1 week Ago By Bernard Keane
A staple of press coverage of Peter Dutton for many months now is the insistence that for all the superficial resemblances between the opposition leader and Donald Trump, he’s in fact nothing like the Mad King and is far more centrist in his political outlook. This is a variant of the “he’s not a monster” school of Dutton commentary, which has been around since his unsuccessful bid for the prime ministership in 2018: beneath that right-wing hard-man persona, we’re told, is a genial, smiling chap of far more moderate sensibilities than political events have made him out to be. As voters’ impression of Trump has steadily grown more toxic, the rush to assure us of Dutton’s non-Trumpiness has accelerated.
Problem is, the Trump thing keeps lurching back into view. Not because his critics and enemies hurl labels like “Temu Trump” at him, but because he keeps doing and saying things that invite the comparison. Dutton might insist he’s an original musical artist, but he can’t help but break out the Trump tribute act whenever he’s up on stage.
The weekend’s raging at the “hate media” of Guardian Australia and the ABC — the latter of which we can expect to be face significant cuts or, perhaps, something far more fundamental if Dutton wins — only lacked the Trumpian “enemy of the people” usage to describe their journalists, who will presumably be excluded from Prime Minister Dutton’s media conferences. And it was only the latest of a long list of moments when Dutton channelled Trump. Loyalty over merit In addition to flagging he’d want to live at Kirribilli if he wins, Dutton also talked about the public servants he’d appoint, indicating a senior role awaited discredited former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo , who was sacked for an array of breaches of the public service code of conduct.
Pezzullo also left Home Affairs in an abject mess, resulting in two scathing reviews after the change of government and a host of critical auditor-general reports. Dutton, who led the department for years, knows all of this — but like Trump and his cabinet picks, clearly prizes Pezzullo’s loyalty above his track record. Slash the Education Department In a clear echo of the Trump administration’s determination to close its Department of Education, Dutton committed to slashing the federal Education Department, complained that students were being “indoctrinated” with an “agenda that’s come out of universities” and that he would put conditions on grants to state education in order to stop it.
DOGE Despite already having a “shadow assistant minister for government waste reduction” in James Stevens, in January Dutton aped Trump in proposing that Jacinta Nampijinpa Price would be minister for government efficiency. Price has since been kept out of the campaign except for a WA presser with Dutton where she, ahem, declared the need to Make Australia Great Again. Since then, despite railing at Labor’s waste and inefficiency, Dutton has done little but endorse each new big-spending Labor initiative.
Moreover, Dutton would slash and burn 40,000 jobs from the Public Service as part of his DOGE-style war on government waste, he promised. Except, after some outcry, not frontline jobs. And then, after further outcry, no-one would be sacked, it would just be a hiring freeze and maybe redundancy offers.
And then, as of last week, it would only be in Canberra, which would thus see nearly two-thirds of the policy core of the APS hacked out. Migration While we’re still unclear on exactly how Dutton would get migration down, except via a punitive fee for foreign students, he’s still hammering Labor for “bringing in about two million people over a five year period”. It’s forgotten now, but back in February, Dutton directly channelled the racist Great Replacement Theory pushed by Trump, Elon Musk and other far-right identities in the US, falsely claiming Labor was bringing in large numbers of migrants to increase its vote.
Working from home The most spectacular example of a Trump idea blowing up in Dutton’s face: clearly the Coalition was taken with Trump ending all working from home for federal employees in January, and within 24 hours was signalling it would embrace the idea. Two weeks later, Dutton announced an end to working from home, and told women affected by the change to go jobshare. By early April, Dutton and his buffoon of a shadow finance minister Jane Hume were tramping through the smoking ruins of the Coalition’s female vote to abjectly apologise.
Lock him up Responding in the second week of the campaign to one of what has turned out to be many mishaps with Liberal branches’ candidate vetting, Dutton ran a variation of Trump’s “lock them up” chants about his political enemies. “I don’t think the prime minister is somebody who can be trusted, now to your point, he hasn’t been convicted by a court but maybe he will, because if he keeps going like this you can’t trust this prime minister with anything that he says.” Some of this is doubtless language directed at the Liberal Party base, intended to fire up the more extreme elements on his own side, while some is intended for mainstream consumption.
But we’re no longer in 1969, when politicians could reliably say one thing in one part of the country and another thing elsewhere and not worry about journalists spotting the difference. Judging by the comfort that Dutton appears to feel at slipping on the Trump mask, the claim that he’s just a regular bloke underneath that hard-man persona seems rather overstated. He may not be the Temu Trump, but he’s definitely MAGA-lia: The Australian Trump Experience, playing at a venue near you.
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