This article is an instalment in a new series, “Peter Dutton is racist”, on Dutton’s history of racism and the role racism has played on both sides of politics since the 1970s.
Peter Dutton is racist.
I agree with Bernard Keane. What I am not sure I do agree on, however, is whether Dutton’s continual displays of blatant racism (which are something that are unique to him in this day and age) somehow set him apart from his racist colleagues in both chambers, or the racist system that he is a part of.
In this 2018 quote at the “Echoes of Cook” discussion, Professor John Maynard adequately reflected a sentiment oft expressed within the Indigenous community:
the Liberals will stab you in the stomach and the Labor will stab you in the back and the end result is [it’s] bleedingly obvious that you’re going to get stabbed.
Why do I believe this sentiment is important? So often in this country, blatant racism is framed as the “bad racism”, the “real racism”. Yet in my experience, blatant is often not the type of racism that wears people down, drains us, works against us, and, at times, kills us.
Blatant racism can do all of the above and more, but due to its open, and shameless, nature, it’s easier for its victims to call out and be believed. We can point at Dutton and say “old mate reckons Muslim candidates standing for election in western Sydney will be disastrous” and most will immediately shudder. When we say though “the ALP has repeatedly introduced legislation that is harmful to Aboriginal people”, most people blink. They fail to see how continuing the Intervention under a less confronting name is an act of racism mainly because the ALP neglected to refer to Aboriginal people by a slur. Indeed, they were seen as the “lesser” of the evils because they reinstalled the Racial Discrimination Act, even though their policies were still highly discriminatory.
Dutton’s racism is fresh in the minds of a lot of progressive people in this country due to last year’s referendum, and this year’s comments on displaced Palestinian people. I have this to say about Dutton: the bloke is consistent. Yet, as I have repeatedly pointed out, can we honestly claim that Dutton not supporting the referendum was any more racist than what the ALP has done? Can we honestly claim Dutton sowing fear about Palestinians is worse than the ALP rejecting visas?
With the referendum, what was up for grabs at the ballot box was a “Voice” for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be inserted in the constitution. The proposed “Voice” had no legislative powers, no power of vetoes, no guaranteed representative structure and selection process — none. All of that was to be decided by the “parliament of the day”. The Voice could have been a robust, democratically-elected committee, or it could have been some future prime minister’s “Blak mate”.
Both the Albanese-led government, and the Dutton-led Coalition, went to work, knowing most Australians don’t know a thing about the constitution, what it contains and how it works, and will vote mainly only because they’re forced to by Australia’s compulsory voting laws. There was a point of exploitation that they both could take, and so they did.
Dutton was predictable. He drew on the nationalistic fervour Howard before him so successfully built, promoting the idea that giving Indigenous people a powerless and non-defined Voice in the constitution was not treating “all Australians equally” — it was giving a certain group more. His “if you don’t know, vote no” campaign was a stroke of genius mainly because it knew most Australians did indeed not know, and were not going to take the time to find out. The official referendum information booklet highlights just how much the No case was about exploiting Australian ignorance, even if voters did bother flipping through the pages when there were catchy slogans, and guaranteed News Corp headlines.
The ALP relied on voter ignorance to spin the idea that this Voice be some massive gesture of inclusion for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. That it would be a “coming together” of the nation. That Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would finally “be heard”, and that we would take our “rightful place” in this founding document.
None of this was true. There were no guarantees on the table, no real measures for equality, nothing. What’s more, the constitution itself is a racist relic, written by the architects of the White Australia Policy, which contains several sections that are objectively racist. The right for people to be able to be excluded from voting based upon their race, for example, has no place in a modern democracy, yet to this day, it sits there in section 25. So does the right to ban dual citizens from running for federal parliament — a measure introduced to exclude mainly Chinese, Indian and Afghani migrants from holding power.
When that section (s44) blew up a few years ago, turfing a bunch of white people with dual citizenship out of Parliament, Labor didn’t campaign to amend the constitution so Australia’s representational structure was in line with most other Western democracies. Instead, it sat on its hands. Then when Senator Payman crossed the floor for the recognition of the Palestinian state, it revisited this racist old passage to make slurs about her in the media.
While Dutton posed with his Indigenous colleagues during the referendum to frame himself as the one who was truly being #notracist because he was “listening to the real voices”, Albanese was doing press conferences with Indigenous Voice advocates behind him, yet tactfully avoiding questions about real power.
Both of them allowed the very humanity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be debated by racist media pundits for months without putting anything substantial on the table. And while Dutton may have dodged the Garma Festival invite altogether, Albanese attended and used a media opportunity to backpedal on the ALP election commitment to implement the Uluru Statement “in full” — thus effectively nullifying promises of a Makarrata Commission and treaty processes.
In a roundabout way, what I am saying is this: the very foundation of the Parliament, and these major parties, is racism. Neither major party is looking to change things beyond a surface level. It suits them to maintain these measures, because it gives them a reassurance that every three years, they will have a viable shot at power at the ballot box, as the mainly apathetic public flips a coin.
When I look at Dutton, I see someone who I, as a progressive and an Arrernte woman, am never going to like. I know what I am dealing with. I look at Albanese, however, and I see a Left faction ALP leader who rode a wave of popularity based upon his love for a good punk album, and who, at the end of the day, has showed he is willing to continue seeing Gaza obliterated, he is fine with children being locked up in prisons here, he is okay with backpedalling on promises to Indigenous communities for real change, and he is willing to sell out the very principles that gave people like me hope when he was elected. I can convince other members of the broad left that Dutton is a racist menace, but rarely are they open to the idea that their leader may be as well — and so might the entire rotten system.
