For a guy who looks like a Bond villain and has only one, deeply divisive policy, Peter Dutton has been riding high in certain opinion polls lately. Does the collective wisdom that he is unelectable need to be revisited?
With the Liberals apparently abandoning most of the leafy, now teal electorates in their slide to the nuclear right, the new strategy is to target Labor seats on slim margins in places like Gilmore and Robertson in NSW, and Lyons in Tasmania; outer suburbs and regional areas hit hard by the cost of living crisis.
Can the battlers who bucked Albo over the Voice be persuaded to chuck the ALP altogether? Similar strategies have succeeded in the UK and the USA, with working people voting against their own interests for various strange reasons, although normally a charismatic showman is required to pull this trick off, and that’s not the current Australian opposition leader by a long shot.
The thing about Peter Dutton is that he always wanted to be a politician, but he’s an oddity in his own party, which is mostly composed of lawyers and bankers. He joined the Young Liberals as a teenager, and only became a police officer after his bid for the Queensland state seat of Lytton was unsuccessful.
For a time he was a detective in the Brisbane drug and sex offenders squad (which appears to have contributed to his jaundiced view of human nature), before a lucrative period spent flipping rundown properties into childcare centres, amongst other successful real estate investments.
Going large
Dutton found his way into federal politics in 2001, snapping up Cheryl Kernot’s seat of Dickson in outer Brisbane after she dallied with Labor and paid the price.
He’s learned from the successes and failures of his mentors, particularly John Howard and Tony Abbott, and survived the fallout from the ScoMo meteor.
Reportedly a lovely guy in person, politically Peter Dutton has proven himself to be a brutal operator. He has repeatedly sought to elevate his own political position by attacks on minorities, including African immigrants, Lebanese refugees and Aboriginal people. He walked out of Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations and pushed the boundaries of international law in his treatment of asylum seekers as Home Affairs Minister.
Dutton is also capable of surprises, such as his support for gay marriage a few years ago, and more recently for Julian Assange.
Although he holds his own seat by a fairly narrow margin, for an opposition leader, GetUp’s previous attempts to unseat him have backfired, and he’s not as vulnerable to changing demographics as John Howard was in Bennelong, for example. Queenslanders are different, after all.
Rumours of incompetence as best, and corruption at worst, such as the mysterious circumstances of his leaving the police, and Dutton’s role in the $532 million contract awarded to the contractor Paladin while he was a minister (an organisation at the time headquartered in a shack on Kangaroo Island), have failed to amount to anything substantial, so far.
Dodgy visas for au pairs and jokes about rising sea levels engulfing Pacific nations have already been forgotten.
Give Dutts a chance
With the predictable aid of the Murdoch and Nine media, the public appear willing to give Peter Dutton the benefit of the doubt.
As a result, Labor are going to have to deal with him, either by sinking to his level, or offering a shining alternative.
Dutton has proven his ability to outflank Anthony Albanese on several occasions, particularly via his cynical use of culture war techniques imported from the US.
Not being Scott Morrison isn’t an election strategy that’s going to work for Albo again, and while there’s much to worry about in Dutton’s public and private statements over the years, the voters he’s targeting now have had bigger things to worry about recently, such as spiralling interest rates and the rising cost of everything. If Labor can be blamed for all this, the other mob may get a go sooner rather than later.
As a result, while it remains mercifully unlikely, the extraordinary answer appears to be that yes, Peter Dutton can win the next election.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning film-maker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
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