Dutton’s dangerous dance: decrying one form of racism while stoking all the others

It must have been quite a shock for the latest crop of far-right activists to find themselves suddenly being condemned by the Coalition. After years of their despicable stunts being ignored, deflected, or treated as a reason for preselection, the recent spate of antisemitic vandalism reminded Peter Dutton and his attack pup James Paterson that Nazis can hate White people, too. 

Pup Paterson’s current complaints that Nazis have been ‘emboldened’ to cause trouble online and irl reach new heights of hypocrisy given that his leader’s consistent use of race as a political tool has played an important role in legitimising their white supremacy.

It was always going to be a challenge for Dutton to position himself as a builder of cohesion and healing when fomenting fear of non-White immigrants and First Nations’ Australians is his first and last political strategy. He is an equal opportunity advocate only to the extent that Chinese, African, Muslim, Lebanese and Aboriginal Australians have all copped it over the years in his persistent bid to Make Australia Freak Out and Vote Coalition Again. Assuming he’s not trying out material for a new stand-up act, his audacious claim that it is Labor who is obsessed by culture wars and Albanese who is intent on dividing our nation rivals the chutzpah of Honest Johnnie Howard’s ‘trust’ 2004 election campaign, after a term spent lying through his Prime Ministerial teeth on matters notably including the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Dutton’s ruthless exploitation of the Jewish community’s post October 7 disquiet to portray Albanese as weak began with the predictable conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and continued by calling the Government’s assertion of long-standing bipartisan support for a two-state solution ‘clear bias against Israel’.

He’s labelled the expression of reservations about carpet-bombing a civilian population ‘protests against Jewish students and academics’, the raucously contested but non-violent Opera House protests of October 9 as ‘akin to a Port Arthur moment in terms of their social significance’, and deemed Jewish Attorney General and descendant of Holocaust survivors Mark Dreyfus and Foreign Minister Penny Wong inappropriate representatives at the Auschwitz Commemoration. Last week he tried to silence Dreyfus on the floor of the House, putting a motion Dreyfus ‘no longer be heard’, as Dreyfus delivered a somber speech on his experience of recent months, ‘(standing) in the shadow of the main gate at the Auschwitz death camp… on the field where a music festival in Israel was turned into a bloodbath, and in the ruins of a burnt-out synagogue in my own home town’.

With no serious policies to showcase (and no, his nuclear fantasy doesn’t count), Dutton is reduced to campaigning on a vibe – a hokey ex-Queensland-policeman-kind-of-vibe despite having spent many more years as a millionaire property developer than he ever did as a cop on the beat. 

Albanese’s response was his own needles-in-the strawberries moment as the Government performatively demonstrated its deep concern at recent antisemitic outrages by rushing through legislation to criminalise things that are already crimes and kicking to the curb its sensible and long-held opposition to mandatory sentencing. Federal and State parliaments seem determined to give vague new powers to the police to ‘send a message’ to potential perpetrators in lieu of letting the police get on and investigate the high-profile violent acts that broke laws already on the books.

Dutton’s ludicrous insistence that the timing of Albanese’s AFP briefing about the infamous Dural caravan is somehow a reflection on the integrity of the Prime Minister’s office is nonsensical. We’ve now learned than the explosives in said caravan were likely up to 40 years old, making the three previously mooted scenarios – meth-heads making trouble, antisemitic terrorists plotting ‘mass casualty events’ or foreign agitators fomenting community discord – even less imaginable, so why not let police carry out their investigation without it being further compromised by baseless media speculation and bizarre political point-scoring?

Criminalising protests near places of worship won’t help in that task nor stop the late-night arson attacks and rancid graffiti sprees, but the frantic political response of the last fortnight while other forms of hatred are normalised, ignored or promoted certainly ‘sends a message’: that some sections of society are more worthy of legislative protection from hatred than others. 

