The opposition leader Peter Dutton’s determination to convince Australian voters they are on a path to an ill-defined catastrophe is collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity.
As with his apparent American role model, Dutton’s Trump-like insistence that voters are headed for disaster relies on cheap over-reach rather than rational analysis – shock them with schlock.
There has been no better demonstration of this grubby, fact-defying tactic – and the attached, mindless absurdity – than his comments on Wednesday evening when delivering the Tom Hughes oration at the Sydney Opera House.
With no obvious twinge of shame or embarrassment, he likened a rally at the Opera House on 9 October last year to the massacre of 35 people at Port Arthur almost exactly 28 years ago.
He said of the protest: “It was a recognition that something is rotten in the state of Australia.”
Before our antipodean Marcellus produced that hollow and vile comparison with its clear disrespect for the victims of the 1996 atrocity, Dutton pumped up trepidation here by referring to events elsewhere.
This is the central element to his scare strategy, a brazen bid to exploit global uncertainty for cheap domestic political gain. It taps understandable voter insecurity by heightening it, without even trying to itemise in detail a policy response.
Whether it’s electric vehicles or tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners, or a supermarket chain declining to sell trashy Australia Day items largely made overseas, Dutton seeks to hoist fear and anger, and demand someone other than himself do something.
An important element of this exploitation is to accuse those in authority – police, the courts, Labor governments – of making Australians more vulnerable to the nasties rocking the world. And on Wednesday Dutton made that clear.
“Imagine if we were citizens of another country today,” he said.
“We might be on the frontlines in Ukraine. We might be mourning the loss of a loved one killed in Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel or in the conflict which has followed in Gaza.”
We might also be in Finland which surveys claim has the happiest people in the world and one of the best education systems in the world.
But that wouldn’t fit the Dutton fright night speech.
He went on: “We might be living with little freedom or hope under one of the world’s many dictators. We might be paying a people smuggler and risking our life on a rickety boat in rough seas to escape privation for the chance of a better life.”
Of course, none of those terrifying factors existed here in what Dutton said was “the safest, most egalitarian, and most prosperous democracy of them all”.
But clearly, his salient message was that it wouldn’t take much to turn Australia into an embattled Ukraine or a population escaping in boats.
You didn’t hear that message? Well, Dutton would not want you confused by accidental subtlety on his part. Shortly after a glowing testimonial to Australia, and its white settlers, he made matters clear.
“But the Australian achievement is under threat,” he warned.
“Just over six months ago, a seething mob [he’s referring to pro-Palestinian demonstrators] gathered on the steps of this very building. They burned a flag of Israel. They threw flares.”
He continued: “They chanted ‘Eff the Jews’ and ‘Eff Israel’.”
Then it was time for the big finish and the exaggerated menace which only he can see.
“The protests of October 9 were a moment of awakening for our nation. We must not surrender our civilisation to anti-civilisational forces,” he said.
“We must defend the Australian achievement from those who seek to sabotage it.”
Whatever was said on 9 October, it has not forced the surrender of any skerrick of our civilisation, or anything else.
But when Dutton sees disruption he shamelessly turns it into a grossly over-rated threat, not because he himself anticipates nation wrecking, but because there could be votes in it for him.
• Malcolm Farr is a political journalist
• This article was amended on 11 April 2024 to remove an inaccurate reference to chants during the October demonstration at the Opera House.
