Pearls and Irritations

When Peter Dutton was voted into the leadership of the Liberal Party by his federal colleagues in 2022, they did so on the understanding that he was the pre-eminent hard man so revered by the hard men who now prevail in the party of Robert Menzies.

Menzies was an urbane scholar with a refined intellect and a sound understanding of the thinking of British Philosopher, John Locke, the father of liberalism, whose ideas he loosely used as the foundation of the Liberal Party he created in 1945.

Eighty years have passed since Menzies founded the Liberal Party and much has changed. The scholarly liberal credentials for which Menzies was so admired in the 1940s, 50s and 60s are regarded by most of his parliamentary successors these days as suspect qualities gained from university institutions that they increasingly dismiss as woke, and which they undermine by innuendo and cuts to funding.

The same doctrinaire men that have ruled the party since Tony Abbott’s federal cabinet now lament that the naturally submissive sex has lost her way and has become a hectoring movement of harpies and harlots with designs on castrating the young patriotic men who stand up for the unblemished values embodied in the British variant of Western civilisation. In increasing numbers, they see themselves as under existential threat in Australia on multiple fronts and are fighting back. They are energised by sitting at the feet of Canadian right-wing darling, Jordan Petersen, and by the adoption of two steadfast beliefs: one, that it’s okay to be white, and two, that it’s okay to be male.

What was once Menzies’ Liberal Party has now become a male bastion infiltrated by hard-line religious zealots who would have us believe that hordes of trans-gender women queue up to invade ladies change rooms with malign intent, who make every attempt to get sentenced into female prisons to mercilessly rape the female inmates, and who become elite athletes in order to unfairly dominate the athletic tracks of the world.

Menzies would hardly know what to make of his party, nor would he understand how it has elected into its leadership a man in Peter Dutton who was not unhappy to have himself described by his one-time party leader and prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, as a thug.

The Liberal Party hard man confirmed Turnbull’s moniker in August 2024 when he travelled to Israel to meet the ultimate global thug of the moment, Benjamin Netanyahu. Without authority to do so, he assured the Israeli leader that Australia supported his unrestrained slaughter of Palestinian citizens and that the illegal occupier of Gaza had a right to defend itself against the resistance of the occupied people, a “right” the United Nations has refused to recognise for many decades.

Dutton claimed also that equivocation on the issue by Australia’s governing Labor Party has fuelled antisemitism at home. By contrast, the Opposition leader has boldly pronounced the confrontation in Gaza as a contest between good and evil, and that unlike the indecisive Labor PM Albanese, his unambiguous position provides the Australian people with “moral clarity”.

Although the attributes entailed in thuggery might win Dutton plaudits from his current crop of party room colleagues and from a Trumpian cohort of his male supporter base in the outer suburbs, a significant proportion of voters in Australia are not much impressed by boys’-own male behaviour. I refer to the women of Australia who make up approximately 51% of citizens entitled to vote. That being the case, Dutton commenced his leadership burdened by a “woman problem”, not unlike his predecessor.

Dutton was happy to be the tough guy who callously walked out of the national apology to the stolen generation of first nation Australians in 2008. Along with Morrison, he willingly led the crusade to punish any refugees who attempted to enter Australia by boat, and he gladly confined them to indefinite detention on the mainland or in the hell-holes of Manus Island and Nauru, despite the likelihood that such practices were illegal. Any attempts on their part to escape their fate on the grounds of illness, were clear evidence that they were “trying it on”, and their complaints were routinely ignored in the interests of national security

Dutton was Home Affairs Minister from 2017-21 and was Defence Minister in 2021-22, in which roles he fuelled disdain towards our biggest trading partner, China, putting it about in the media that we were, in fact, at war with that country. Fortunately, hostile words are not sufficient to amount to an actual war because we would be fighting out of our class were it so. But his anti-China rhetoric left the unmistakable impression with voters that the minister was a hard-hitting national leader and was not the type who pulled his punches simply because he was a David facing up to a Goliath.

He was the notable strong-arm man also when he called on the Victorian Government in February 2018 to protect the citizens of Melbourne instead of putting up with black African gangs allegedly running amok through the streets at their leisure. Melbourne’s police denied any such thing was happening, but Dutton insisted he had it on good authority and lamented the soft-on-crime display among the woke snowflakes down south.

