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Quarterly Essay #93
Bad Cop: Peter Dutton's Strongman Politics
Where will Dutton lead the Coalition?
A portrait of Peter Dutton, as well as a modern interrogation of the Australian suburbs and the people who live there.
2022 saw the splintering of the Liberal Party's electoral coalition. Influential conservatives have urged Peter Dutton to forget about the seats lost to the Teal independents and instead pursue outer-suburban and regional seats held by Labor. Since then we have seen his manoeuvring on the Voice. The mortgage crunch in the outer suburbs. The rental and housing crisis, especially for millennials and under.
What does Peter Dutton know about the Australian electorate? Has he updated Menzies' Forgotten People pitch for the age of anxiety? Or will he collapse the Liberals' "broad church"?
An essential essay for 2024.
A portrait of Peter Dutton, as well as a modern interrogation of the Australian suburbs and the people who live there.
2022 saw the splintering of the Liberal Party's electoral coalition. Influential conservatives have urged Peter Dutton to forget about the seats lost to the Teal independents and instead pursue outer-suburban and regional seats held by Labor. Since then we have seen his manoeuvring on the Voice. The mortgage crunch in the outer suburbs. The rental and housing crisis, especially for millennials and under.
What does Peter Dutton know about the Australian electorate? Has he updated Menzies' Forgotten People pitch for the age of anxiety? Or will he collapse the Liberals' "broad church"?
An essential essay for 2024.
176 pages, Paperback
First published March 18, 2024
22 people are currently reading
98 people want to read
About the author
Lech Blaine
10 books89 followersLech Blaine is a writer from Toowoomba, Queensland. His work appears in The Best Australian Essays, Meanjin, The Guardian and The Monthly, among others. His work has been nominated for several prizes and he was an inaugural recipient of a Griffith Review Queensland Writers Fellowship.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
July 4, 2024
This is Lech Blaine’s second Quarterly Essay. His first was Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power: Quarterly Essay 83. He is a skilled writer and uses some great twist of phrases.
I have often reflected on how some politicians in Western Democracies would operate in authoritarian regimes. Sadly, over the last few decades we have seen the rise of hard right-wing politicians under the auspicious of traditional conservative parties. The days of people like Malcolm Fraser, Andrew Peacock, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull leading the Liberal Party are gone for the forseeable future. The right wing has taken control of the Liberal Party. The 2022 election saw the defeat of any potential leader of the Liberal Party from the more traditional conservatives. So, Peter Dutton, up there with Tony Abbott, as being part of the ‘hard right’ is now the leader.
Some readers might charge Blaine as doing a hatchet job on Dutton but he has qualified his arguments with detailed quotes and examples. Dutton deliberately identifies the powerless and poor and vilifies them to create hatred towards them and blame towards the Labor Party. Immigrants, Muslim and any who haven’t got jobs, Lebanese, Black African, gay people of any description, Aborigines, lawyers.
The title of the essay comes from Dutton’s early career as a police officer and the effect that occupation had on his world view. In his political career Dutton has mentioned his life in the police force. He does the opposite with his longer career as a property developer.
Blaine touches on Dutton’s early political career and his relationship with Howard. The author goes on to describe the different portfolios he had and how he maintained a firm grip on his Brisbane seat of Dickson.
In his time as opposition leader he has trodden the path of opposing the government every step of the way. He was very successful in the campaign against the referendum on the Voice. Where he can he has used his strongman tactics to vilify, with varying degrees of success. He has not produced many policies to attract voters. His nuclear power policy is riddled with concerns. He was out manoeuvred by Albanese on the tax cuts.
I find that too often he is handled with kid gloves by the media, especially the Murdoch media, Sky After Dark, and Ray Hadley. After his recent interview on 7.30 with Sarah Ferguson, where his only defence is to attack the credibility and independence of the journalist.
“Presenter Sarah Ferguson asks the alternative PM some blunt questions about the back flip on tax cuts. Dutton bristles. He senses a conspiracy. ‘Well Sarah, I don’t think it is your job to push the position of the government,’ says Dutton
It's absolutely not: this is an outside observer – says Ferguson.
‘I wish it was,’ Dutton injects.”
What Dutton has failed to do is to attract back to the party those who he needs to win government. Women and millennials. There has been incident after incident where women have been further alienated by the party in its failure to promote women into roles in the Liberal Party. Nomination of male candidates in Dunkley and Cook. The antics of the SA Liberal Party replacing an ex-minister with a loudmouth ratbag in the number one spot on the Senate card.
Traditionally, as Australians grew older they became more conservative with millennials inability to purchase houses this seems to be changing. Dutton appears incapable of initiating the changes to his party to attract voters. Predictions are being made that interest rates will come down, the cost-of-living rate improves, wages rise then Dutton scaring the electorate and blaming Labor for making Australia unsafe then he will have great difficulty replacing Albanese.
