In an ideal world politics would focus on rational and intelligent debate between enlightened people – just like in Ancient Greece –without, of course, the exclusion of women and slaves. Albeit there are some serious doubts about the Liberal Party’s commitment to advancing women.

But sadly, we don’t live in an ideal world. Instead, it is a battle between competing groups – both run by apparatchiks – focussed on forgettable ‘announceables’. The politicians keep up the pretence of high-minded debate, but the real campaigns focus on offending as few people as possible and not frightening the horses by campaigning on issues about real reform – like negative gearing, capital gains tax and climate change.

At the same time the word reform has transmogrified from its original 19^th Century politics origins into cover for policies which only benefit the proponents – for example when business groups talk about reform they are actually talking about reducing union and worker power, cutting corporate taxes and getting rid of regulation which they don’t like.

The starting point for any campaign is that Right wing parties – like the Liberal National Coalition – are nowadays neither reformist nor conservative. Instead, they are radical in the same way as Donald Trump is – a politician committed to norm-breaking.

Peter Dutton is already an exemplary practitioner of this strategy. As with the Democrats and Trump Labor seems incapable of combating this approach – partly because it is very difficult to see what Labor stands for. Moreover, when it comes to responding to Dutton’s playbook the Labor Government seems inept to say the last.

The Prime Minister has just returned from a whistle stop tour of three states with much talk about a positive campaign being embarked upon. But can anyone remember one thing he promised or one significant achievement he pointed to?  It was all a performative rather than purposeful activity.

If Albanese continues along the same lines, he is doomed. There are, therefore, two options, get rid of him and get someone who can articulate practical much-needed policies, avoid pollie talk and project some vision.

There is, however, an alternative. It doesn’t involve tours of marginal electorates for photo opportunities; nor media conferences announcing new policies of marginal significance; nor all the other boring and predictable things which keeps the media hopping on and off planes to follow the circus.

Of course, there has to be some of that because you can’t take the Press Gallery very far out of its comfort zone, narrow preoccupations, ritualised campaign coverage and the search for Gotcha moments. But basically, there would be very little of the things politicians usually do in the form of conventional symbolic and performative events.

That alternative focuses on the long-recognised success of creative negative campaigns. And doesn’t Peter Dutton leave himself open to this? Indeed, Labor should run a relentlessly negative one targeting Dutton and largely forget about policies and promises.

There is lots of raw material for such a campaign.

For instance, Dutton recently claimed that “our society is less cohesive” because of the Albanese Government. A junior creative in a second- string advertising agency ought to be able to produce some ads highlighting his gross hypocrisy – from refusing to stand in front of the Indigenous flag and the divisive Voice campaign to the Liberal Party’s continued failure to achieve anything close to male-female parity in Parliamentary representation.

Then there is the nuclear ploy. Former Liberal Party Cabinet Minister, now lobbyist, Christopher Pyne, belled the cat in an Age op ed when he argued that Dutton had neutralised the climate change issue with a nuclear policy which is really only an excuse to do nothing about climate change. As Pyne recognised, the nuclear plants would probably never be built and, if they were, they would be massively expensive and too late to combat the real climate challenges Australia faces.

Labor ought, in this situation, to produce a series of ads and lots of social media posts around the theme of – if Peter Dutton’s nuclear policy ever because reality – this is what Australia will face.

For instance, 2024 was the hottest year on record in Australia and the world. Illustrate how devastatingly much worse that can get, and what the impact of climate change on Australia will be with images of bushfires, flash floods, landslides, disease outbreaks, extreme weather events by the time Dutton claims his nuclear power plants will be ready and when he is abandoned every other policy to combat climate change.

An ad challenging him to produce one example of a nuclear power station built on time and on budget might also be worth exploring as would his fantasy of small modular nuclear reactors. A unicorn or the Second Coming are probably more likely – although some of Dutton’s religious supporters are probably hoping for and expecting the latter.

For many people it will be impossible to insure their home and an ad featuring insurance companies refusing coverage would bring that reality home – so to speak. Plus, it is already happening which adds to plausibility.

Everybody fears radioactivity – so it would be easy enough to produce a campaign around where nuclear waste would be stored.

A special feature on the death of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage site would be a double whammy in terms of the huge impact on the tourism industry and the Queensland economy as well as the loss of one of the world’s most amazing places.

It would be nice to do something on debt as – Labor inherited $1trillion in debt from Dutton/Morrison, inflation with a six in front and which is now a two in front. But sadly, the public has been infected by the meme that the LNP is best on all this so it would probably be ineffective. However, focussing on the services which would be slashed would be more effective because that’s believed to be in the LNP DNA.

Finally, some positive stuff about renewable energy would be useful. But it should focus less on how necessary it is and instead pick up on Ross Garnaut’s work about how Australia can be a renewable energy giant. Some great Australian boosterism never goes astray.