How does Peter Dutton go about selling the idea of Prime Minister Peter Dutton to the electorate?
I mean, the Left just loathes him … which is why he’s going to start right there.
The Left of Dutton’s own party, and the Left on Twitter — maybe especially the Left on Twitter — cannot stand this man.
He’s Mr Potato Head.
The Grim Reaper.
This naturally assists him. Dutton is the anti-Malcolm. He’s conservative, like John Howard was conservative.
He does not care about the loud and vicious opinions of people who will never in a million years vote for him.
He understands that not every vote is winnable.
Dutton isn’t afraid of his own position on things: he is, as we speak, being thrashed online for his treatment of asylum seekers, and he’s responding by saying that he doesn’t want people to drown at sea.
Turnbull of course says the same, but with much less conviction, not that it matters.
The ALP can’t come at Dutton on border protection. Their policy is exactly the same.
Here’s another way he’s the anti-Malcolm: Dutton can’t stand Lefties, or luvvies, or whatever you want to call them.
Malcolm so needed their love.
Everything about politics — not being liked, occasionally being mocked and loathed — seemed to pain Turnbull.
Dutton has always been a Liberal; indeed, he’s a former Young Liberal, having joined the party as a pup.
He’s had real jobs: as a young man, he graduated of the Police Academy, and he’s been a police officer in the drug squad, and the sex offenders squad, so you can imagine the things he’s seen.
Twitter is going to seem like very small beer, compared to sadists in anonymous hotel rooms, uploading pictures of infants to pedophile sites.
Like Malcolm, he’s self-made, but not in an investment bank. Dutton is more your small business gone very big: some years back, he started a building company with his father, and he’s into child care centres (indeed, he’s in the frame as we speak for having taken Commonwealth funds for child care centres apparently owned by a family trust although it’s all a bit murky.)
He doesn’t own a Harbourside Mansion but he does have six investment properties.
Dutton is the one who famously said Melburnians are scared to go out at night because of African gangs.
For all its ugliness, that will play extremely well in some seats.
Dutton boycotted Kevin Rudd’s apology to indigenous Australians. He’s opposed to same-sex marriage, voting for it only after it became apparent that 65 per cent of his electorate was in favour.
So, when he says he’s conservative, he’s not mucking around.
Turnbull was very often mucking around.
Dutton has been in the House since booting out Cheryl Kernot, seventeen years ago. He has been one of the longest serving, most experienced ministers in the current government.
Like Turnbull, he has never really changed.
Malcolm always looked a monied investment banker who wore extremely clean moleskins and shiny RM Williams on the weekend, because that’s precisely what he was. Dutton looks like an ex-cop in an ill-fitting, too-blue suit, because that’s actually what he is.
He has started his campaign for the top job by talking about energy prices, which is the only thing anyone in his seat probably cares about, and one thing Turnbull probably doesn’t know anything about.
Dutton wants the GST removed. He also wants a Royal Commission into the rorting which makes energy in Australia, which is basically one big mine, the most expensive in the world.
He understands his base, in other words.
That’s also why you could have found him on Triple M this morning talking to the Hot Breakfast team (that said, he couldn’t name an AC/DC song he liked, so is he even Australian? Maybe just more of a Chisel man.)
Not everyone sees the upside in any of this. On Sky this morning, Fairfax’s Peter Hartcher said: “Let’s be blunt about this — Peter Dutton MP is electoral poison. The public can’t stand the bloke … He’s got a huge task of trying to transform his public image.”
My colleague Chip le Grand responded, on Twitter: “Unelectable is a word that should be banished from the keyboards of political pundits.”
Nobody is unelectable. Surely we know that by now?