The Australian electorate has never turfed out a first term government and if Dutton is unable to claim the prime ministership his own party might not give him a second chance.
I have often reflected on how some politicians in Western Democracies would operate in authoritarian regimes. Sadly, over the last few decades we have seen the rise of hard right-wing politicians under the auspicious of traditional conservative parties. The days of people like Malcolm Fraser, Andrew Peacock, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull leading the Liberal Party are gone for the forseeable future. The right wing has taken control of the Liberal Party. The 2022 election saw the defeat of any potential leader of the Liberal Party from the more traditional conservatives. So, Peter Dutton, up there with Tony Abbott, as being part of the ‘hard right’ is now the leader.
Some readers might charge Blaine as doing a hatchet job on Dutton but he has qualified his arguments with detailed quotes and examples. Dutton deliberately identifies the powerless and poor and vilifies them to create hatred towards them and blame towards the Labor Party. Immigrants, Muslim and any who haven’t got jobs, Lebanese, Black African, gay people of any description, Aborigines, lawyers.
The title of the essay comes from Dutton’s early career as a police officer and the effect that occupation had on his world view. In his political career Dutton has mentioned his life in the police force. He does the opposite with his longer career as a property developer.
Blaine touches on Dutton’s early political career and his relationship with Howard. The author goes on to describe the different portfolios he had and how he maintained a firm grip on his Brisbane seat of Dickson.
In his time as opposition leader he has trodden the path of opposing the government every step of the way. He was very successful in the campaign against the referendum on the Voice. Where he can he has used his strongman tactics to vilify, with varying degrees of success. He has not produced many policies to attract voters. His nuclear power policy is riddled with concerns. He was out manoeuvred by Albanese on the tax cuts.
I find that too often he is handled with kid gloves by the media, especially the Murdoch media, Sky After Dark, and Ray Hadley. After his recent interview on 7.30 with Sarah Ferguson, where his only defence is to attack the credibility and independence of the journalist.
“Presenter Sarah Ferguson asks the alternative PM some blunt questions about the back flip on tax cuts. Dutton bristles. He senses a conspiracy. ‘Well Sarah, I don’t think it is your job to push the position of the government,’ says Dutton
It's absolutely not: this is an outside observer – says Ferguson.
‘I wish it was,’ Dutton injects.”
What Dutton has failed to do is to attract back to the party those who he needs to win government. Women and millennials. There has been incident after incident where women have been further alienated by the party in its failure to promote women into roles in the Liberal Party. Nomination of male candidates in Dunkley and Cook. The antics of the SA Liberal Party replacing an ex-minister with a loudmouth ratbag in the number one spot on the Senate card.
Traditionally, as Australians grew older they became more conservative with millennials inability to purchase houses this seems to be changing. Dutton appears incapable of initiating the changes to his party to attract voters. Predictions are being made that interest rates will come down, the cost-of-living rate improves, wages rise then Dutton scaring the electorate and blaming Labor for making Australia unsafe then he will have great difficulty replacing Albanese.
The Australian electorate has never turfed out a first term government and if Dutton is unable to claim the prime ministership his own party might not give him a second chance.
March 23, 2024
I enjoy reading Lech Blaine's work. It is amusing and insightful. This essay provides an entertaining, yet clearly biased, analysis of the motivations behind Peter Dutton.
The tone of this essay is set early when he quotes Liberal MP Bridget Archer as saying that 'the Liberal Party has become One Nation lite'. Dutton is portrayed as a hard-right culture warrior with an unnuanced fixation on crime, race, and national security. Blaine digs into Dutton’s past to help explain the 'siege mentality' where Dutton believes his toughness is required to save Australia.
This siege mentality motivates Dutton's wedge politics where the fear mongering against 'woke' agendas (such as environmentalism, marriage equality, indigenous recognition, 'the elite') is used to tear working-class voters from their economic self-interest. Through his appeal to traditional values, rather than economic or labour policy, Dutton is concentrating on winning the votes of outer-suburban, provincial, and rural electorates.
Blaine's essay is most interesting in his analysis of the bleak future of the federal Liberal Party. Blaine argues that the Liberal Party is suffering from a split personality. Dutton wants to win the working-class vote, but he remains committed to tax loopholes that benefit the ‘woke’ university-educated inner-city wealthy electorates that he openly despises. A clear example of this was Dutton’s attack on Labor for re-arranging the stage three tax cuts so that it benefitted low and middle income earners – the very people he wants to win over.