Barely a month later, in March 2018, it became apparent that the notoriously anti-immigrant and anti-refugee pugilist had a soft side. He began calling for a certain class of immigrant to be given entry into Australia. Identified as white Christian farmers from South Africa, Dutton wanted them to be given fast-track immigration status to escape the “uncivilised” country in which they were domiciled. South Africa protested at the characterisation and Dutton was happy to quietly apologise. The point had been made. The strong man had a soft side, albeit for white men who happened to be farmers stranded haplessly in a black man’s country.

Liberal Party strategists and their public relations operatives at Murdoch’s News Corp could see the perception of Dutton the hard man was becoming fixed in the public mind, and so put their heads together for a solution when Dutton was shaping up to challenge Turnbull for the party leadership in 2018. He needed to be seen as having a soft side that included women, and a strategy to shift the perception was promptly initiated prior to the 2019 election.

The strategy took the form of an article published prominently in Brisbane’s Courier Mail tabloid and other News Corp outlets. It featured Dutton and his wife, Kirilly, in a clumsily posed picture taken by News Corp photographer Peter Wallis. The couple’s hands were semi-joined as though they might be about to dance, but Dutton appeared anchored to the floor. He was dressed for the occasion in a soft blue shirt and had put on a professional smile. For her part, the unelected Kirilly, also dressed in a soft blue dress, was able to force a grin for the camera that passed muster sufficiently well because it was the picture that ran nationally with a headline quote attributed to her. “He is not a monster”, it declared in an unmistakeable reference to her spouse.

Fast forward to the dying days of 2024. The Victorian Labor Party decided to repurpose the unedited 2018 picture as a meme accompanied by a mocking caption: “Justifying dating your new partner to your friends who don’t like him”.

Out of the blocks comes Dutton insisting that the Liberal Party would never stoop to targeting an unelected partner of the prime minister, adding that he likes and respects the PM’s partner Jodie Haydon. The meme, of course, was not about Dutton’s wife; it was about him. And only two months earlier the Liberal Party’s public relations outfit, News Corp, ran damning stories for weeks about Albanese and Jodie buying a house together, noting that they did so during a cost-of-living crisis when housing affordability was an increasingly hot issue.

On a few counts, it could be argued that the Victorian Labor Party meme was ill-advised. The cleverness of the original News Corp puff piece was that it entailed an assertion from the woman most close to Dutton that the women of Australia could trust him because she was happy to say he was a nice man who does not inspire fear and dread in her. Simultaneously, the monster reference to her husband revived a belief that Dutton’s Trumper male base of supporters were happy to embrace. If Dutton’s wife was going to the trouble of denying in a national headline that her spouse was “not a monster”, there was a fair chance that their faith in his monstrousness had some residual foundation. It was not Kirilly’s fault that her denial was the smoke that suggested evidence of the Dutton fire that the PR people had attempted to douse

In summary, the Victorian meme appeared to simultaneously revive and deny the Dutton “monster” narrative, and by doing so it served the original interests of Dutton’s public relations strategy, but this time at the Labor Party’s expense. In addition, it provided Dutton with an opportunistic window to condemn Victorian Labor for its heartless attack on a defenceless unelected woman, a condemnation that News Corp and other legacy media outlets would give Dutton maximum exposure to advance, as they did.

Accordingly, if the meme amounted to a lose-lose move by Victorian Labor, Anthony Albanese’s demand that the state branch remove the meme amounted to a comprehensive lose-lose-lose. Albanese’s intervention was a reminder of his demand in 2023 that Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus should apologise to a Sky News reporter who questioned him about the High Court’s ruling on the illegality of holding refugees in indefinite detention. Similarly, Albanese’s intervention against Labor’s state branch validated Dutton’s fake indignation, proving yet again that the Labor Party was not only devious, but that it was so insipid when found out that it couldn’t even hold its ground over what might so easily have been characterised as a historic Liberal Party own goal.

In addition, the episode put on display a key election lesson absorbed by Dutton from Trump’s victory in the US. The lesson assumes that when push comes to shove the progressive side of politics will reliably observe the letter of the law as well as unwritten rules of decent behaviour, while the Trumpers push on insisting that no conventions, codes of conduct, or laws of the land apply to them.

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