It’s always noteworthy when a major party politician decides not to send out a media transcript. Sometimes it’s for technical or resourcing reasons — especially for oppositions, where staff resources are much scarcer. But usually, it’s because the event covered wasn’t the politician’s finest moment.
Peter Dutton — like the prime minister, besotted with all things Western Australia — started the week over in the west. On Tuesday, he held a press conference in Kalamunda, on the eastern fringe of Perth. The media covered the opposition leader, with Guardian Australia even live-blogging the presser, so there was no problem with other people hearing what Dutton said.
Yet no transcript has been forthcoming from Dutton’s office. If you go to his website, his transcripts skip from interviews and pressers the day before to events in Alice Springs the day after.
Did Dutton say anything untoward at the presser that his office would prefer people not see?
Perhaps it was a journalist pointing out that in appointing Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to a new government efficiency role, Dutton appeared to have forgotten that he’d already appointed South Australian MP James Stevens as “shadow assistant minister for government waste reduction”. That’s understandable as, apart from the occasional Sky News story on taxpayer money being “wasted” on Welcome to Country ceremonies, Stevens is invisible.
Dutton devoted 280 words to not answering the journalist, explaining, “There’s so much waste in the system … there are many other aspects of government waste that we need to address and Jacinta Price, I think, as she demonstrated during the course of the Voice, has a great capacity not just to get across detail but to understand what is a better path forward.”
Presumably unlike Stevens. Although he was, Dutton added, “doing an excellent job”.
The journalist pressed Dutton again. He replied, “I just think that the amount of waste — you’ve got a foreign affairs minister and a shadow and a junior foreign affairs minister as well. You’ve got a finance minister and you’ve got a treasurer and an assistant treasurer. There are many roles within government where there’s more than one person doing that task, and I think that’s entirely appropriate on Foreign Affairs.”
Make of that what you will (and pity poor Jane Hume, who had such high hopes of displacing Stevens as the Musk-wannabe in a Dutton government).
Apart from repeating Trump’s mistake of appointing two people to lead a war on inefficiency — unsurprising, given Dutton’s reflexive copycatting of the mad king — Dutton threw in a drive-by on Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, declaring that having a dynamic duo tackling waste instead of just one shadow minister was “an extension of what happened in the Howard years after they came in, when Paul Keating and Bob Hawke had destroyed the economy then as well”.
Perhaps Dutton’s too young to remember, but Bob Hawke hadn’t been in politics for over four years when John Howard came to office. And it used to be pro forma for the Coalition to insist that they supported the Hawke-Keating economic reform program (in fact, they opposed large slabs of it, like superannuation, tax reform, Medicare and national competition policy). Now, under Dutton — an LNP leader, not a Liberal leader — the Coalition line is that Hawke and Keating “destroyed the economy”.
Mind you, if it’s waste and inefficiency that Dutton is worried about, Paul Keating left spending at 25.6% of GDP. The government Dutton was a senior member of left spending in 2021-22 at 26.4% of GDP, (helped in part by its reckless and incompetent defence expenditure under Dutton) which helped drive inflation up to 7%, and we’ve been wearing the consequences ever since.
At least Dutton’s office made its own modest contribution to improved efficiency by not troubling our inboxes with such insight. But Dutton is very skilled at turning on and off his media presence. A hallmark of his time as opposition leader — apart from refusing to subject himself to questioning by the Canberra press gallery — is that when things go badly for him, he simply hides from the media for a few days.
He might play the hard man, but turns out Dutton has a soft skin. It’s clever politics.
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