Dutton’s Racist Politicking Is Concerning in the Context of Potential Prime Ministership

With the 2025 federal election looming, concerns about the prospect of Liberal leader Peter Dutton being elected as the next Australian prime minister are on the rise.

This is not just because the Liberals are willing to commit ecocide on behalf of a few stupidly rich Australians devoid of any humanity, along with the foreign corporations stoking the party coffers, but more so of late, numerous remarks are being made in relation to the threat of an unbridled racist taking top office.

A 10 December announcement made by Dutton has heightened fears, as the Liberal leader told the nation that if he’s elected, he’ll end the 2022-established practice of government press conferences and events involving three flags – the Australian, the Aboriginal and the Torres Strait Islander – which is distinctly on brand when it comes to our most divisive major party politician of recent times.

The November 2024 US election provided human-rights-forward-thinking Americans with little choice, either vote for the re-election of Joe Biden, who’s bankrolled the Israeli-perpetrated Gaza genocide or re-elect Donald Trump: the most divisive US president of all time, who stokes the prejudices of white constituents to maintain power.

But the looming 2025 federal election is presenting our nation with the same stark choice: despite its recent change of script, the Albanese government has been falling over itself to support Israel as that nation was and continues to commit genocide upon the Palestinian population of Gaza, or potentially the most racist and hostile PM of all time, which would be no easy task to achieve.

Indeed, Dutton has been playing divisive politics of this nature for twice the time of Trump, and it’s quite likely he threw this recent flag proposal into the arena to cause more division and distress amongst the constituency, rather than any real inconvenience he might feel whilst standing in front of three flags.

Growing up on the right side of prejudice

The leader of the Liberal party is able to get away with the level of racism he’s displayed over the years because Australia was founded on the genocide of the First Peoples of the continent and for the first 70 years since federation, the imposition of the White Australia policy meant that only certain Europeans could enter the country.

Upon foundation, the white political class had concerns about keeping foreigners out, especially Chinese people, it passed laws to expel the South Sea Islander population, who it transported here to work sugarcane fields in Queensland, in the days of blackbirding that commenced in 1863, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples continued to be erased, dispossessed and criminalised.

Born in 1970, Dutton grew up in highly conservative Bjelke-Petersen Queensland, in the immediate wake of the White Australia policy. He joined the Young Liberals in 1988, and two years later, a 20-year-old Peter graduated from the local police academy to join the Queensland Police Service, which is known to foster the type of racial sentiment that the former home affairs minister deals in.

Dutton was then elected into the House of Representatives at the November 2001 election, and during his maiden speech in parliament, he spoke of “unacceptable rates of crime”, “households where up to three generations… by choice have never worked” and constituents who sought rights without any responsibilities, as well as decrying civil liberties advocates and refugee campaigners.

So, Dutton’s growing playlist has been on rotation for close to a quarter of a century now.

Dutton’s latest hits

“We are a country united under one flag, and if we are asking people to identify with different flags – no other country does that – we are dividing our country unnecessarily,” Dutton told the press early last month.

“Now, we should have respect for the Indigenous flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag, but they are not our nation’s flags. And I think the prime minister presents a very confusing message.”

But in the same way that people question whether Donald Trump is really as invested in some of the pronouncements he makes or he simply makes divisive statements in order to gain more notoriety and hence, popularity, one has to ask whether the same question applies to Dutton.

The statement “no other country does that” is right out of the Trump playbook, and it would appear that Dutton has no more idea regarding the truth of this point than the US president-elect does when he employs this same tactic to assert his own disinformation as truth.

The Liberal leader has further been the subject of a racial discrimination complaint lodged by Sydney law firm Birchgrove Legal with the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), claiming that the potential next PM has been discriminatory towards Palestinians, with a 24 November statement outlining 22 incidents in which, over the course of the Gaza genocide, he dehumanised Palestinians.

“Led by Professor Peter Slezak, an Australian Jewish academic and Palestinian advocate Nasser Mashni, the action accuses Dutton of dehumanising Palestinians, Muslims, and Jews, while stigmatising Australians who support Palestinian rights,” reads the statement.

The incidents cited included Dutton suggesting that granting close to 3,000 Palestinians tourist visas was a threat to national security and he spouted the disinformation around October 7th beheaded babies and the antisemitic Opera House chant “Gas the Jews”, which were both untrue, yet he didn’t retract either after they were proven false. And these are amongst many more such slurs.

“The legal action states that Mr Dutton’s comments contradict Australia’s obligations under the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute, particularly in relation to preventing genocide and protecting refugees,” the statement continues.

These matters and the fact that the potential next prime minister has been gifted pro bono legal advice from Arnold Bloch Leibler, the practice of the nation’s most prominent Zionist, lawyer Mark Leibler, are being raised at public forums as reasons why a Dutton prime ministership could mark a descent into our own parochial MAGA.

Classic Dutton tracks

But the boy from Brisbane has been employing this sort of racist dog whistling for his entire career.

An early incident that revealed how far Dutton is willing to go in playing the racial card occurred in 2008, when Kevin Rudd delivered the apology to the Stolen Generations, as the member for the Queensland seat of Dickson was the only frontbencher in the parliament to boycott the event.

Then there was the time Dutton, then PM Tony Abbott and then social services minister Scott Morrison were unexpectedly caught on camera speaking privately back in 2015. In reference to Abbott stating that a meeting he’d attended in Papua New Guinea having started late, Dutton was remarked, “Time doesn’t mean anything, when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.”

Dutton, then immigration minister, went on to say in the lead up to the 2016 election that many refugees that come to Australia “won’t be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English.”

Just to make sure we were all on the same page, Dutton then added the old chestnut, “These people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no doubt about that.” And we all know where we’ve heard that before.

Dutton suggested that 1970s Lebanese immigration to Australia was a mistake too in 2016. As home affairs minister in early 2018, the former police officer suggested that people in Melbourne were too afraid to go out to dinner for fear of a nonexistent “African youth crime wave”.

And just for good measure, and to show when it comes to prejudice he’s got more than enough to go around, Dutton voted against marriage equality.

Busting the duopoly

The dog whistling incidents cited above are only the most well-known amongst Dutton’s vast back catalogue, which does seem to appeal to a sizable sector of a constituency once referred to as Redneck Wonderland.

But for those not captured by the opposition leader’s dulcet tones, the decision to choose between the majors is not such a simple one.

For the past 15 months, federal Labor has thrown its weight behind and made excuses for the Israeli state as it perpetrates the most large-scale genocide of recent times. And just as US constituents found at the recent US election, voting against the blatant white racism of Trump for the more subtle but ultimately horrendously lethal racial prejudice of the Biden administration was no choice at all.

But Australians do have a third choice and that’s to vote for the Australian Greens or an independent running in their seat. And whilst this will still likely result in a major party prime ministership, it is chipping away at the hold of the duopoly, it is serving to shift the centre of politics, and it allows the voter to make a moral choice.

In this time of genocide, the multicultural, multifaith nation of Australia can vote Greens, independent, for Payman’s Australia’s Voice or in line with the new voting advocacy groups The Muslim Vote or Muslim Votes Matter.