The essay makes the point that Dutton’s 'strategy makes great mathematical sense if you ignore the ethnic diversity of outer-suburban Sydney and Melbourne and the monoculturalism of the Coalition'. Dutton's fearmongering on China and rage against immigrant crime are also losing him support in the very electorates he wants to win. This is compounded by the Liberal party's alienation of millennials who have given up buying their own home, due in large part because of the housing policies implemented under Dutton’s hero, John Howard. As Blaine wittily observes, typically people become conservative the older they get, but how can you become conservative when you don't have anything to conserve.
The conclusion is that Dutton is continuing the destructive transformation of the Liberal Party away from its moderate ideological roots. Menzies established the centre-right party to uphold the interests of the ‘forgotten people’ – people who worked and saved hard to achieve the Australian dream: a middle-class family with a house and a garden: a ‘life which finds room for literature, for the arts, for science, for medicine and the law’. Dutton and the modern Liberal Party is portrayed as none of these things. Rather, under Dutton, it seems that the Liberal Party is more concerned with the ‘war on woke’ than it is with fighting against the cost of living. The 'forgotten people' that Dutton is defending seems to have been redefined as something similar the Clinton's 'deplorables'.
I would have liked this essay a lot more if there was at least some effort towards impartiality. It reads like a hit piece. It justifiably lists Dutton’s failures, such as walking out on the Apology, the campaign against The Voice, the obsession with ‘boat people’, the Paladin contract, the Au Pair scandal, dog-whistling regarding 'African youth crime', rejection of climate change, the boycott of Woolworths, etc. However, the essay doesn’t even try to find something positive to say about him. But maybe that’s the point. Dutton is defined by what he’s not, what he’s against, and what he’s afraid of. Dutton sees himself as the strong man that needs to save Australia from its enemies - real or perceived.
The tone of this essay is set early when he quotes Liberal MP Bridget Archer as saying that 'the Liberal Party has become One Nation lite'. Dutton is portrayed as a hard-right culture warrior with an unnuanced fixation on crime, race, and national security. Blaine digs into Dutton’s past to help explain the 'siege mentality' where Dutton believes his toughness is required to save Australia.
This siege mentality motivates Dutton's wedge politics where the fear mongering against 'woke' agendas (such as environmentalism, marriage equality, indigenous recognition, 'the elite') is used to tear working-class voters from their economic self-interest. Through his appeal to traditional values, rather than economic or labour policy, Dutton is concentrating on winning the votes of outer-suburban, provincial, and rural electorates.
Blaine's essay is most interesting in his analysis of the bleak future of the federal Liberal Party. Blaine argues that the Liberal Party is suffering from a split personality. Dutton wants to win the working-class vote, but he remains committed to tax loopholes that benefit the ‘woke’ university-educated inner-city wealthy electorates that he openly despises. A clear example of this was Dutton’s attack on Labor for re-arranging the stage three tax cuts so that it benefitted low and middle income earners – the very people he wants to win over.
The essay makes the point that Dutton’s 'strategy makes great mathematical sense if you ignore the ethnic diversity of outer-suburban Sydney and Melbourne and the monoculturalism of the Coalition'. Dutton's fearmongering on China and rage against immigrant crime are also losing him support in the very electorates he wants to win. This is compounded by the Liberal party's alienation of millennials who have given up buying their own home, due in large part because of the housing policies implemented under Dutton’s hero, John Howard. As Blaine wittily observes, typically people become conservative the older they get, but how can you become conservative when you don't have anything to conserve.
The conclusion is that Dutton is continuing the destructive transformation of the Liberal Party away from its moderate ideological roots. Menzies established the centre-right party to uphold the interests of the ‘forgotten people’ – people who worked and saved hard to achieve the Australian dream: a middle-class family with a house and a garden: a ‘life which finds room for literature, for the arts, for science, for medicine and the law’. Dutton and the modern Liberal Party is portrayed as none of these things. Rather, under Dutton, it seems that the Liberal Party is more concerned with the ‘war on woke’ than it is with fighting against the cost of living. The 'forgotten people' that Dutton is defending seems to have been redefined as something similar the Clinton's 'deplorables'.
I would have liked this essay a lot more if there was at least some effort towards impartiality. It reads like a hit piece. It justifiably lists Dutton’s failures, such as walking out on the Apology, the campaign against The Voice, the obsession with ‘boat people’, the Paladin contract, the Au Pair scandal, dog-whistling regarding 'African youth crime', rejection of climate change, the boycott of Woolworths, etc. However, the essay doesn’t even try to find something positive to say about him. But maybe that’s the point. Dutton is defined by what he’s not, what he’s against, and what he’s afraid of. Dutton sees himself as the strong man that needs to save Australia from its enemies - real or perceived.
