Peter Dutton’s insistence that no Palestinian from Gaza be allowed to enter Australia on a humanitarian visa — or, presumably, for any other reason — because they are automatically a national security risk, won’t surprise too many people. It’s been clear for most of Dutton’s time as opposition leader that his primary business model, derived partly from Tony Abbott but mostly from Donald Trump, is to exacerbate division and demonise groups that are powerless enough to be othered without fear of backlash.
You’ll notice for example, that Dutton, once a vehement critic of China prone to attacking Labor MPs as “the Manchurian candidate”, has left most of the Coalition’s attacks on China to acolyte and home affairs shadow minister James Paterson (currently trapped in the Senate because winnable seats in Victoria are thin on the ground for the Liberals), recognising that Dutton’s and Scott Morrison’s hardline anti-Beijing rhetoric played a big role in losing seats with the substantial Chinese-Australia vote in 2022.
Muslim Australians, however, are fair game for Dutton, particularly if they dare to express any outrage at the atrocities being perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians. He’s already on record as saying a government supported by “Muslim candidates from Western Sydney … will be a disaster”.
Not that Dutton is materially far from Labor on these specific issues: He appears to have made a call by himself to lunge for a complete ban on Palestinians entering Australia because Labor was already knocking back over 70% of applications from Gazans. And it was Labor, not Dutton, that initiated the national flaying of the straw man of Muslim sectarianism as part of its efforts — gleefully reported by News Corp — to demonise Fatima Payman (or, the Islamic Pauline Hanson, if you believe Nine newspaper troll-in-chief Peter Hartcher).
Labor’s denunciations at the state and federal level of pro-Palestinian protests (and how’s that Islamophobia Envoy coming along, PM?), and Anthony Albanese’s accusations that the Greens are more or less inciting violence, don’t differ greatly from the Coalition’s hostility to critics of Israel’s mass murdering. Dutton has also had difficulty distinguishing the Coalition’s position on reducing immigration from the government’s, to the extent that he undercut his own shadow treasurer.
Even so, it’s clear that Labor tries to make a virtue of supporting “social cohesion”, even while demonising pro-Palestinian protesters, cutting immigration, refusing entry to Gazans, and denouncing political organisation by Muslim voters. Dutton, on the other hand, has a certain refreshing honesty — while Labor reflexively accuses him of division, he apparently couldn’t care less. While Labor ministers incessantly throw the phrase “social cohesion” around, the leader of the opposition has only used it three times since the Hamas atrocities that initiated the Gaza conflict last year (Paterson, however, uses it semi-regularly).
As the head of ASIO has recently warned, both politicians and the media have risked harming national security with their inflammatory words. Like his predecessors, Mike Burgess knows that the more politicians lift the temperature of debate and the more they demonise minority groups like Muslim Australians, the more alienated they will become and the more susceptible a small number will become to radicalisation and taking action outside Australian political norms, including violence.
As of now, Muslim Australians are told not to protest the Gazan atrocities because that’s inciting violence, told not to criticise Israel because that’s antisemitic, told not to organise politically and, if Dutton had his way, the already tight restrictions on who can flee Israel’s campaign of industrial murder in Gaza would turn into a total ban on people simply for who they are.
What’s crucial to remember is that this damage to national security, this increasing of the risk of political violence by delegitimising and demonising sections of the community, isn’t collateral damage in a right-wing politician’s campaign for power, but quite intentional. Politicians like Dutton, and like Abbott before him, and like many politicians of the last two decades of the failed War on Terror, understand perfectly well that many of the actions Western nations took only created more alienation, more anger and more terrorists — which in turn justified a continuation of the curbs on civil liberties and the lavish security expenditure that marked “counter-terrorism”.
For politicians like Dutton, whose primary selling point is his “strength” (in contrast to the “weak” Anthony Albanese), a calmer, less inflamed civic life is a disaster; peaceful resolutions of conflicts are a body blow. The political temperature must always be high, there must always be a crisis, one with the highest stakes possible, and we must always be threatened, preferably existentially so. They prosper in environments of hostility, anger and terror. They benefit from heightened risks to national security, and from terror attacks, because they believe such conditions suit their political business model — just as those conditions benefit the business models of media companies that make money from inciting grievance, fear and anger in their readerships, and, of course, benefit extremists and terror groups.
Just ask Benjamin Netanyahu — the Israeli prime minister helped fund and legitimise Hamas in order to prevent a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian conflict because his political business model relies on perpetual conflict to keep him in power and out of jail for corruption. Here, Dutton hopes for higher and higher levels of anger, conflict and alienation, and lower and lower levels of national security. At least there’s nothing hypocritical or dishonest about Dutton. There’s a very good reason why the phrase “social cohesion” barely ever passes his lips: it’s anathema to him.
What do you think of Peter Dutton’s proposed total ban on Gazan refugees? 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.
