In February 2023 Peter Dutton told the first joint Coalition party room of the year that the Liberals and Nationals were the “parties of the Australian working class”.

Much like the kid who gives himself a nickname, it was hard to take this self-identification seriously. But it’s worth paying attention to as a statement of Dutton’s intent, if not as a description of reality.

After losing government and a swag of blue-ribbon Liberal seats, the opposition increasingly looks to regional and outer urban areas as key to their path back: places such as Lyons in Tasmania, McEwen, north of Melbourne, and the Hunter Valley in New South Wales.

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The class politics of Dutton’s internal target seat list helps explain the wobbles we’ve seen on the Coalition side since Labor unveiled its bold plan to halve the legislated stage-three tax cuts for high-income earners to pay for bigger cuts for taxpayers earning less than $146,486.

The Coalition rowed out so hard against Labor’s new policy that a softening of its opposition to more generous cuts for low- and middle-income earners seemed inevitable.

The softening began last week with the deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, clarifying she had not intended to........

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