March 25, 2024
A fairly detailed account of the career of Peter Dutton, who could quite possibly become our next prime minister. A right-wing, old-style Tory, Dutton could become Australia’s Trump. Blaine gives us clear warning: Don’t underestimate this bloke.
October 26, 2024
LB is one of the most insightful political commentators in Australia.
March 31, 2024
Leaves one longing for the politics of a past age. Modern politics has become relentlessly narrowed into the acquisition of power and the deception of the electorate. Dutton is the latest manifestation of that trend.
April 8, 2024
Nothing like a quarterly essay bio one of our party leaders - always hits.
8/10
8/10
August 27, 2025
the liberal party is a fascinating mess
December 31, 2024
Lech Blaine’s essay might strike some as one-sided, but I think it’s an intriguing insight into a figure who could very likely be our next Prime Minister.
What voters must recognise is that Peter Dutton remains fundamentally the same headstrong personality from his days as a Queensland police officer. He continues to project this image of the former cop—an ally of working-class Australia. But this persona starkly contrasts with the reality that he’s a wealthy property developer with broad commercial interests.
Dutton appears fixated, as many far-right politicians are, that Australia’s future is hindered by migrants, refugees, and a “woke” agenda advocating for equal rights and representation for Indigenous people, for example. This ideology resonates with many disengaged voters who share similar views. However, this alignment also underscores a larger issue, which is the persistence of such antiquated views within the Australian body politic.
For Dutton at least, this narrow worldview may be borne out of his years in law enforcement, where pragmatism often prioritises instinct and authority over introspection. But should the office of Prime Minister not demand a leader with greater intellectual breadth and vision? Or is this a calculated strategy, borrowed from Donald Trump’s playbook, to appeal to low- and middle-class suburban voters who feel overlooked by progressive governments like Labor? Through the politics of fear, Dutton drives a wedge between these voters and their economic interests. But what about a progressive, reforming government that could genuinely improve their lives?
Dutton’s lack of political ideology means he subsequently lacks a substantive plan for Australia’s future. Australians need hope and opportunity, not to be divided by anxiety and fear.
What voters must recognise is that Peter Dutton remains fundamentally the same headstrong personality from his days as a Queensland police officer. He continues to project this image of the former cop—an ally of working-class Australia. But this persona starkly contrasts with the reality that he’s a wealthy property developer with broad commercial interests.
Dutton appears fixated, as many far-right politicians are, that Australia’s future is hindered by migrants, refugees, and a “woke” agenda advocating for equal rights and representation for Indigenous people, for example. This ideology resonates with many disengaged voters who share similar views. However, this alignment also underscores a larger issue, which is the persistence of such antiquated views within the Australian body politic.
For Dutton at least, this narrow worldview may be borne out of his years in law enforcement, where pragmatism often prioritises instinct and authority over introspection. But should the office of Prime Minister not demand a leader with greater intellectual breadth and vision? Or is this a calculated strategy, borrowed from Donald Trump’s playbook, to appeal to low- and middle-class suburban voters who feel overlooked by progressive governments like Labor? Through the politics of fear, Dutton drives a wedge between these voters and their economic interests. But what about a progressive, reforming government that could genuinely improve their lives?
Dutton’s lack of political ideology means he subsequently lacks a substantive plan for Australia’s future. Australians need hope and opportunity, not to be divided by anxiety and fear.
April 12, 2024
I like Lech Blaine, he's a great writer, I am not as left WING as him but he does occasionally offer deep insights into Australian politics
Read
December 23, 2025A portrait of a former political hooligan. This year, I was never prouder to be Australian when he and that brand of politics were soundly defeated at the ballot box.
June 22, 2024
I find very little to like in Peter Dutton. And that is coming from (until recently) a conflicted Liberal voter who, despite everything, tends to look forgivingly on Scott Morrison, and has a level of respect for, if not quite a personal liking of, Malcolm Turnbull. This book - or long essay, rather - clearly harbours no intention to render its subject any more likeable. As is to be expected, Blaine unapologetically casts him as a villain, somewhat illuminating backstory or not.
Still, this recent publication in the ever valuable Quarterly Essay series offers a decent amount of commentary and context into some of Australia’s more recent upheavals, primarily but not exclusively the depressingly unsuccessful referendum on the First Nations Voice to Parliament.
Still, this recent publication in the ever valuable Quarterly Essay series offers a decent amount of commentary and context into some of Australia’s more recent upheavals, primarily but not exclusively the depressingly unsuccessful referendum on the First Nations Voice to Parliament.
April 20, 2024
What a rank man
May 14, 2024
I’ve become a fan of Lech Blaine’s Quarterly Essays. Well thought out and well edited. Blaine sticks to his thesis statement nice and tight, as he did with Top Blokes. And then aside from that, he actually makes Aus politics an enjoyable reading experience. Blaine is also very good at characterisation which I think makes his work so readable. Top marks all round.