The deliberate stoking of panic and fear by the media and the knee-jerk responses of our institutional leaders is as deplorable as it is predictable. In the last fortnight alone we have seen two insanely stupid young nurses pilloried for shit-talking on social media, the reputation-ending decision of Creative Australia to revoke a Lebanese-born artist’s prestigious commission less than a week after its announcement, a lawsuit over a 5-day contract of a fill-in radio presenter upend the ABC and tawdry stuntmeister Daily Telegraph demonstrate scant meaning of the word ‘undercover’ sending an ‘UndercoverJew’ to Newtown dressed as an Israeli flag. It’s a hot mess.

It’s unclear how the Coalition’s newfound suspicion of the Aryan Proud aligns with their sycophantic celebration of the ascension of the deeply racist Trump-Musk regime. The Coalition is cock-a-hoop about Trump’s election. Ex-Ministers spat out glowing op-eds. Alexander Downer overlooked the golfing and Fox viewing schedule of Trump’s first term to endorse his ‘extraordinary capacity for hard work and decision making’ and proclaimed his wild geopolitical posturing as evidence of his ‘courage and sense of direction’. Weapons shill Christopher Pyne assured us Trump’s ambition to annex Greenland from NATO ally Denmark was entirely reasonable and historically defensible and that, despite conceding they had no desire to become American, assured Greenlanders they would enjoy ‘a future much more brightly under the umbrella of the US’.

Current Shadow Ministers were equally delighted. Michaelia Cash enthused that Trump was showing ‘a man of action’ and that Australia would get ‘the exact same attitude under a Peter Dutton government… the same great energy’. Even as Trump advocated for Gaza to become the same Palestinian-free ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ his son-in-law first described a year ago now, Dutton praised him as a ‘a big thinker and a dealmaker’.

Trump’s BFF status with Netanyahu and proposed ethnic cleansing is on brand for Dutton, but how does he rationalise Musk’s fascist salutes and habit of cosying up to actual German Nazis? Or Vice President Vance’s tirade against Europe before his private meeting with the AfD? Or Trump’s friendly chats with fellow kleptocrat Putin as he eyes Ukraine’s critical minerals without consulting Ukraine or NATO allies?

Cleaving close to Trump’s illegal and amoral administration might not be the winning strategy in centrist Australia Dutton thinks it is, with the chaos in Washington causing mostly exhaustion and incredulity amongst an Australian population, 74% of whom said they’d prefer Kamala Harris to be President. So far, Dutton seems content to follow in the hefty footsteps of Oz Trumpette Gina Rinehart and parrot Trump’s lines. A mere two days after Rinehart called for Australia to ‘set up a DOGE immediately’, Dutton obediently announced Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as the ‘shadow minister for government efficiency’, seemingly forgetting he’d appointed the Invisible Member for Sturt James Stevens to the remarkably similar sounding role of ‘shadow assistant minister for government waste reduction’ in March last year. He’s leaning into the manosphere, going on podcasts to sympathise with hypothetical young men who ‘feel disenfranchised and feel ostracised’, who ‘have had enough of being overlooked for jobs and promotions’ while their hypothetical partners stay obediently at home. He’s taken aim at the bureaucracy and its ‘cultural diversity and inclusion adviser positions’, asserting he will sack the 36,000 new public servants employed under the Labor Government, presumably condemning veterans back to the Morrison-era “Delay, Deny, Wait until we Die” strategy of their previously understaffed Department, and social security recipients back to hours of frustration on hold to Centrelink, and millions of taxpayer dollars to be wasted on expensive often conflicted consultants plugging gaps in the bureaucracy many of these cheaper permanent roles had filled.

Dutton’s reactionary reflexes aren’t new. His elation at the global ‘anti-woke revolution’ is not because it’s a revelation but because it’s a reinforcement of his default worldview – a reductive zero-sum vision in which morning teas promoting diversity and Indigenous names for military barracks imperil our nation. Hell, he supported the white South African farmers long before Musk whispered sweet apartheid-era hatred into Trump’s receptive ears. Dutton may think his Trumpian language and the divisive tactics he deployed during the Voice campaign can eke out a victory at the next election, and current polling is bolstering his confidence. But Australia isn’t the US and a general election is no referendum. When called to demonstrate his credentials as an alternative Prime Minister, Dutton will need more than fanboy copycatting, cynical posturing and the flimsiest of policy fig-leaves.