Talk about the dog that didn’t bark. Cast your mind back to the distant days of the election campaign, and you’ll dimly remember how often we were told how polling revealed that the only subject hard-pressed voters were interested in discussing was the cost of living.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers stuck to this rule relentlessly, repeatedly assuring us the economy had “turned the corner” (a focus-group-tested line if ever there was one), but Peter Dutton had trouble keeping to the script.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

He was supposed to keep asking whether we felt better off than we did three years ago and, knowing our answer would be “no”, put all the blame for this regression onto Labor. But he couldn’t resist reminding us of the supposed rising tide of crime and risk of invasion.

Am I the only person to have noticed that, in all the many thousands of words commentators have spilled in explaining Labor’s landslide win, there’s been nary a mention of the cost of living? Had it been the only issue in voters’ minds, surely there’d have been a swing away from Labor, not towards it?

And what about all those outer-suburban seats full of families with massive mortgages? Why didn’t any of them think it was time to give the other side a try?

I think the explanation for the big swing to Labor was far simpler than the pundits think. People’s worries about the cost of living were forgotten after the arrival of a new and far more pertinent issue: voters got their first good look at Dutton and the kind of politician he was and, overwhelmingly,........

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