Peter Dutton, the leader of the Liberal Party and king of calling out “divisive” politics, has had a frankly shocking 24 hours. First he was in hot water for his controversial comparison of a pro-Palestine protest in Sydney to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, and then it was revealed that taxpayers paid the bill for his hour-long visit to billionaire Gina Rinehart‘s birthday party.
Petey, slow down! Most politicians try and limit themselves to one scandal a week. Two in a day is too much, you’ll exhaust yourself!
So what exactly did Dutton get up to on his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day? Let’s dive in.
Dutton compares a protest to a mass shooting
While making a speech at the Sydney Opera House on Wednesday night, Peter Dutton slammed Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong‘s calls for a two-state solution to the Gaza conflict as the “most reckless act” he’d seen from a Foreign Minster in 20 years.
Dutton accused Wong of promoting “a national moral fog, which has made anti-Semitism permissible”, and he attempted to make his point about the severity of anti-Semitism in Australia by drawing a comparison between two events he believed to be similar.
A pro-Palestine protest outside the Sydney Opera House on October 9 last year, and the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania where 35 people were murdered by Martin Bryant in Australia’s worst mass shooting.
The Port Arthur shooting is regarded as a national tragedy, and led to then-Prime Minister John Howard reforming Australia’s gun laws which saw firearms abolished. Which Dutton affirmed made him a “strong” leader, and makes Anthony Albanese weak.
The Sydney protest Dutton believes is similar occurred two days after Hamas’s October 7 attacks. Though there was some police dispute over whether or not certain chants were shouted, there was no casualties, violence, or arrests.
But Dutton — who hates when politicians say things “for a crass domestic political win” BTW — didn’t mean the loss of life. He meant the “social significance”.
What did Dutton say about Port Arthur?
“Many of you will remember John Howard’s response to the Port Arthur Massacre of 1996. The gun prohibitions which he sought to introduce grated against his Liberal inclinations,” Dutton said, beginning his allegory.
“But John Howard also understood the broader national and human interest involved. He appreciated the need to call upon Australians in a tragic moment to bring about a profound cultural shift in community attitudes.”
Dutton finished fan-boying over Howard by somehow deciding this was relevant at all to protest laws. Then he began to finish his stretch of a comparison by bringing up the protest.
“While no one was killed during the October 9 protests, the events at the Sydney Opera House were akin to a Port Arthur moment in terms of their social significance,” he said, before ending it with a final dig at the current PM.
“In my judgement, Prime Minister Albanese has not risen to that moment.”
Response to Dutton’s wild comparison
The next day the Liberal Party leader found himself in the middle of a media frenzy, where everyone and their dog heard what he said and went: “uhh, what?”
Even members of his own party such as Liberal backbencher and MP for Bass, Bridget Archer, called him out for it. And if I’m gonna trust anybody to identify when a long bow has been drawn, it’s someone named Archer.
“Dutton’s comments were incredibly disrespectful to the victims and survivors of one of the darkest days in our nation’s history and a wholly inappropriate and somewhat bizarre comparison,” Archer told Guardian Australia.
Others online mocked the Liberal leader’s audacity.
reader, my jaw it dropped pic.twitter.com/bIm0bh6QcD
— pj harvey keitel (@BenjaminMillar) April 11, 2024
All of a sudden the man who has spearheaded culture wars against Indigenous Australians, the LGBTQIA+ community, refugees, Muslims, Woolworths, and — who could forget — African gangs, is desperate to protect minorities in Australia.
Political satire outlet The Shovel conducted a thorough statistical analysis of the two events that Dutton compared, to try and better understand his point.
While at first glance the Opera House protest may look similar to the Port Arthur massacre, on closer inspection there are some key differences.
— The Shovel (@TheShovel) April 11, 2024
We’ve prepared this handy graph for Peter Dutton pic.twitter.com/4SXe9f3TUN
Josh Lees, who is involved in organising the pro-Palestine protests in Sydney, was shocked Dutton compared Palestine Action Group’s rally to a literal massacre.
