“Blackouts and brownouts:” Peter Dutton hits the panic buttons

Welcome to the final week of the 2025 Australian election campaign. It feels appropriate that the final leaders debate produced exactly zero things worthy of note or different to previous statements, from either leader, in the energy and climate context. Both were calling it in, and honestly, that’s better for everyone.

The more interesting moment came the day before: on Saturday, Peter Dutton did something he has only done once before in this campaign – he uttered the word ‘climate’. It’s a remarkable reply:

QUESTION: The people of Leichhardt, though, they know that, you know, there’s coral bleaching and climate change affecting the Great Barrier Reef. So, in the next ten years, what is your climate policy?

PETER DUTTON: Well, we’ve said in relation to our policy, that we’ll announce our targets once we get into government, get the advice from the agencies, but if you’re concerned about the environment, you’re concerned about climate, then your only choice at this election is to vote for the Coalition, because Anthony Albanese has a plan that has failed. We’re now talking about blackouts and brownouts in our country. Power bills haven’t come down by $275, they’ve gone up by $1,300. That’s the reality.

Just pause for a moment. Soak in the weirdness. If you’re concerned for environment or climate, you should be voting for the Coalition. Is there a single living soul out there who is convinced by something like that?

To me, it’s a really perfect illustration of the multiple personality disorder that has characterised Dutton’s campaign.

If the Coalition had been running a classic hard-right conservative campaign, they would be mentioning climate change constantly – but in the context of it being an elite, luxury concern pushed by out-of-touch academics and greenies.

As I’ve written here before, the election and subsequent economic disaster that is Donald Trump convinced the Coalition’s campaign strategists to put on a moderate mask during most of the past few weeks.

Instead of aggressively and constantly attacking Labor’s climate policies, the Coalition opted for a softer approach that noticeably strayed from critiquing the concept of climate policy inherently and instead leaning on anti-renewable and anti-EV tropes that focused on technology misinformation.

The panic has obviously begun to seep in, for the Coalition. Dutton recently decried the ABC and the Guardian as “hate media“. That was specifically because he claims those two media outlets are projecting the Coalition will lose the poll this coming Saturday – despite every single other major media outlet projecting exactly the same.

During the uninspiring leaders’ debate, Dutton decided to attack Welcome to Country ceremonies (only days after an ANZAC day ceremony was interrupted by Neo Nazi hecklers).

In the same answer in which Dutton claims the Coalition is a climate leader he also jarringly pivots back to claiming Labor’s climate policies are causing ‘blackouts and brownouts’ (despite this not really being on the agenda).

It sounds disjointed because Peter Dutton is just mashing the buttons on the campaign control panel. The polls (hate media or not) continue to get worse for Dutton.

It is likely that this last week might see some moves that actually do stray from the script, when it comes to the Coalition’s positions on energy and climate, and Dutton’s remarks to media.

More for people like us to fact-check and critique – but ultimately, just a mad scramble of panic from a leader whose insistence that he is going to win the election next Saturday feels like an admission that he may have already lost.

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