October 3, 2024
Divisive power hungry ruthless and will say anything against Labour to win. Hideous man.
July 10, 2024
I am now so politically involved - look at me go. Dutton sucks - what more can I say
April 11, 2024
I will never vote for him, but I wonder what purpose this essay serves. Because the author has chosen to wear his bias on his sleeve, this won't change anyone's mind about Dutton, which is fine to a point, but QEs aren't meant to be glorified university assignments. You're reading this because you follow politics. Therefore, the biographical details are redundant.
What's left is an unremarkable, fairly standard critique of Dutton's politics. If you have an opinion on Dutton, whether it's good or bad, you can skip this. We've seen all of it before.
What's left is an unremarkable, fairly standard critique of Dutton's politics. If you have an opinion on Dutton, whether it's good or bad, you can skip this. We've seen all of it before.
June 10, 2024
I have tried to switch off from following Australian politics in the last few years and this depressing essay profiling the rise of Peter Dutton, the man who now leads Australia’s Liberal (Conservative) Party, has merely reinforced that impulse.
Since the election of John Howard back in 1996 and his successful tapping into the fears and prejudice of so-called ‘aspirational’ outer-suburban mainly white voters, Australian politicians’ horizons have shrunk further and further.
Howard was a pre-boomer whose constituency was that old pre-WWII generation of Australians never comfortable with the changes resulting from mass immigration and the progressive cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s.
These changes were epitomised by the rise of a new class of well-educated urban professionals in the Whitlam era, when progressive politics was at its zenith. The 80s-90s governments of Hawke and Keating combined social liberalism with neoliberal economics that successfully wedged the Liberals.
Then Howard reversed the formula, fusing neoliberal economics with conservative social policy that acted as kryptonite to Keating’s agenda of a modern, multicultural Australia, reconciling with its indigenous people, moving towards a republic and seeking its destiny in the fast-growing economies of the Asia Pacific.
Since 1996 (now nearly three decades ago), that vision has faded as many Australians, spooked by Keating’s vision of the country unmoored from its Anglo-American roots and made insecure by the very market-driven policies he espoused, began to cling more and more to what they thought was familiar territory.
It is this reactionary era which serves as the historical background to journalist Lech Blaine’s essay on the rise of Peter Dutton, the latest Liberal leader to till the soil of fear and division first seeded by Howard. But as Blaine notes, Dutton should be understood not just as an ideological offspring of Howard but also as an expression of Queensland’s notoriously racist and regressive politics. Taking an even longer-term view, Blaine casts Dutton as the latest manifestation of the mindset born of Australia’s 18th century beginnings as a penal colony.
“The historian Manning Clark described Australian public life as a contest between the enlargers and the punishers,” Blaine writes. “Those with a craving for a freer way of being. And those clinging onto the authoritarian mindset of the convict colony. Dutton is a punisher. His desire to discipline the vulnerable comes from a visceral place. For John Howard, punishment was a means to power. For Dutton, power is a means to punishment.”
Dutton is indeed a punisher. He virtually boasts of the scars he carries as a former Queensland policeman. The early part of the essay looks at his frustrations in trying to put rapists and sexual deviants behind bars, thwarted by what he saw as virtue-signalling middle class lawyers and the ‘grievance industry’. Blaine also spends some time charting Dutton’s own family history, which is steeped both in the punisher and enlarger traditions in Queensland’s sorry past.
Like the Trumpists and other right-wing authoritarians now dominating politics around the world, Dutton uses cultural resentments against urban ‘elites’ to build a new constituency out of the former left-wing ALP’s old working class, suburban and regional constituency. This is analogous to how the Republicans in the US, formerly the voice of the business and industrial elites of the north exploited the Democrats’ embrace of Wall Street and Silicon Valley to harvest the votes of the resentful white working class of the south and mid-west.
The blame for this phenomenon can be cast as much on the old social democratic parties’ embrace of neoliberalism (which dumps more and more risk formerly underwritten by the government onto the shoulders of working people). The conservatives parties, which also back those policies, then use the sense of insecurity among the working class to fan culture war issues and get them continuing to vote against their own economic interests. It’s a strategy that keeps working, which explains Trump and others. Yet the parties of the nominal ‘left’ - instead of taking the gloves off and fighting the uber capitalists - continue to cling to an imaginary ‘centre’ (which is nowhere).
To be fair, in fighting endless culture wars, Dutton is only doing overtly what Howard - and his other disciplines (Abbott and Morrison) did covertly. He has thrown away the dog whistle and embraced the fog horn instead. And you’d have to say it is working for him. The more he is derided by urban liberals as a neo-fascist and ‘thug’ (as Malcolm Turnbull described him), the more he revels in his chosen role as a truth teller for the forgotten people.