“Over 35,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel began its brutal offensive after 7 October. That is 1,000 times the number killed in the horrific massacre in Port Arthur in 1996,” Lees wrote in a statement to PEDESTRIAN.TV.
“And yet Peter Dutton wants to attack protesters for opposing this horrendous mass killing, while he has supported Israel’s actions every step of the way.”
Despite the criticism, Dutton still chose to stand by his allegory when he appeared on the Today show on Friday morning.
“The point I was making, which is absolutely a legitimate one, is that I thought this was a time for the Prime Minister to show leadership and to step up,” Dutton told Today.
“I think, with John Howard, who stood up at a point of national importance for our country, demonstrated leadership and changed the course of history for the better. The Prime Minister has allowed this rise of anti-Semitism in our country.”
So if he won’t back down from the comments, why does this comparison mean so much to him?
Why did Dutton compare a massacre to a protest?
Australian political historian and author Frank Bongiorno from Australian National University explained that the reason Dutton is so desperate to invoke Howard and Port Arthur in contrast to Albanese and a pro-Palestine protest comes down to his perspective that “the world is divided into goodies and baddies.”
“For Dutton’s worldview, in the context of his career as a Queensland policeman and his career as a politician, the world is divided into goodies and baddies,” Bongiorno told PEDESTRIAN.TV.
“This kind of narrative and comparison fits perfectly within that particular approach.”
So though the comparison of a massacre that saw 35 people killed and 23 people were injured may not be at all equivalent to a protest for most people, when you divide the world into the groups that Dutton has divided it into, it makes sense.
Ironically, Dutton has a history of trying to fight division by causing division, which Bongiorno pointed out.
“I’m not sure what mixture of opportunism and ideology it is, but I think it does reflect a long standing approach to politics where he’s constantly evoking enemies of one kind or another,” he said.
“Protesters are fitting enemies for a conservative politician, and so the comparison makes sense if you think about it in those sorts of terms.”
At the end of the day, Dutton believes you are either with him or against him. It doesn’t matter how different the people “against” him are from one another, to him they all look the same. Read that however you will.
Dutton billed taxpayers for Rinehart birthday appearance
On top of the gargantuan political shit-storm that Dutton landed himself in for his Port Arthur comments, on Friday the Guardian shared a revelation that Dutton’s office had billed the Aussie taxpayer almost $6,000 for his trip to visit Gina Rinehart’s birthday party.
At the time Dutton was criticised by figures like 2GB’s Ben Fordham, who slammed the minister for going to visit a birthday party in Perth instead of focusing on the crucial Dunkley by-election happening at the same time in Victoria (that the Liberals lost).
“Peter Dutton spent more time on the airplane than he did at the party, which sounds like a waste of time to me,” said the radio host.
However, Dutton’s leg to stand on was that he went on the “waste of time” trip at his own cost… but he didn’t say anything about his staff or security detail.
As revealed through a Freedom Of Information request, the publication uncovered that while Dutton did pay for his own expenses, the cost of his security and staffers travelling from Melbourne to Perth and back in one day cost a total of $5,931.36 to the taxpayer.
Now if you cast your mind back to 2015 when Speaker of the House Bronwyn Bishop went on a cheeky $5K helicopter ride, you might remember that little trip ended up costing her the job.
So would Dutton be looking at any similar consequences?
“He’ll brazen it out because he’ll say ‘Oh I paid for my own expenses, and these are just the ordinary security that comes with being Leader of the Opposition.’ So I suspect it will peter out,” Bongiorno predicted, with no pun intended.
However the political historian didn’t suspect that Dutton will get off entirely free, as it will tarnish his image as the Liberal Leader.
“It will also foster the kind of image of Dutton as saying one thing doing something else,” he stated.
“The problem for Dutton is there’s a perception that he’s talking strong leadership, and performing it, but when it comes to actually to acting, he doesn’t back it up with with those actions.
“There is a danger for Dutton that he’ll start to look hypocritical.”
To which all I have to say is: start to?
