When he was elected Liberal leader after the 2022 election, Peter Dutton vowed he’d keep his party true to its values.
Values were important to him. That had been clear for a while.
In 2018, just four months before he challenged Malcom Turnbull for the prime ministership and lost, Dutton gave an interview to Guardian Australia and was asked about his ambition to lead the country and whether leaders had a responsibility to build consensus, rather than drive wedges between groups. He went straight to values.
“The short answer is yes,” he replied. “But you have to do it at the same time as you still adhere to the values that people know you believe in. I think some leaders fall into the trap of abandoning principles or changing to somebody that they think people want them to be, and I think that’s a huge mistake.”
As home affairs minister, he oversaw the revamp of the Australian Values Statement that visa applicants were required to embrace before they would be considered for entry. It involved endorsing a range of principles, including free speech and freedom of association, equality of opportunity regardless of ethnic origin, mutual respect, tolerance and compassion for those in need.
Dutton’s personal values also included defending police, having served in uniform himself in Queensland back in the day.
Those particular values were on display in 2019, when he clashed with then opposition leader Anthony Albanese in one of their weekly appearances on Channel Nine’s Today show, after Albanese condemned police raids on a journalist’s home.
“Nobody would accept me as minister, or Albo as minister, directing how an investigation should take place or who should be raided or who should be subject to inquiry,” Dutton said at the time. “We have laws that operate in this country.”
Saying it was “outrageous” that seven police had spent seven hours in the journalist’s home, Albanese emphasised he was criticising the government for authorising the action, not the police for conducting the operation. Dutton chose to see it differently.
“You’re criticising the police, Albo,” he said. “That is an investigation. They make a decision. You absolutely are [criticising] and that is wrong.”
‘Dutton amplified criticism of police’
Five years on, the circumstances are different and it seems Dutton is too.
In April, he blamed police directly for the rise in antisemitism in Australia after the 7 October Hamas terrorist attack/s on Israel.
“It would be concerning if – among our top-ranking police officers – there is a reluctance to enforce the law because to do so risks offending certain cultural sensitivities or stoking tension in particular communities,” Dutton said in a speech on 10 April.
“If our top-ranking police officers harbour such fears and have adopted a soft approach, they do a disservice to these very communities who want the law enforced just like their fellow Australians.”
This week he was walking a slightly more careful line, having marked police remembrance day on the same day that protesters were gathering in Australian capital cities in the wake of Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon, aimed at terrorist organisation Hezbollah.
Nevertheless, he still amplified criticism of police for not instantly arresting protesters who carried photographs of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, killed in the airstrikes, or the organisation’s distinctive yellow flag.
“The minister, the attorney general should be very clear to the commissioner of the police, to the director-general of Asio that we don’t have any tolerance of this sort of glorification of a terrorist leader,” Dutton said on Tuesday.
He chose to ignore the fact that the relatively new hate-speech laws that criminalise displaying prohibited symbols didn’t automatically outlaw waving the flags or carrying the pictures. The offences contained in them are heavily contingent on the context in which such symbols of terrorist organisations are displayed.
In order to determine if someone is in breach for displaying these symbols, police need to study what else happened around that act at the time. The laws say it’s not just displaying a prohibited symbol that constitutes a criminal offence.
It’s about doing so wilfully intending to spread hatred or ideas of racial superiority, incite others to offend or intimidate someone, intimidate or use force or violence against someone based on their race, religion or nationality or in circumstances where it is likely to offend, insult or intimidate people because of a “defining characteristic”. There’s also a “reasonable person” test, meaning somebody without that characteristic needs to be able to readily identify that the person with the prohibited symbol was trying to do these things by displaying it – in other words, somebody who isn’t necessarily being targeted can identify that someone else is.
‘He escalated the rhetoric as the week wore on’
Dutton’s demands also overlook the practical reality that police in this country are used to going to protests to prevent, monitor for, and break up physical violence, not look for flags and T-shirts bearing some symbol in a chanting crowd. Knowing which flags and slogans mean what and to whom, what might be being said by someone waving them, and who else is watching on and could be offended, is a different kind of policing altogether.
The laws are designed to navigate that important line between free speech and social harmony. Still very new, they might prove more effective if police were better trained and resourced to uphold them.
But Dutton simply took the view that police should have arrested more people as a result of last weekend’s protests, and sooner – and if they couldn’t do that, then the laws must need to be tougher.
“The response should’ve been on the day,” Dutton said, agreeing as 2GB program host Ray Hadley railed against police on Thursday for waiting until they had received video footage of the protests to determine whether to lay charges.
He escalated the rhetoric as the week wore on, suggesting anyone protesting on or around this weekend’s one-year anniversary of the 7 October attacks was automatically “celebrating” the slaughter of 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping of hundreds more. He did not and apparently does not accept that it might also be legitimate to mourn the deaths of an estimated 41,000 Palestinians in the relentless attacks on Gaza that have ensued since.
Dutton wasn’t alone in suggesting Australians’ right to protest – the right to free speech and free association – was somehow conditional on more than just abiding by the law. Albanese also said protesters not specifically mourning the 7 October murder of Israelis over the long weekend should stay home.
Of course, there’s a risk in attending any mass protest. The reason you go may not be the reason others go and the message you want to send may not be the one that’s heard. The most extreme in any crowd will generally determine how everyone is perceived. And if they do more harm than good, others who were there will be associated with that.
But it’s also problematic for leaders in a democracy to suggest that the rights we hold dear should be suspended when upholding them becomes too tricky. Values shouldn’t work that way. Visa applicants don’t have a *when-applicable caveat in the fine print at the bottom of the form.
Evidence may sometimes be circumstantial. Values – in case anyone in high office has forgotten – generally aren’t.
Karen Middleton is Guardian Australia’s political editor
