It was grim. It was something to behold. The twitchy, raw nerves of Peter Dutton — looking every part a gory amalgam of elation, determination and self-pity. As though the tyranny of low expectations had been superseded by the tyranny he might exceed these expectations.
Two days out from unceremoniously sinking the Voice referendum, the country’s most recent study in moral desolation had found himself stranded in a wilderness of the unknown. He was thinking about himself.
About how to crowbar the “nasty, bigoted outfit” that passes for the opposition into permanent relevance now that the referendum was over. How to pretend to make good on the line he is a “conviction politician”, as those dead-on moralists over at Sky had so earnestly described him, and resist being reduced to some preposterous footnote in the nation’s history.
Gloating, at this point, seemed off the cards — even for someone as low as Dutton. After all, he had just batted any prospect of Indigenous reconciliation into a raging dumpster fire. And for all the perverse pleasure he derived from the utter debasement of it all — which was immense — something broke that night. People were in shock. Many people he didn’t care about were genuinely grieving.
Appearances can be everything, as they say. So, he seized the day looking prime ministerial and grave, though not impossibly grave, and responded in the only way this spectacle in political division knew best: by bringing a censure motion against the prime minister for needlessly dividing the country over the Voice.
But it didn’t work — of course it didn’t. Though he never had the numbers, the sheer grandeur and discipline required of the moment proved too much for the shameless spiv. Through the cracks of Dutton’s very Dutton facade of sincerity oozed his usual blend of petty ruthlessness and unserious saltiness, betraying the pathetic ploy to casual observers for what it was.
“The prime minister is no light on the hill,” he hissed across the lectern. “This prime minister is a fading light, a flickering light on the hill — he is a flake!” Someone had written this speech for him, this terrible, lurching speech. “[The prime minister is] looking more and more like his mentor, Kevin Rudd. K-Rudd, A-Albanese — ‘A-Disaster’-Albanese!”
All killer lines, until they weren’t. This sad excuse for an opposition leader was painfully missing his mark, and he knew it. So now what? To hell with it, Dutton thought. He’s not some random Kafka character, maundering the point of his existence. On the contrary, he knows himself, deeply, unnervingly: every last self-serving, self-aggrandising layer.
And so on he marched, this towering vision of confected outrage and moral indignation, out to strike a different tone. What tone? An in-your-face winning tone! No more of this timorous pretending to be temperamentally fit to hold office nonsense. It’s time for a post-Voice victory lap and to act as though he has Albanese on the ropes, even if he doesn’t.
Snapping his fingers, he reneged on his promise of constitutional recognition for First Nations peoples, and in moves that surprised no-one, went on to press for an audit of spending in Indigenous programs and a royal commission into “rampant” child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities. Undergirding this “high tide of the big grotesque” was dirty Dutton’s usual penchant for mendacity: all these “practical measures”, he thundered at Albanese, were precisely “what the Australian people voted for last Saturday”.
Like so many Dutton lies before it, this one was lazy, yet incomparably so. Did he truly believe Australians would accept such a brazen lie? The answer was it didn’t matter. Dutton’s a known liar. One man’s moral no-go zone, he’s told us time again, is another’s desacralised “Pass Go and Collect $200”. Just ask Morrison. And besides, this scammer had finally hit his stride, thought he could fly, touch the sky – a sentiment the caravan of moral degenerates sitting behind him, with one or two honourable exceptions, appeared to share.
So, emboldened, Dutton didn’t stop there. In his quest to supersede Morrison as the most apt description of all that is so nakedly wrong with the Coalition today, this nouveau Nietzsche told Parliament it was also veritably true Australians had not just voted against the Voice but so too to unwinding and casting aside any and all efforts at First Nations truth-telling, treaty discussions and closing the gap.
When Minister for Health Mark Butler finally rose to say Australians had not, contrary to Dutton’s assertions, voted against closing the gap, Dutton returned to his rhetorical vagrancy and yelled, “You have divided the country!” forcing Butler in turn to calmly scold him, as though he were a small child: “We’ve got angry interjections,” he said. It was unedifying, it was crass. It was all very Dutton.
It was also very contradictory. After tying much of his campaign against the Voice to Martin Luther King Jr’s rhetoric of colour-blind, universal dignity, here was Trumpy Dutton, embracing the narrowness of identity politics for white people with all the same sanctimonious hectoring the right routinely assigns to the left. Faux civic unity — that magical promise the Voice’s defeat would herald the end of racial division forever — was yesterday’s tactic. Today’s tactics demanded that Dutton dispense with that deceit.
In this depraved new world, there couldn’t possibly be any return to the frontbench for moderate Liberal MP Julian Leeser. No, warned Dutton’s closest, Pontius Leeser must serve his time. And as for “et tu, Bridget Archer” — she of the take a principled stance and cross the floor fame — it seems she’s probably on the way out, and with her the party’s convention of voting according to conscience, if Dutton’s unhinged chat to Ray Hadley the other day is anything to go by.
After all, there’s simply no room for moderates and Burkean conservatism if disciplined outrage politics is the name of the game. On the contrary, this is a time to rage against wind farms, to shout from the rooftops for a ban on Palestinian rallies, to call for the deportation of protesters, to lie and accuse Albanese of not condemning anti-Semitism, to also accuse him of not being partisan enough on Israel, to use even more inflammatory language on the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza for pure political advantage. Never mind ASIO chief Mike Burgess’ calls to cease and desist.
This is Dutton laid bare, unstoppable, logorrheic and shameless. The country’s would-be aspiring fascist — a serial disrupter of scale, great muddler of messages, doing and saying whatever he thinks necessary to win power, groping for a win. Even if it dehumanises First Nations peoples, even if defiles the seat of democracy in the process, even if it unleashes social unrest and whatever Hannah Arendt said about the sweeping menace of cynicism. Oh well, shrugs Dutton.
But then you hear it. The chords of self-doubt, the desperation to speak reality into existence, the anxiety his moon shot date with relevance will never materialise. Albanese is a “completely different bloke”, he says, a “shadow of his former self”, he insists. He sounded beaten, as though he’d already lost his nerve. The type of person utterly distracted by Newspoll — that one space where all right-wing claims of progressive bias fall to the wayside and shattering reality looms.
So there he was, tragedy and farce all at once, the grasper, the lurcher, as though he can see it all laid out so clearly before him: the crushing election loss, the disappointment, the utter existential futility of it all. Dutton as Trump, minus the charisma. A man without a conscience, with no nagging sense of public duty, no talent for government or leadership, but plenty of scope for stinging humiliation.
The show can’t go on, but somehow it will. Until it doesn’t. Until the foundations crack and crumble, and stone becomes sand. Until this lost sock behind the dryer is forced to face the music. In the meantime, pretending to win is all that matters, a permanent state: bellum omnium contra omnes.