With the help of a campaign of disinformation by the shadowy think-tank-funded Advance Australia and the most cynical co-opting of ambitious Aboriginal politician Jacinta Price, Dutton destroyed Labor PM Anthony Albanese’s referendum for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal Australians and the creation of an indigenous ‘voice’ to parliament. Since the defeat of the referendum, Albanese looks greatly diminished - not that he ever carried much clout anyway. Alongside the pain of persistent inflation and higher interest rates, Labor looks at risk of losing its slight parliamentary majority in the election due in 2025. The Voice was poorly handled from the start and Albanese walked into Dutton’s trap by aligning himself with corporate leaders pushing the ‘woke agenda’.
The most interesting part of Blaine’s essay questions the strategic thinking around Dutton’s anti-‘elite’ pitch. In sneering at the university educated and urban liberals, he may have won some support in Labor’s old outer-suburban heartlands, but he essentially has sacrificed any chance of winning back the seats the Liberals lost at the last election to professional, middle-class women candidates running as independents (the ‘teals’). But with his racist, Sinophobic, anti-immigrant pitch, he may also have misunderstood the nature of the urban fringe seats he is courting.
“There are 45 inner-metropolitan seats. Dutton is happy to leave Labor, the Greens and the teals to squabble over them,” Blaine writes. “He is concentrating on the ninety-six outer-suburban, provincial and rural electorates. This strategy makes great mathematical sense if you ignore the ethnic diversity of outer-suburban Sydney and Melbourne and the monoculturalism of the Coalition.”
But then Dutton knows he probably can’t win in 2025. His goal is to reduce Albanese’s government to minority status, depending on the Greens and Teals for support. And then, like Abbot before him, he could make a subsequent pitch for an end to the ‘chaos’ of informal coalitions and a return to ‘strong man’ politics.
My own view on the authoritarian right is that its days are numbered. Its agenda, as former Liberal Party pollster Tony Barry mentions in Blaine’s book, is pitched at my rapidly disappearing generation, the Baby Boomers. Millennials and Generation Z (my kids’ generation) despise the Liberals as they have been shafted by policies that forestall climate action, that expose them to greater economic insecurity and that destroy the possibility of them ever owning their own home.
The greatest irony is that Dutton - supposed enemy of the ‘elites’ and friend of ‘ordinary’ Australians -is an extremely wealthy property speculator who has made tens of millions of dollars exploiting the hugely inequitable tax lurks that reward those who making fortunes flipping houses. He has produced nothing and has no positive ideas for Australia beyond the pipedream of nuclear power (in reality yet another way for the fossil fuel industry to delay effective action on climate). He has shafted our kids’ economic futures and now runs war-mongering campaigns against our biggest trading partner, China. His entire schtick is built on kicking down and fear of others.
The sooner his stain is wiped from history the better.
Since the election of John Howard back in 1996 and his successful tapping into the fears and prejudice of so-called ‘aspirational’ outer-suburban mainly white voters, Australian politicians’ horizons have shrunk further and further.
Howard was a pre-boomer whose constituency was that old pre-WWII generation of Australians never comfortable with the changes resulting from mass immigration and the progressive cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s.
These changes were epitomised by the rise of a new class of well-educated urban professionals in the Whitlam era, when progressive politics was at its zenith. The 80s-90s governments of Hawke and Keating combined social liberalism with neoliberal economics that successfully wedged the Liberals.
Then Howard reversed the formula, fusing neoliberal economics with conservative social policy that acted as kryptonite to Keating’s agenda of a modern, multicultural Australia, reconciling with its indigenous people, moving towards a republic and seeking its destiny in the fast-growing economies of the Asia Pacific.
Since 1996 (now nearly three decades ago), that vision has faded as many Australians, spooked by Keating’s vision of the country unmoored from its Anglo-American roots and made insecure by the very market-driven policies he espoused, began to cling more and more to what they thought was familiar territory.
It is this reactionary era which serves as the historical background to journalist Lech Blaine’s essay on the rise of Peter Dutton, the latest Liberal leader to till the soil of fear and division first seeded by Howard. But as Blaine notes, Dutton should be understood not just as an ideological offspring of Howard but also as an expression of Queensland’s notoriously racist and regressive politics. Taking an even longer-term view, Blaine casts Dutton as the latest manifestation of the mindset born of Australia’s 18th century beginnings as a penal colony.
