When you’re the PM, or you’re at the very least polishing your bald nog, wearing a suit and lining up for the top job, here’s a tip gleaned from recent history. Don’t go to Hawaii in a bushfire. And definitely don’t go to a party in a cyclone. Especially a swanky Vaucluse fundraising party for the Liberal Party when your electorate (the people WHO ELECTED YOU, i.e. technically your employers) are facing the prospect of losing everything. People don’t like it. It makes them feel like you don’t care. I have to admit, it does look a lot like you don’t care. Hey, isn’t Dickson a super marginal seat? Ooh, not a good time to leave, buddy.
Last week we found out, just as our former Coalition PM doesn’t hold a hose, Dutto doesn’t fill a sandbag. And filling sandbags is exhausting work. Anyone who’s filled one knows. We’re talking sand, Peter not uranium. No one wants a bag of uranium at their door, because we know nuclear isn’t the answer. It shouldn’t even be the question. It had me wondering why no one has asked party-hard Dutto how his fantasy reactors would go in a cyclone. I don’t know if you’ve ever sandbagged a nuclear power plant, but it’s next level. Takes this weather event from catastrophic to radioactive.
Sneaky little Peter thought no one would notice him at Justin’s party house. I mean the guy throws some crazy lavish shindigs. Some of them go for 40 hours. You need more than a cup of tea to party that hard. And it’s a glorious sweaty wonderland. Beautiful people wearing tiny clothes. DJs pumping the tunes. Stuffed toys in the plush room. It would have been the most wicked Lib fundraiser ever. I imagined Pete in his tiny pants sucking a Chupa Chup, a fist pumping in the air – not Elon-style, doof-style – to the heavy-driving bass. The man who would be king.
I don’t know how this could have happened. Didn’t Scomo pay $200,000 for his MPs to do empathy training? Hasn’t he learnt how to do concerned and listening eyebrows? Sad face for the poor? Caring hands for his electorate? Maybe climate change has also caused this terrible compassion drought. The desert where good people do nothing.
So what exactly were they raising money for at the $100 million waterfront mansion owned by billionaire Justine Hemmes? Wow, when you think of all the people trying to save their overpriced rentals, their modest three-bedroom brick homes, their duplexes, their nursing homes, their one-bedroom converted garages, it makes being at a fricking mansion feel downright cruel. Maybe what they should have raised money for is some new political advisors. Ones that say: ‘Don’t go Dutto. Feel the FOMO. Fill a sandbag’.
Put on the hi-vis. I mean, isn’t this the time when politicians who don’t do anything remotely dangerous, or even physical, put on the hi-vis? Isn’t this time to put on the serious danger hi-vis pollie cosplay outfits? The optics darling! The optics! Oh dear, maybe that’s how he got sprung. Did Dutto wear the hi-vis to Hemmesies big Lib donor doof? Is that how he was spotted? In the hard hat and the fluro going crazy on the dance floor?
Instead of packing sacks with sand, was he seen stuffing them full of billionaire cash? Enough sacks of money to sandbag a parliament house, to stop ethics and social justice getting in at the next Fed election? Keep the billionaires safe Pete. Keep them safe. Because if Peter Dutton’s decision to go to a Liberal party fundraiser told us anything it told us this: he doesn’t stand with his electorate, the average Joe, the single mum on struggle street, he stands with billionaires. No amount of money can undo that truth.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
