It's been just over a month since the federal budget and, in that time, it has been Peter Dutton and the Coalition setting the terms of the debate in federal politics.
There was his linking of the housing crisis to migration, even though — as discussed previously in this column — he does not have a clear policy that would actually cut migration by the amount suggested, let alone improve housing prices.
Labor then took far too long to work out how to counter the Opposition's attack on the government over the release of detainees with criminal convictions.
And now we are back at the climate wars, with Dutton's declaration that a Coalition government would not honour the legislated commitment that Australia reduce greenhouse emissions by 43 per cent by 2030.
That all spells political trouble for the government, in that it has ceded the field to the Opposition, even at times when there was little more than a slogan behind Dutton's posturing.
But, particularly when it comes to climate policy, it spells a lot more trouble for the rest of us.
Cost-of-living reframes debate
Even Coalition colleagues are a bit perplexed about where Dutton's political strategy is supposed to be going on nuclear policy, and now emissions targets.
Business interests have expressed their concern about new climate policy uncertainty. People worried about the climate are alarmed by a new policy vacuum opening up for another decade or more.
There are a lot of political and policy threads to unpick, but a starting point might be why the Coalition even feels it can safely be talking about doing less on climate change, two years after losing an election where the Morrison government's perceived climate change denialism was a major factor in the loss.
As one close observer said this week, that shift has been enabled by where the public and the government have gone since 2022.
The cost-of-living crisis has reframed the energy debate. Energy bills trump energy transformation as a priority.
Any suggestion that the current path of policy may be increasing bills is more readily believed, whether or not it is true.
A number of pollsters argue that voters may not be blaming the government for soaring energy prices, but they are not impressed with what it has done to fix them either.
A common response to the prime minister in focus groups these days, in general, is: "Yeah, but what's he actually done?".
There are sufficient doubts around about whether Labor has done enough to leave the door open to those doubts.
The proclivity of ministers to talk in terms of targets and percentages, which makes people's eyes glaze over, doesn't really help.
Also, keep in mind here that we really have to stop considering federal politics as a two-horse race.
Whether it's the Greens or independents more broadly, there is now a third group of runners in the political race who are not satisfied with either the Coalition or Labor on climate policy.
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Banking on nuclear
Most of the elements of what Peter Dutton has said on energy in recent months are not new territory for the Coalition.
It was considering nuclear policy as a 'get out of emissions-reduction jail free' card back in the Morrison government's days — when the technology questions suddenly seemed handily linked to an interest in nuclear-powered submarines.
Remember also the bitter battle within the Coalition about agreeing — even to the commitment — to net zero by 2050?
Barnaby Joyce and other Nationals were stridently against it, and absolutely against a 2030 target.
Their grudging commitment to net zero by 2050 was won in late 2021, with the promise of billions of dollars for the regions in infrastructure spending.
In the internal positioning, as the Opposition tries to backfill an announcement with an actual policy, insiders say this is still roughly how things line up: "The Liberals still think nuclear is their get out of jail free card, the Nats want to make sure they will still get the billions".
Peter Dutton talking about nuclear energy means he can't be accused of being a climate change denier, or even of not wanting to reduce emissions. It just means he doesn't have to do anything much anytime soon.
But anyone who lived through earlier climate wars remembers what the graphs said about this: not just in economic terms, but in terms of making the task of keeping global warming manageable.
In political terms, there's a bit of the Peter Beattie 1998 'jobs promise vibe' about Dutton's strategy now.
It is part of Queensland political folklore how, in the 1998 election campaign, Peter Beattie set himself an unemployment target of 5 per cent within five years if he won government, a pronouncement he apparently made on the run and on the hustings.
What surprised his opponents at the time was that it cut through.
It wasn't that voters necessarily believed he could achieve it, they just gave him 'at least he's trying' points.
There's a sense of that in some of Dutton's comments in the past week.
The 'At least I'm being up-front with people that we can't reach the 2030 targets' position — a position which has the added advantage of raising questions about Labor's targets — rather than debating whether they should be met.
The government, meanwhile, now has yet another factor outside of its control on which its performance will be conspicuously measured before the next election.
Just as it is at the mercy of the Reserve Bank on interest rates, it is now at the mercy of the end-of-year assessment of the Climate Change Authority about whether we are any closer to meeting the 2030 emissions reduction target.
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Dutton's strategy for the so-called teal seats is also clear.
It's not that he is showering them with policies they might like, he is sowing doubt about the independents who occupy them, a strategy which reflects the most likely scenarios for the next election: either a Labor government or minority government.
"Monique Ryan is a Green", he said of the Kooyong MP this week.
"She's not a disaffected Liberal, she's a Green.
"It's absolutely certain that Monique Ryan would support Anthony Albanese in a minority government. So, a vote for Monique Ryan is a vote for Anthony Albanese".
His repeated messages to this effect are supposed to feed disquiet among the Liberal voters who abandoned the party at the last election, and also undermine the economic management credibility of MPs like Ryan by casting them as Greens.
The electoral redistributions currently underway profoundly change the political landscape, with the proposed NSW boundaries announced on Friday resulting in 39 of the state's (now) 45 seats having their boundaries changed, on top of changes already announced in WA and Victoria.
Phil Coorey wrote in the Australian Financial Review on Friday that Dutton had been hoping for a net gain of three or four seats from the redistributions. His gain has been one seat.
But the contest is tight when the current government only holds office by a notional margin of one seat, and while it continues to let the Opposition Leader dictate the rules of play.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
