Peter Dutton’s long-awaited military spending plan was supposed to be the Coalition’s chance to shift the election debate onto the former defence minister’s favoured terrain.

Instead, Dutton ran into yet more questions about his preparation for the election contest as he revealed the plan in a hot defence manufacturing factory in Perth on Wednesday, raising further questions over what his own MPs privately describe as a thin and rushed policy agenda.

Coalition leader Peter Dutton at the Townsville RSL on Friday. Credit: James Brickwood

“Leaving policies so late is a tactic that belongs in the Howard era, and we haven’t learnt our lesson from last time when Morrison’s super-for-housing policy should have come earlier,” one opposition minister, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss internal party matters, said. “We needed to offer more than just saying we’re not Labor, and we’ve so far failed.”

The Liberal Party’s campaign review found a similar thing happened in 2022, when Scott Morrison made his key announcement on home ownership in the last week of the campaign.

This time, the problem is more acute because early voting has soared since the last election, with 72 per cent more people voting on the first day of pre-poll compared to 2022.

After a stuttering first few weeks of the campaign, Dutton is running out of time to raise his game. His stronger debate performance on Tuesday did not flow through to a period of sustained momentum because contentious remarks on reversing tax cuts were followed by an apparent backflip over EV tax breaks.

Both the defence policy and the mortgage deductibility scheme announced on April 12 had support among shadow ministers to be announced weeks or months earlier, according to senior MPs and other party sources who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely.

Dutton pushed back when asked about the delayed timing of the defence policy on Wednesday, saying: “People can argue the politics of it, but the more prudent approach was to see what the bottom line looked like, to make sure that we weren’t promising funny........

© The Sydney Morning Herald