The Coalition formally launches its election campaign on Sunday.

After a fortnight of a Seinfeld election – an election about nothing (or rather, nothing but an auction of ‘free’ stuff) – it’s the last, best chance for Peter Dutton and the LNP to get their proverbial together, and show they have an election-winning package, and not just a grab-bag of announceables, thought-bubbles and ‘me-toos’.

What would I like to see Dutton include in his policy speech? Dozing off after a Saturday afternoon gin and tonic, this is what I dreamt:

• The Opposition leader acknowledges the Coalition went badly wrong before it was thrown out in May 2022. He apologises for the fiscal profligacy of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government of which he was a part, and that it abandoned fiscal discipline after Labor’s successful assault on its 2014 Budget. Especially, he apologises for the catastrophic assault on people’s lives and liberties in the blighted and benighted Covid years, and acknowledges that the scars are yet to heal.
• Dutton recommits proudly to classic centre-right values: smaller government, lower taxes, and increasing personal liberty in return for personal responsibility. Declare the Liberal party is returning to its philosophical roots, and those core values will drive and underpin everything Dutton and his team does on returning to government.

Then, Dutton goes on and:

• Declares that reckless and profligate federal government spending must stop, including canning new high-cost campaign promises. Dutton says that, in the current volatile economic climate, we must do everything possible to reduce debt and deficit, not increase them. He makes it clear that new spending, including the ‘me-too’ big ticket items in Medicare and education, are going ahead only on condition that savings and offsets, at least commensurate with their value, are found.
• Promises genuine tax reform, especially personal tax indexation, so that bracket creep is eliminated. But Dutton makes it clear that requires government to live within its means instead of budgeting for bracket creep windfalls. And it would help with reducing cost-of-living in a permanent, sensible, structural way.
• Promises to reduce the size of government outside of defence, which needs to be boosted as a share of GDP. 28 per cent of the nation’s annual wealth being gobbled up by the federal government is too much. Commit to reducing that share by one per cent per year for five years.
• In pursuit of that goal, Dutton commits to run the ruler under every line of the government’s budget, questioning the need for every function that doesn’t relate directly to government’s basic constitutional responsibilities. Functions that are state responsibilities, like hospitals and schools, don’t need a big federal bureaucracy, just small agencies to write and audit funding cheques. Likewise, big-spending programs and agencies in areas in roles that should have been left to the private sector should go. Goodbye to the likes of Creative Australia and the Australian Sports Commission, that only exist to do what the luvvies and jocks tell them to do – and many other federal bodies and agencies that are little more than captive audiences for rent-seekers.
• Paris and Net Zero: Dutton doesn’t abandon the former (that would split the Liberal party and gift seats to grandstanding Teals), but declares Net Zero by 2050 is an aspirational and not an absolute goal. We all want to reduce carbon emissions if they be bad, but as LNP energy spokesman Ted O’Brien gamely said in his debate takedown of renewable energy fanatic Chris Bowen, the national interest must always come first. In relation to that, Dutton congratulates another Labour leader – Britain’s Keir Starmer – for showing Anthony Albanese that if you’re serious about Net Zero, you have to invest big in nuclear capability, as Starmer has announced with his massive Sizewell B project just last week.
• Doubles down on the reality that our education system is indoctrinating our kids with a Green-Left worldview. Commits to tossing out the inverse-racist national curriculum, and restoring truth, honesty, and mainstream community values into what our kids are taught. When six-year-olds, like mine, come home from a supposedly secular state school having been convinced the world was created by an Aboriginal spirit bird, and are taught they must atone for the original sin of Western colonisation, we have a problem.
• Lastly, Dutton shows Australians the Coalition trusts them to use their freedoms of speech and thought, because that’s what a healthy democracy is all about. Abolish the e-Safety Commissioner. Admit the under-16 social media ban is a well-intentioned mistake. Stop the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and federal courts from persecuting those who don’t agree with the mindset and world view of the woke elites in politics, the media, and corporate Australia, not least on their dangerous embrace of gender ideology.

Oh, and Dutton makes an unambiguous commitment to put the Greens last on every Coalition how-to-vote card, even if that risks gifting a handful of seats to Labor. Principle matters.

I could go on, but as politics is the art of the possible, this is already too much. Therefore, while I dare to dream all this in my G and T haze, I expect to wake up disappointed once the ballyhoo of the Coalition’s policy launch is done and dusted. I can only hope to be proved wrong on Sunday.

Terry Barnes writes our Morning Double Shot newsletter