Peter Dutton’s loss not just of the election, but of being in parliament, is sad.

Dutton is a good man – I met him here and there over the years and always found him to be decent, smart, personable. He’s funny too. A bit of a lad, actually. Not that you saw it on TV, but that’s politics – too often, it’s the performative hypocrites who look the best in the media, while serious, earnest pollies come across as dour and ‘unlikable’. Nobody got to know the real Peter Dutton – not least of all during the campaign.

Dutton had some good ideas. He had good instincts. The Liberal Party’s policies – such as they were – were sensible, from lifting the ban on nuclear power to a coherent policy on vaping that doesn’t see criminal gangs emboldened and tobacconists firebombed.

And of course, he did the right thing on ‘the voice’. Preventing Australia from inserting racially discriminatory clauses into its founding document will be his legacy as opposition leader – maybe even the finest moment of his entire political career. It was the kind of stand we haven’t seen by a Liberal Party leader since Tony Abbott came out against Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme.

But going into the election, something about Peter Dutton changed. He lost his equilibrium. He became uncertain, equivocal – almost intimidated. Watching his budget reply speech, I thought he looked so rattled that I texted around asking if there was something actually wrong with him. He never shook it off, and went through entire the campaign papably uncomfortable.

Above all Dutton became too risk averse. What he needed was one more signature idea – something novel or interesting enough to seize the agenda. Dutton probably knows in his heart of hearts that, for instance, sticking to the Paris agreement is pointless and damaging to Australia. A stronger stand on that or a raft of similar issues would have given him a real point of difference with Labor.

But Dutton blinked.

The most likely gamechanger would have been migration – probably the biggest sleeper issue in the country. If Dutton had proposed stronger cuts and made them front-and-centre of the campaign, he could have made the election a referendum on immigration levels. Albanese would have been forced to either play catch-up and match the cuts (alienating his base) or defend the status quo (alienating the swing).

As it happened, the election agenda was totally controlled by Labor, who coasted along flashing Medicare cards and putting out memes of three-eyed fish and other such tomfoolery. Dutton’s campaign stops at petrol stations weren’t as flashy. It was a battle of glib slogans and photo ops, and Labor won.

And because the campaign was – as a seemingly deliberate strategy on both sides – so devoid of any discussion of any matter of serious national significance whatsoever, nobody really paid much attention to it. Aside from a few members of the Jewish community voting largely on Israel and antisemitism, not a single person I spoke to during the campaign had any enthusiasm for nor interest in this election whatsoever – not even the political junkies, not even the die-hards. Nobody cared. Political wisdom tells us that in such circumstances, people will usually stick with ‘the devil they know’. They did.

Peter Dutton didn’t need to win, exactly – knocking over a first-term PM is tough, even one as staggeringly ineffectual as Albanese – but he needed to do better than this. He could have picked up eight to ten seats, held on as leader, and won the following election. We’ll never know now. Dutton’s political career is, by definition, over.

It’s a great shame. Peter Dutton could have been a very good prime minister, if not at this election then after the next. But ultimately, he was let down by the most uninspiring, incompetent and all-round awful federal campaign in living memory.

Gideon Rozner was Director of Policy at The Institute of Public Affairs for 5 years following a stint as a ministerial adviser to the Hon Josh Frydenberg MP (then Minister for Resources, Energy and Northern Australia). He completed his Bachelor of Laws with Honours at the University of Melbourne. Follow Gideon on 𝕏.