Replacing Dutton’s bottom of the barrel ideas about leadership
Aug 26, 2024
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton seems bereft of the qualities required in a leader, so it’s worth pondering how he and those who support him could show leadership.
There’s no fixed prescription for leaders, but imagination, vision and a concern with altruism are invaluable, as long as those traits are augmented with touches of humanity, as in romantic William Wordsworth’s poem of that name. He asked, “What a fair world were ours for verse to paint, if power could live at ease with self restraint”, and finished by advising, ‘The power least prized is that which thinks and feels.”
By searching for inspiration from poets, instead of perpetuating prejudice in Indigenous affairs, Dutton and others might have mentioned Oodgeroo Nunucaal’s “Aboriginal Charter of Rights”.
We need love not overlordship,
Grip of hand not whip hand wardship,
Opportunity that places
White and black on equal basis.
If poetry eludes, reference to inspirational music could suggest how people from different cultures and countries could live together. Beethoven’s Peace Symphony, the 9th, became the composer’s hope that his message would sound inside and outside concert halls, with a final chorus exultant in the lyrics of the poet Schiller’s Ode to Joy which he wanted to be “a kiss for the whole earth”.
If the classical repertoire is not to Dutton’s taste, themes from songs of Aboriginal group Yothu Yindi, ‘I’m dreaming of a brighter day…’ would be therapeutic.
If a potential Australian leader wanted to depart these shores, almost any music protesting violence would set a tone different from the notion that security derives from force. A leader searching for vision could consult US folk singer, activist Pete Seeger who finished his song, If I had a hammer:
I got a hammer…
And I got a bell
I got a song to sing…
It’s the hammer of justice
It’s the bell of freedom
It’s the song of love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.
Contrast those highs from poetry and music with this Australian politician’s grim record, starting with his time as a health minister keen to cut millions in support for public hospitals. He came to that portfolio intent on privatisation, unable to grasp the idea of a common good via the benefits of universal health insurance.
Even the parliamentary, foot-stamping Dutton devotees might occasionally judge his attitude towards First Nations people as obnoxious. This behaviour, evident in his boycott of the 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, was followed by a refusal to attend Garma Festivals and by opposition to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. In a classic example of projection — attributing to others what you know, perhaps unconsciously, about yourself — he claimed that allowing Indigenous people a voice would divide the country. This, from someone intent on fear to create division.
Dutton’s attitude to asylum seekers and refugees reflects a concern to establish identity by demonising others as unworthy. Once that label sticks, there are few limits to the cruelty of people with power. To demonstrate the strength of a coward, Dutton advised that the Murugappan Tamil family facing deportation be locked up without proper medical care, with no early childhood education and certainly not allowed to remain in Australia.
In an inquiry about offshore detention in Nauru, Dutton dipped into a store of suspicions kept in his policing handbook. He had suggested that women alleging rape were “trying it on” in an attempt to be flown to mainland Australia.
Given this record, the controversy over Gazans being allowed into Australia should come as no surprise. Despite Palestinians fleeing an end-of-time slaughter, only 1,300 have managed to arrive in Australia, but more than 7000 have been denied entry. Supported by his apprentice, Shadow Home Affairs Minister James Paterson, and by the leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Simon Birmingham, Dutton called for all visa applications from Gazans to be rejected.
Generosity, vision, compassion — not even an iota. Dutton and Paterson play their fearmongering national security card. They claim that anyone coming from a war-torn area such as Gaza must be a threat to Australia’s security.
I have been in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank several times, and have had productive face-to-face meetings with leaders of Hamas.
Does that make me a threat to national security? Or is it a reminder that since 1948, establishment interests have ignored Israeli terrorism, and that in a recent Australian Zionist-sponsored trip to Israel, Dutton met war crimes defendant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a meeting which suggests Dutton be considered a security threat?
Although the Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote that the 40,000-plus Palestinians killed by Israel within 10 months is greater than the number killed in Iraq over 20 years or in the Yugoslav war over 10 years, Dutton returned to Australia having spoken in Israel about common Australian/Israeli values and way of life.
In courts of law and in the court of public opinion, if evidence appears overdone, judges become impatient, hence the need to summarise the case that Dutton is no leader.
At any point in efforts to depict a future for his country and party, Dutton might have derived ideas from poetry, music, works of art or even from any one of 30 principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Instead, his way of thinking says that demonising the vulnerable is politically useful and abusing those with whom you disagree can be satisfying. Recall that in 2015, Dutton was accused of bullying Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs and that former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described Dutton as a thug.
On 17 August, confirmation of the Turnbull judgment appeared in News Corporation papers. Dutton’s derision as a substitute for thinking was evident in his reference to Labor, Teals and Greens politicians as “Hamas’ useful idiots”. Backed by papers willing to repeat the Dutton wisdom, a standard of leadership reached new heights.
In response to Independent MP Zali Steggall’s charge that the the stance and policy of banning Gazans from entry to Australia was racist, Dutton gave a final illustration of his leadership style. He threatened Steggall with legal action.
In anyone’s time on Earth, there is a reservoir of ideas from which to express generous ways to envision a future. In which case, given the privileged position of being a political leader in a democracy, why would anyone show a lack of compassion, resort to name-calling, bullying, thuggery and cruelty?
Alternatively, certain books could inspire, great art stir imagination, music create happiness.
Dutton & Co could look to those sources and embrace the notion that hospitality to strangers builds a culture. If that value seems difficult to digest, they might ponder Shelley’s prediction that by conjuring visions of humanity, poets’ become “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
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