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.
Racism has been a recurring theme in Australian politics ever since the Whitlam government formally ended the White Australia Policy.
Labor — under Whitlam — resisted accepting South Vietnamese refugees (Whitlam is described as referring to them as “fucking Vietnamese Balts“), with Whitlam anticipating Peter Dutton by nearly 50 years in suggesting their ranks might include war criminals.
In opposition, Labor criticised the Fraser government’s willingness to welcome South Vietnamese refugees to Australia after 1975. “Any sovereign nation has the right to determine how it will exercise its compassion and how it will increase its population,” then ACTU leader Bob Hawke said in 1977 — as Gerard Henderson noted, thus sounding a lot like John Howard later would.
John Howard’s first period as Liberal leader saw him attempt to weaponise racism by calling for a reduction in Asian immigration in the name of “social cohesion” in 1988. Howard later apologised for the remarks. In office, and especially after 9/11, Howard’s government demonised Middle Eastern refugees — most notably via fake claims in the “children overboard” scandal — usually in exactly the terms that Labor had employed against South Vietnamese boat people.
Pauline Hanson began her career in the election that brought Howard to power in 1996, and made racism — initially directed against Australians of Asian heritage, and then Muslim Australians — the basis for what has turned out to be a lengthy political career, even if much of it was spent out of Parliament. A number of politicians — always older white men — have had their own forays into politics on her political coattails.
Howard’s government was also marked by hostility toward Indigenous peoples, particularly via the Northern Territory Intervention, which Labor backed, and his refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generations. Kevin Rudd’s Apology in 2008 marked the beginning of around 15 years of relative bipartisanship on both the Apology and the challenge of Closing The Gap — a period ended by Peter Dutton and his decision to oppose constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples and a Voice to Parliament.
The past 30 years have been more characterised by “dog-whistling” than open racism of the kind displayed by Labor and by Howard in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, claims of racism are now angrily denied by major party politicians. But both sides of politics have sought to use racism-adjacent issues, such as refugees or temporary migration, for political purposes.
The Coalition has long owned border security as a political issue — despite the loss of control of Australia’s borders to people smugglers and illegal immigrants under Dutton as Home Affairs minister. Migration, however, has been more contested: the Gillard government sought to exploit the issue of concerns about temporary migration by announcing it was cutting back on what were then “457 visas”. Labor and the Coalition are presently engaged in a kind of reverse auction on temporary migration, with each seeking to outbid the other on who can cut foreign student and temporary worker numbers more, while the Coalition under Dutton has sought to link Labor’s poor handling of the High Court’s changes to immigration detention to the threat of criminal refugees attacking Australians.
Is Dutton, who now calls for a ban on Palestinians entering Australia because they’re a potential security threat, thus any different to leaders on both sides of politics who have sought to use racism-adjacent issues for political gain? There are more than a dozen instances of Dutton making remarks that engage in race-baiting, or the exploitation of race-adjacent issues, since 2008. But there are three specific and overt sets of remarks that suggest that for Dutton, racism isn’t merely a political tool, but a personal belief that he thinks is relevant to public policy.
In 2010, Dutton defended colleague Wilson Tuckey, who had attacked acknowledgements of Traditional Owners as a “farce”, suggested Indigenous peoples had only got a “population of 300,000 people” out of Australia, and claimed that the 1967 referendum was “the worst thing that’s happened for Aboriginal people in history”. Dutton not merely supported Tuckey’s right to say his comments, but went further, saying “I don’t have any issue with what Wilson said frankly or his right to say it.” Dutton also famously boycotted Rudd’s Apology two years before, an action he now says was a mistake.
The second is Dutton’s hostility toward non-white refugees. He criticised the Fraser government for allowing Lebanese refugees into Australia, described refugees as illiterate, innumerate and simultaneously taking jobs from Australians and “languish[ing] in unemployment queues and on Medicare and the rest of it”, argued (conversely) that people found to be refugees in fact were wealthy economic migrants, claimed that African gangs (the alleged product of Sudanese refugees) were terrifying Melburnians — and, most recently, argued all Palestinian refugees fleeing the onslaught in Gaza are potential national security threats.
But there’s one group of refugees Dutton is very welcoming of: white people. In 2018, Dutton ordered the Home Affairs Department to examine ways to help white South African farmers flee to a “civilized” country like Australia. White South Africans “work hard, they integrate well into Australian society, they contribute to make us a better country and they’re the sorts of migrants that we want to bring into our country.”
To be hostile to refugees or migration per se may not necessarily be racist, though the former is frequently due to the latter. But Dutton has explicit racial preferences in refugees — white refugees are good; brown and Black refugees are illiterate, innumerate, lazy, economic migrants, security threats and prone to forming criminal gangs.
The third is Dutton’s false claim in November 2018 that Australia’s Muslim communities had hampered counter-terrorism efforts. In the wake of the fatal Bourke St attack by Hassan Khalif Shire Ali, Dutton said “it is a time for community members to step up … We need to be realistic about the threat and the idea that community leaders would have information, but withhold it from the police or intelligence agencies is unacceptable.”
In fact there was no evidence that anyone had withheld information about Shire Ali. Shire Ali was well-known to police and ASIO — which by then was in Dutton’s own portfolio — at the time of the attack and he had had his passport cancelled. An AFP assessment determined he did not pose a threat to national security. If anyone had failed, it was Dutton’s own agency. Yet he singled out Muslim Australians as somehow responsible for Shire Ali’s attack.
Indigenous peoples. Brown and black-skinned refugees. Muslims. Dutton has attacked each group, or endorsed attacks on them. He continues to do so. Other political leaders might dog-whistle, or pursue racism-adjacent issues. Dutton does that, as well — but he goes further. He’s overtly racist — something Australia hasn’t seen in a national leader since John Howard’s repudiated remarks in the 1980s.
Do you think Peter Dutton is racist? 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.
