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Every budget week, the opposition leader gives a budget reply on Thursday night.
Every budget week, a chorus of voices urges the opposition leader to "put some meat on the bones" of his* alternative policy vision for the nation.
This year is no different.
Did Peter Dutton put "meat on the bones" of the opposition's plans for Australia tonight?
Of course he didn't. For two reasons.
First: Dutton used to work in a butcher's shop. So he knows that "putting meat on the bones" is not actually how meat works. (Once meat is meat, it really cannot be reapplied to osseous material with any degree of success.)
Second, and more significantly: Dutton has been in politics for a long time.
And his speech tonight was what every shrewd opposition leader's budget-reply speech is: a calculated ideological butchery of the parts of the government's budget he judges to be most vulnerable to his blade, swathed in evocative rhetoric.
The opposition's targets
In tonight's speech, Dutton excoriated the Albanese government for spending too much on green energy, allowing too many immigrants into the country, and failing to keep Australians safe.
The main commitments? A 25 per cent reduction to the annual permanent immigration rate, because the opposition leader argues that high immigration is why Aussies can't afford somewhere to live. More of this in a moment.
Knife crime: Dutton is opposed. Tonight, he promised to "provide much-needed leadership … [to] ….develop uniform knife laws across all jurisdictions."
This will be a popular measure, no doubt. No one much likes knife crime. But the Dutton plan may come as a surprise to the state and territory politicians who populate the tier of government with actual responsibility for the criminal codes.
If elected, Dutton would cancel $13.7 billion in down-the-track budget tax breaks for the development of green hydrogen and critical minerals. This doesn't offend anyone in the short term apart from Twiggy Forrest, and for the Coalition offending Twiggy is a gift-with-purchase.
The opposition won't oppose the budget's $3.7 billion spent on $300 power bill rebates for every household, even though Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor expressed the view to RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas on Wednesday that it should be better targeted.
Why? Because in an electoral environment where the cost of living is the most crushing and broadly felt issue, who is going to stand between voters and a $300 power discount? Nobody, that's who.
Dutton stayed in his comfort zone
Dutton is pro-nuclear, and used his speech tonight to redouble his broad support, which he premiered a year ago in his last budget reply speech.
About two months ago, a front-page story by The Australian's political editor broke the news that "Peter Dutton will announce the Coalition's signature energy policy before the May federal budget, including a plan identifying potential sites for small modular nuclear reactors as future net-zero power sources".
Meat! Bones!
These flesh adhesions, sadly, have not materialised. A senior opposition figure this week explained to your correspondent that "that was just an unsourced front-page story in The Australian, not an actual commitment".
(This seems unfair, given that in the Coalition's Tactical Thesaurus, "unsourced front page story in The Australian" actually appears as a synonym for "press release". But let's not be catty.)
Why would Dutton interfere with the already-hectic politics of budget week by throwing in anything quite as risky to him as specific nuclear power sites?
Instead, he kept to his comfort zone.
Immigration, for instance. Tonight, he made the argument more explicitly than ever before that high immigration is to blame for the high cost of living.
This is a highly incendiary claim. It is politically potent, and it pushes on an open door in the Australian psyche — the one that worries about being "swamped by immigrants". In the 1970s and 1980s, the concern was that immigrants would steal Australian jobs.
We know better than that now. We know that skilled immigration particularly creates jobs, and economic growth.
LoadingImporting a ready-to-work foreign adult is actually far quicker and cheaper than making a new Australian from scratch using the traditional birds-and-bees method.
Here's why the Dutton argument has teeth tonight, though. The government has already conceded that high rates of immigration are exacerbating pressure on housing, which is a key driver of inflation.
You don't even have to wade through the rhetoric — just look at the budget. The government in the budget announced caps on the numbers of international students, acknowledging that in an era of crisis-level housing undersupply, those foreign students are in competition with Australians.
What Dutton did tonight wasn't putting meat on the bones. It was putting a parsley garnish on an argument that the government has already, in part, conceded.
Shameless? Sure. Especially from an opposition leader who as recently as 2022 said "we do need an increase in the migration numbers", and who moreover knows that this budget already projects a near-halving of total immigration numbers from the post-COVID high of 528,000 in 2022/23 to 260,000 in 2024/25. Permanent immigration rates are reduced to 185,000, a figure Dutton proposes to cut further, to 140,000.
As he did last year, Dutton promised tonight to expand the number of hours welfare recipients can work without losing benefits, increase the number of psychology sessions funded annually by Medicare, and ban gambling during sporting events.
This is a week in which the government has put forward contestable ideas. This budget is the clearest indicator yet of the Albanese/Chalmers partnership's long-term ideological colours, once it has got through the business of handing out last leftovers of the Coalition's squillion-dollar tax cuts, for which both men hated so much having to vote when they were in opposition.
In a target-rich ideological environment, it's a foolish opposition leader who calls "Pull!" on his own clay pigeons.
Meat on bones is a risk for opposition leaders. Not many of them take that risk. Anthony Albanese didn't take it very often, which is why he got to be prime minister and Bill Shorten didn't.
*The male pronoun is justified, because we've never had a female opposition leader. Relatedly, we have never had a female treasurer either. Which is why history is replete with outrage about how expensive the treasurer's wife's outfit was on budget night – see our recent coverage of Laura Chalmers's $899 lemon-yellow Carla Zampatti gown, which occurs 10 years after Melissa Babbage (Mrs Joe Hockey) was convicted of Carla Crimes for wearing a $750 Zampatti creation in ivory to Hockey's austerity budget. When will there be a fuss about how expensive the treasurer's clobber cost? When we have a female treasurer. Stand by for updates.