CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
A man who became a household name stoking racial divisions as both Immigration Minister and Home Affairs Minister under a string of Liberal Prime Ministers who all saw their stints in leadership undermined by his extreme bigotry, has this week taken great offence at one of Australia’s most respected journalists suggesting there might be a problem with racism in Australia.
Peter Dutton – the current leader of the Federal Opposition who made his name spending billions of tax-payer dollars torturing refugees in sweltering offshore detention centres, while also publicly declaring that his own political party should have never let Lebanese into Australia and that Aboriginal people live in squalor – is sick and tired of the R-word being used to describe people like him.
This comes as the most racist politician to lead a major political party since the White Australia Policy appeared on the most racist Australian radio network 2GB to slam Canberra’s chief political correspondent Laura Tingle.
Mr Dutton, who has been unable to control himself with several hot-tempered outbursts this week, condemned Tingle’s comments at the Sydney Writers Festival last Sunday, where she said Australia was a ‘racist country’ because people like Peter Dutton were able to freely incite violence against migrants as part of low-effort fear-mongering politics.
Dutton’s rose-coloured view of a harmonious Australia seems to contradict the extreme islamophobia that he and his colleagues have polluted both Australian society and media with for over a decade – in turn, creating a radical and unprecedented ‘mainstream’ that culminated in multiple race riots as well as the unspeakable 2019 tragedy that saw a homegrown Australian white supremacist slaughtering 51 muslims at the height of the coalition’s extremist rhetoric.
Even New Zealand’s right-wing have openly criticised Dutton’s brand of race-baiting, as have his own colleagues in the Queensland LNP who took issue with $96m being spent to ensure that the young girls from an innocent Tamil family from Biloela spent their childhoods in cages where they faced extreme malnutrition and a lack of sunlight after his Border Force jackboots raid their rural Queensland home at 5 in the morning over visa problems.
