CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Opposition leader Peter Dutton is starting to think he might’ve bitten off more than he chew this week, after hard-launching his new Jew-Friendly rebrand in the Teal seats down south.
As a multimillionaire property developer from North Brisbane’s mortgage belt, the most diverse voters that Dutton has previously had to engage with over his 20 years in Federal Politics has been the Maori scaffolders who drink at the Kallangur Tavern. And he doesn’t take ‘those types’ too seriously. They aren’t even from here.
However, he’s now a man of worldly wisdom. A student of history. A champion of human rights for not just the elderly rednecks who’ve been brainwashed by Ray Hadley – but anyone whose fears present a political opportunity.
And right now, the misery and horror taking place in the Middle East is presenting him with the perfect chance to take some bark off his political opponents. Just like the Indigenous Voice Referendum in 2023, when he turned a once bipartisan constitutional amendment into a racist culture war that achieved nothing.
As a champion for the Australia far-right, Dutton has never really been one for reforming his party. That, unfortunately, has had to change.
For now.
With 7 uppity women taking up space in Parliament as the Teal independent MPs for once blue-ribbon Liberal seats, Dutton has had to tweak his populist xenophobia to exclude the Jewish people who seem to vote that way.
Overnight, he’s had to up-skill his language and learn a few things. Namely that ‘Israel’ isn’t ‘one of them Muslim countries’ – as he previously thought when he was focused on locking up Tamil families as Immigration Minister.
It’s a frustrating pivot, that means Peter Dutton has had to learn a lot more about the suffering of other people than he’s ever cared to.
It also means that he must now condemn the very scary white supremacist extremism that has emerged off the back of his two decade campaign to normalise extreme racial bigotry in Australia’s political arena.
This crushing realisation suddenly became real for Peter Dutton earlier today, when he was asked by a Liberal party strategist to publicly condemn the white supremacist who was convicted in the Melbourne courts for extreme anti-semitism.
Unfortunately, he can’t leave this in the ‘Free Speech’ pile, like he usually does when his most reliable voters take their masks off.