“The historian Manning Clark described Australian public life as a contest between the enlargers and the punishers,” Blaine writes. “Those with a craving for a freer way of being. And those clinging onto the authoritarian mindset of the convict colony. Dutton is a punisher. His desire to discipline the vulnerable comes from a visceral place. For John Howard, punishment was a means to power. For Dutton, power is a means to punishment.”
Dutton is indeed a punisher. He virtually boasts of the scars he carries as a former Queensland policeman. The early part of the essay looks at his frustrations in trying to put rapists and sexual deviants behind bars, thwarted by what he saw as virtue-signalling middle class lawyers and the ‘grievance industry’. Blaine also spends some time charting Dutton’s own family history, which is steeped both in the punisher and enlarger traditions in Queensland’s sorry past.
Like the Trumpists and other right-wing authoritarians now dominating politics around the world, Dutton uses cultural resentments against urban ‘elites’ to build a new constituency out of the former left-wing ALP’s old working class, suburban and regional constituency. This is analogous to how the Republicans in the US, formerly the voice of the business and industrial elites of the north exploited the Democrats’ embrace of Wall Street and Silicon Valley to harvest the votes of the resentful white working class of the south and mid-west.
The blame for this phenomenon can be cast as much on the old social democratic parties’ embrace of neoliberalism (which dumps more and more risk formerly underwritten by the government onto the shoulders of working people). The conservatives parties, which also back those policies, then use the sense of insecurity among the working class to fan culture war issues and get them continuing to vote against their own economic interests. It’s a strategy that keeps working, which explains Trump and others. Yet the parties of the nominal ‘left’ - instead of taking the gloves off and fighting the uber capitalists - continue to cling to an imaginary ‘centre’ (which is nowhere).
To be fair, in fighting endless culture wars, Dutton is only doing overtly what Howard - and his other disciplines (Abbott and Morrison) did covertly. He has thrown away the dog whistle and embraced the fog horn instead. And you’d have to say it is working for him. The more he is derided by urban liberals as a neo-fascist and ‘thug’ (as Malcolm Turnbull described him), the more he revels in his chosen role as a truth teller for the forgotten people.
With the help of a campaign of disinformation by the shadowy think-tank-funded Advance Australia and the most cynical co-opting of ambitious Aboriginal politician Jacinta Price, Dutton destroyed Labor PM Anthony Albanese’s referendum for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal Australians and the creation of an indigenous ‘voice’ to parliament. Since the defeat of the referendum, Albanese looks greatly diminished - not that he ever carried much clout anyway. Alongside the pain of persistent inflation and higher interest rates, Labor looks at risk of losing its slight parliamentary majority in the election due in 2025. The Voice was poorly handled from the start and Albanese walked into Dutton’s trap by aligning himself with corporate leaders pushing the ‘woke agenda’.
The most interesting part of Blaine’s essay questions the strategic thinking around Dutton’s anti-‘elite’ pitch. In sneering at the university educated and urban liberals, he may have won some support in Labor’s old outer-suburban heartlands, but he essentially has sacrificed any chance of winning back the seats the Liberals lost at the last election to professional, middle-class women candidates running as independents (the ‘teals’). But with his racist, Sinophobic, anti-immigrant pitch, he may also have misunderstood the nature of the urban fringe seats he is courting.
“There are 45 inner-metropolitan seats. Dutton is happy to leave Labor, the Greens and the teals to squabble over them,” Blaine writes. “He is concentrating on the ninety-six outer-suburban, provincial and rural electorates. This strategy makes great mathematical sense if you ignore the ethnic diversity of outer-suburban Sydney and Melbourne and the monoculturalism of the Coalition.”
But then Dutton knows he probably can’t win in 2025. His goal is to reduce Albanese’s government to minority status, depending on the Greens and Teals for support. And then, like Abbot before him, he could make a subsequent pitch for an end to the ‘chaos’ of informal coalitions and a return to ‘strong man’ politics.
My own view on the authoritarian right is that its days are numbered. Its agenda, as former Liberal Party pollster Tony Barry mentions in Blaine’s book, is pitched at my rapidly disappearing generation, the Baby Boomers. Millennials and Generation Z (my kids’ generation) despise the Liberals as they have been shafted by policies that forestall climate action, that expose them to greater economic insecurity and that destroy the possibility of them ever owning their own home.
The greatest irony is that Dutton - supposed enemy of the ‘elites’ and friend of ‘ordinary’ Australians -is an extremely wealthy property speculator who has made tens of millions of dollars exploiting the hugely inequitable tax lurks that reward those who making fortunes flipping houses. He has produced nothing and has no positive ideas for Australia beyond the pipedream of nuclear power (in reality yet another way for the fossil fuel industry to delay effective action on climate). He has shafted our kids’ economic futures and now runs war-mongering campaigns against our biggest trading partner, China. His entire schtick is built on kicking down and fear of others.
