Peter Dutton is sorry for not saying sorry. He wasn’t there when Kevin Rudd delivered the landmark apology to the stolen generations in the House of Representatives in 2008 because the ghost of Peter past boycotted the event.
Dutton’s pivot has been in train for some months. After he took the Liberal leadership last year, he acknowledged he had “made a mistake” in 2008.
But a motion in the House of Representatives on Monday marking the 15th anniversary of Rudd’s apology demanded a more substantial atonement from an alternative prime minister of Australia. Dutton’s “mistake” had been acknowledged initially in response to a journalist’s question, but Monday required a bespoke message for survivors – and for voters who think Dutton is a head kicker from Queensland and can never be anything other than a head kicker from Queensland.
Dutton has spent the summer running a soft no campaign on the voice to parliament. One of Labor’s responses to the summer of soft no has been reminding Dutton regularly that he screwed up in 2008. The point of Anthony Albanese and Linda Burney re-litigating 2008 is obvious. You did the wrong thing then. Are you going to do the wrong thing now?
For now, this question remains open. While Dutton searches for his answer, the anniversary forced a more extended reckoning with 2008. In the chamber, Dutton said he wanted to explain the past in an “unscripted” way. Dutton said he couldn’t say sorry back then because the ghost of Peter past possessed the mind of a cop – one of his pre-politics professions. He was haunted by images of domestic violence, and abused women and children. Back in 2008, he felt the time for apologies would be after those problems were fixed.
I’m certain Dutton saw absolutely unspeakable things while on the beat, things that must haunt him. But Monday’s words beg a simple question. Can the alternative prime minister of Australia only process things he can see?
If this is right, it’s strange that Dutton missed the survivors who wept in Canberra in 2008. They weren’t just in the chamber. Strange he missed Pat Dodson, a parliamentary colleague since 2016, and a First Nations leader for many years before that. Albanese reminded Australians on Monday that Dodson hid in the long grass as a young child to avoid being rounded up and removed with some of his peers. The contours of that terrified kid remain clearly visible in a man who has spent a lifetime striving for grace, and campaigning for justice and reconciliation.
It’s quite hard to fathom how a person can see one atrocity with piercing clarity, but struggle to visualise another, particularly when the invisible atrocity continues to inform the visible one.
That’s how inter-generational trauma works. The part relates to the whole. If reconciliation is to be a bipartisan endeavour in this country, Dutton needs to do better than selective seeing. Seeing the whole, seeing how the parts connect, is what this moment demands, because seeing that is the necessary precursor to action.
I’m sure Dutton has learned things since his failure of judgment in 2008 because it is the way of humans to learn more from our mistakes than our triumphs.
The relevant question before us, though, is not how much this political leader has learned. The question is how will he put his learning to use.
And right now, that’s not clear.
Dutton and Albanese continue to circle one another wondering if there is a universe where this referendum campaign can be a moment of unity rather than a moment of psychic injury. Liberals who support the voice want Albanese to give them a set of conditions, both practical and procedural, where they can say yes. Albanese wants something different: the Liberals to endorse the principle of constitutional recognition now, then work through the detail in an ensuing parliamentary process.
Liberals who support the voice suspect Albanese is jamming them up. Albanese suspects they want to stall a project they have been pretending to consider and then scuttling for the best part of two decades. These gambits circle each other most days in different iterations of close combat.
Dutton right now is in no man’s land, somewhere between observation and participation. Dutton’s transit from observation to participation is the story of the coming weeks and months.
The shadow attorney general, Julian Leeser, on Monday borrowed from Rudd in 2008, noting it wasn’t sentiment that makes history “it is our actions that make history”.
“Let us all choose to be participants and not observers in the repair of our country and the reconciliation of our nation,” Leeser said.
Fine words. But the country is watching.
