A year ago, it was still hard to take Peter Dutton seriously as Australia’s alternative prime minister. By then, the former Queensland policeman’s most significant achievement – though not the most infamous – in a 23-year political career was his orchestration of the defeat in October 2023 of Australia’s national referendum to give Aboriginal people a formal Voice to Parliament.
Dutton fostered the ignorance of the many incurious about the Aboriginal world, effectively telling Australians not to bother learning the detail of the Voice proposal before they voted. Instead, he urged: “If you don’t know, vote ‘no’ “.
A statesman, you might think, would have at least encouraged his countrymen to decide on the facts. But facts, detail and advocacy are largely absent from Dutton’s realm.
Instead, he trades in anxiety, insecurity and envy: fear of migrants, overblown anxiety about crime, envy of the assistance that a decent society renders to the less privileged, the different, the needy.
The man who dropped out early from university business studies after failing more subjects than he passed (he later returned and graduated) does have an ability for fomenting anger and frustration.
Africans? So threatening, apparently, that in 2018, when he was in charge of Australia’s borders under then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, Dutton said Melburnians were too scared to go out to restaurants at night.
Kiwis? Sending New Zealand-born criminals back to their birth place was akin to “taking out the trash”, he told national television after allowing handcuffed deportees to be questioned by a reporter as they were forced aboard an aircraft.
Government jobs for culture, diversity advisers – along with change managers and internal communications specialists – “did nothing to improve the lives of everyday Australians”, Dutton said at the end of January in his first big speech of this election year. They’d likely finish under his leadership.
The latter was lifted from the Donald Trump playbook, as was Dutton’s appointment a week earlier of a shadow minister for government efficiency, putting in his sights the 36,000 additional public servants employed since Antony Albanese took office 32 months ago.
As Turnbull has observed, Dutton is not known for original thinking. Even his campaign slogan ‘”Get Australia Back on Track” is lifted from the New Zealand National Party’s successful 2023 campaign.
His biggest policy offering so far – the establishment of a nuclear power industry – is a borrowed and foggy aspiration that might see the first nuclear power station arrive at the earliest in 2035, according to Dutton, but well beyond 2040, according to experts. Meanwhile, Australia’s thrust away from a network of ageing, carbon-emitting coal-fired power stations and into renewable energy would be stalled.
Yet, it does feel the wind is building behind Dutton’s sails in the lead-up to an election – likely in April – that could yet render Albanese’s the first single-term regime since James Scullin’s in 1932.
Whoever wins – Albanese or Dutton – is highly likely to lead minority governments, reliant on the support of the raft of diverse independent MPs in Parliament.
January’s first big poll showed a majority of voters for the first time expect Dutton’s conservative coalition to win the coming election. Albanese has slid to his lowest approval levels since becoming prime minister in May 2022.
Dutton has been Australia’s alternative prime minister for well over a year but has largely avoided policy specifics, spruiking an economic policy that so far amounts to “smaller government which gets off people’s backs …”
One benefit of being taken seriously is that scrutiny follows – especially once an election campaign begins. The real Peter Dutton cannot hide forever.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for The Times, London.
