Peter Dutton, a sad loser
Let’s take a moment to celebrate the downfall of the election’s biggest loser, Peter Dutton. Scott Morrison’s electoral loss in 2022 was the worst Liberal-National Party result for at least 70 years. Dutton has topped that, with a further swing away from the Coalition and the loss of at least a dozen more seats. The Liberal Party’s lower house representatives have been wiped out of many major Australian cities, and the entirety of Tasmania, the ACT and the NT.
Dutton says his hero and mentor is the conservative former PM John Howard. Dutton has managed to emulate none of Howard’s successes, only his final act of humiliation by losing his seat of Dickson, just as Howard lost Bennelong in 2007. In fact, Dutton has made history by becoming the first opposition leader to lose his own seat, suffering an 8 percent negative primary vote swing, more than twice as bad as his party’s terrible national average, and falling a whopping 12 percent short of Labor’s Ali France in two-party preferred terms.
Dutton praised his other hero, Donald Trump, as a “big thinker” after the US president announced his plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. He suggested that he would be best-placed to have a cosy relationship with the far-right billionaire. But Dutton is such a loser that, after the election, Trump said he had “no idea” who Dutton even was. Sad.
On election night, Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he did not “intend to dance on Peter Dutton’s grave”. That’s fine, because we don’t want to share the dance floor with Labor politicians who spent far too much of their last term dancing to Dutton’s tune. For everyone else, join us as Red Flag, Australia’s leading “hate media” outlet, leads us on this merry jig atop the corpse of the despicable career of Peter Dutton.
Dutton grew up in Brisbane and joined the Young Liberals at age 18. By 19, he was already running (and losing) as a Liberal candidate. He failed out of his business degree at Queensland University of Technology and, in a logical move for a human failure, joined the police force. He remained a cop for a decade, until he crashed and rolled his unmarked Mazda 626 while on a stakeout outside a fast food restaurant. He then joined his father’s property development business, reportedly making more than $30 million in property transactions over the subsequent 35 years, making him one of Australia’s richest politicians. Dutton became a member of parliament in 2001.
His maiden speech in 2002 railed against our “over tolerant society” and the “politically correct”, singling out “the Civil Liberties Council, the Refugee Action Collective, and certainly the dictatorship of the trade union movement”. Under the Howard government, he championed attacks on civil liberties, welfare recipients and workers’ rights and justified the “war on terror”.
In 2015, after the Tony Abbott government tried (and failed) to dismantle the public health system and introduce compulsory fees for seeing a GP, doctors voted Dutton “the worst health minister in 35 years”.
Dutton’s whole political career was built on law-and-order scare campaigns and racism, while hating unions and ruling for the rich. This is hardly unique among right-wing politicians, but Dutton brought a certain zeal that marked him out even among his appalling colleagues as a sociopathic thug who dreamt of imprisoning or deporting half the population. He has been at the forefront of every racist campaign in Australia for a decade or more.
In 2008, Dutton boycotted parliament so he wouldn’t be present as the official government apology was delivered to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations. In 2023, he led the racist campaign against the Voice.
In 2018, Dutton railed against “Sudanese gangs” in Victoria and said Melburnians were afraid to go out to restaurants due to violence perpetrated by South Sudanese people. This year, he tried again, saying Melburnians were afraid to go to the shops due to crime. On both occasions, the Liberals subsequently got thumped.
Dutton once said that Lebanese Muslim migration to Australia had been “a mistake”. He cheered on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, threatened to deport anyone who protested against it, promised to introduce support for Israel as a condition of Australian citizenship and pledged to stop any refugees from Gaza coming to Australia.
Dutton’s time as immigration and home affairs ministers from 2014 to 2021 cemented his reputation as a sadistic authoritarian. During this time, he presided over a cruel regime of offshore concentration camps in which asylum seekers were indefinitely detained, abused, beaten, raped and vilified. In many ways, Peter Dutton helped pioneer the cruel treatment of refugees and immigrants that has since taken hold in Europe and the US.
Such was his reputation that Dutton had to wheel out his wife to reassure the public that he was, in fact, a human being and “not a monster”. The memes were glorious, perfectly balancing the menace that Dutton represented with the ridicule this potato-headed mediocrity deserved.
From failing business school, to rolling his police car, Dutton has now crashed the LNP and his own Temu Trump political career. We can only hope for a climate change-induced cyclone or a youth crime spree to destroy his property portfolio and complete the schadenfreude.
While Dutton’s loss is a setback for hard right politics in Australia for now, the right and the far right are far from dead. The conditions that give rise to them, and the capitalist forces that back them, are alive and well all around the world.
What’s more, almost everyone Dutton spent his career punching down on is also being punched under the newly elected Labor government. Our goal must be to turn this repudiation of Dutton into a repudiation of the similarly right-wing agenda pursued by Anthony Albanese, who himself covets his “warm” relationship with Donald Trump.
