Australian political reporting works with the unspoken assumption that Canberra operates in a vacuum, untouched by global trends.
The result? Last week’s over-heated rhetoric on migration was presented as a serious response to public concerns rather than what it was: a dangerous and divisive injection of the global right’s anti-Muslim rhetoric that has long been powering its hate machine.
Just returned from a meeting in Israel with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security advisers and off the back of a meeting with his own “national security” team, Peter Dutton catapulted the global right’s campaign against Muslim migrants into the centre of the Canberra discourse with his call to ban Palestinians coming to Australia from Gaza.
The framing was perfectly pitched to echo through the national news cycle. “Dutton finds his mark,” crowed The Australian.
Dressed up as being all about “Australia’s interests”, it was a local polish to the divisive exploitation of Muslim migration pioneered by the European right.
The Dutton Gaza ban itself was not even original — Donald Trump was pumping the idea as far back as October as a reprise of his 2017 “Muslim ban”. The rhetoric veers close to the notorious Great Replacement theory promoted by former Fox star Tucker Carlson (that migrants are brought in as a voting bloc to replace “real” citizens), with Dutton saying “the prime minister has clearly had a political motivation here” and was seeking a “political dividend”.
The Australian intervention could not have come at a worse time, just weeks after English far-right groups networked to shock the community by generating anti-Muslim riots across England towns and Belfast in Northern Ireland, which were rebuffed by significantly larger anti-racism demonstrations in support of migrants and refugees.
Since the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, the network of right-wing parties across Europe, as well as Trump’s MAGA Republicans, has found in Muslim migrants the perfect “them” to counterpoint their populist “us”. It drove the right’s pre-COVID surge in the Brexit referendum and the elevation of France’s Rassemblement National in the 2017 elections.
Its rhetoric has replaced the gentler Howard-era dog-whistle of “we decide who comes to this country” with an out-and-proud trumpeting: “Muslim invaders”, as the movement’s thought leader, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, told Germany’s right-wing tabloid Bild in 2018.
The result is what the Brookings Institute described as “the one percent problem”: a relatively small number of Muslim migrants turned into “one of the defining issues of the populist era” where “nearly every major right-wing populist party emphasises cultural and religious objections to specifically Muslim immigration”.
It has left traditional centre-right parties with a hard decision: resist the moment (like Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in Germany or the post-Gaullist Republicans in France) or jump on board, like the US Republicans. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t: oppose the populist right and become irrelevant; or pander to its extremism, prioritising unity over electability.
Dutton has given us his decision: tilt right, MAGA-style, to keep the movement together (and to protect his own back), perhaps recognising that the much-celebrated fragmentation of Australia’s two-party system is happening more on the right-wing fringe than it is on the high-profile teal centre.
The rise of right-wing micro-parties has been concealed by their diversity. In the most recent election, parties like One Nation, UAP, the Liberal Democrats and Katter’s Australian Party collected just over 11% of the vote. Add in the more domesticated right-wing Nationals, and about a third of right-of-centre voters opted to cast their ballot for a party on the ugly side of Menzies’ Liberals.
By comparison, the drift of disaffected Liberal voters to centrist independents has been far smaller, although (like the old Country Party) regional focus and strategic (and preference) votes from Labor and Greens voters has maximised the teal representation that has caught the public eye.
In most European democracies, the fragmentation to the left has offered traditional social democratic parties the same choice: compete or cooperate.
In Australia, Labor and the Greens seem to have come to a sort of coopetition – cooperating at election time through preference deals, competing between times (although the more aggressive approach by the Greens under the Albanese government threatens to fracture these arrangements).
Dutton’s weaponisation of national security comes as the US national security establishment (aka ”the blob”) is trying yet again to disentangle itself from the vulgarities of populist politics. This month’s lead article in the blob’s house journal, Foreign Affairs, noted the populist right’s attempt to make everything a matter of national security, concluding: “If everything is defined as national security, nothing is a national security priority.”
Australia’s own blob — more or less a franchise of the Washington original — seems to have got the same memo, with ASIO boss Mike Burgess turning up on Insiders last weekend in an attempt to hose things down.
Regardless, the media is more than happy to keep amplifying Dutton’s anti-Muslim bell. So don’t expect him to stop ringing it.
What do you make of Dutton’s plan to ban people fleeing Gaza from coming to Australia? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
