only to carry it like a millstone as Australian sentiment soured and Trump became a serious negative.

Voters here had noticed Dutton's use of Trump's corrosive methodologies which involved demonising sections of the electorate - inner-city elites, professionals, teal-Green-Labor cosmopolitans and journalists.

Branding the ABC and others as the "hate media" was pure Trump. Worse than pointless, it rang in Australian ears as fawningly, suspiciously American.

Ditto his railing against welcome-to-country statements at airports and public events and his deliberately one-sided campaigning on the Israel-Gaza war.

Too often, in his eagerness to enliven electoral resentments, Dutton brushed over solid reform options lunging instead for ill-conceived wedge policies like sacking public servants and ending work from home.

He even appointed a shadow minister for "government efficiency". The fingerprints of Trump's drain-the-swamp assault on DC bureaucrats were all over Dutton's anti-Canberra variant.

This was typical of the total-politics approach urged on him by right-wing media foghorns and dubious billionaires for whom everything becomes angry partisan fodder.

Headline-grabbing pledges to hit bureaucrats may have been badged as an economic reform but they owed more to Dutton's penchant for cultural combat than to frugal economic stewardship.

Small government Liberals like to say "you cannot tax your way to prosperity".

This election they might have learnt a new lesson: in Australia's system of compulsory preferential voting, you cannot divide your way to a broader electoral constituency.

Australia saw the worst of Dutton during his time as leader and only glimpsed the best of him as he left.

It is human to feel sorry for him as a person, but bear in mind also the thousands of dedicated public officials who spent the campaign wondering if their careers would be axed, their agencies dissolved, their world upended.

Where was the Coalition's sensitivity for these anonymous Australians.

Ask them if they feel better off than they did three years ago, and they're likely to say they feel better off than they did three days ago!

Like his predecessor, Dutton chose division. In so doing, he flubbed a threshold test of national leadership - the requirement to advance a manifesto for all.

If you cannot make up ground on an uncharismatic government during a cost-of-living crunch which is straining households and sending small businesses to the wall, you are either very unpopular or hopelessly unready.

Dutton's opposition turned out to be both.

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