Glenn Connley

Imagine being on top of the Liberal Senate ticket in the ACT.

It’s fair to say Jacob Vadakkedathu has been handed Mission: Impossible at this election.

Not only has Liberal leader Peter Dutton flip-flopped on a policy which would rip the heart out of the Canberra economy … the Opposition leader has left what – to be fair – appears to be a fairly poor candidate utterly high and dry.

In February, Mr Vadakkedathu survived a hastily-convened bid to have him booted off the ticket – slammed for his poor performance and accused of branch stacking to win the party’s endorsement in the first place.

Mr Vadakkedathu went on radio a fortnight ago, insisting Mr Dutton’s proposed public service cuts would not all be in Canberra … only for Mr Dutton to slap him down during a press conference in Tasmania a couple of days later. In what sounded like an off-the-cuff comment to keep Tassie journalists happy, the Opposition Leader said, yes, indeed, all 41,000 of his proposed public service job cuts would be in the capital.

This morning, Mr Vadakkedathu was back on ABC radio, in a debate with David Pocock, Katy Gallagher and Greens ACT Senate candidate Christina Hobbs.

When the subject inevitably turned to public service cuts, you could almost hear Mr Vadakkedathu’s heart drop.

To be fair, he vowed to fight Peter Dutton’s plan but, once again, insisted it was possible to rip the equivalent of several departments’ worth of jobs out of the public service, using only natural attrition and voluntary redundancies over five years, without destroying the public service.

To say Mr Vadakkedathu was torn apart by the other three candidates is an understatement.

They destroyed him.

And the more he fumbled and bumbled his way to find the right Dutton talking point, the deeper he dug.

Has Peter Dutton visited the ACT at all in this campaign? I don’t think he has.

For a bloke who wants the most important job in Canberra (albeit working remotely from beside Sydney Harbour) the disdain with which he speaks about the nation’s capital is sickening.

Perhaps he identified early that the Liberals had no chance of knocking off Mr Pocock or Ms Gallagher to win back the Senate spot the party lost in 2022.

Perhaps he identified early that he had a dud candidate.

But, as Mr Pocock so eloquently put it, “punching down on Canberra public service who, by law, aren’t allowed to fight back” … is pretty gutless.