The sooner his stain is wiped from history the better.
May 5, 2025
We do not want Peter as our next Prime Minister. Between this and Niki Savva's "Plots and Prayers," I think the Liberal Party has forgotten how hard they fought against him being their leader back in 2018. It is worth remembering that his party did not want him. Why on Earth should the electorate? This is the man who ruined any hope of Reconciliation this century. He is threatening us with the likes of Gina Rinehart, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and nuclear energy.
A cop from Queensland (who should really see a psychologist, take some meds and go on a holiday very far away from here) turned property developer has no place being the leader of our precarious social democracy. Peter is afraid of multiculturalism, rigorously avoids scrutiny and belongs to a time "when dole bludgers were bigger public enemies than landlords." He is paranoid, ideological and not as smart as Abbott, more vindictive about the culture wars than Howard and prone to constructing falsehoods to suit his own narratives.
I started this year dreading the election and wary that the Coalition would get up. Upon reading this, I take comfort in believing Peter's suburban strategy will fail. The ALP will get a second term. And I hope Dickson takes him to the cleaners and Ali France gets his seat.
"Dutton is a hard man with a glass jaw. He feels entitled to the highest prize of Australia's democracy, yet he resents attention and accountability. His siege mentality gets exhausting.
"Dutton is the most pessimistic headliner since Marilyn Manson graced the stage. The dark wizard of wedge politics is daydreaming about the Forgotten People."
"Dutton needs to be tested, not placated. He is an opportunist who only responds to electoral pressure. The best weapon against right-wing culture wars is proper social democracy."
"Dutton is Australia's pre-eminent practitioner of right-wing identity politics. He highlights difference for a living. his career has been spent persuading Australians to prioritise cultural belonging above egalitarianism."
"A lot of disengaged No voters were not signing up for a 24/7 'war on woke.'"
"Refusing the comply with judges and lawyers is the whole point of [Dutton's] career."
"Has Dutton been flogging a dead horse for no tangible gain? This is a fascinating thesis, shared privately by some moderate Liberal MPs. They fear that their leader has been overestimating his effect on the nosediving polls and interpreting them as vindication for Abbott's Suburban Strategy... metropolitan small-l liberals will never forget the wrecking ball Dutton aimed at reconciliation."
A cop from Queensland (who should really see a psychologist, take some meds and go on a holiday very far away from here) turned property developer has no place being the leader of our precarious social democracy. Peter is afraid of multiculturalism, rigorously avoids scrutiny and belongs to a time "when dole bludgers were bigger public enemies than landlords." He is paranoid, ideological and not as smart as Abbott, more vindictive about the culture wars than Howard and prone to constructing falsehoods to suit his own narratives.
I started this year dreading the election and wary that the Coalition would get up. Upon reading this, I take comfort in believing Peter's suburban strategy will fail. The ALP will get a second term. And I hope Dickson takes him to the cleaners and Ali France gets his seat.
"Dutton is a hard man with a glass jaw. He feels entitled to the highest prize of Australia's democracy, yet he resents attention and accountability. His siege mentality gets exhausting.
"Dutton is the most pessimistic headliner since Marilyn Manson graced the stage. The dark wizard of wedge politics is daydreaming about the Forgotten People."
"Dutton needs to be tested, not placated. He is an opportunist who only responds to electoral pressure. The best weapon against right-wing culture wars is proper social democracy."
"Dutton is Australia's pre-eminent practitioner of right-wing identity politics. He highlights difference for a living. his career has been spent persuading Australians to prioritise cultural belonging above egalitarianism."
"A lot of disengaged No voters were not signing up for a 24/7 'war on woke.'"
"Refusing the comply with judges and lawyers is the whole point of [Dutton's] career."
"Has Dutton been flogging a dead horse for no tangible gain? This is a fascinating thesis, shared privately by some moderate Liberal MPs. They fear that their leader has been overestimating his effect on the nosediving polls and interpreting them as vindication for Abbott's Suburban Strategy... metropolitan small-l liberals will never forget the wrecking ball Dutton aimed at reconciliation."
April 18, 2024
Just a reminder why I don’t vote liberal
March 30, 2024
It's been a long time since I finished a Quarterly Essay in one sitting. Lech Blaine's writing was captivating. Conceptually, I knew that Peter Dutton was an evil man, but I don't think I truly realised HOW evil he is. This filled me with dread for the future of Australian politics, and an anger that runs beyond Dutton, beyond the Liberal party, and lands pointing somewhere towards a broken political system and a broken world. This QE is, in my books, absolutely essential reading.
December 29, 2024
Reading quarterly essays feels a little like homework but I’m generally glad when I do. Writing this review a few months after I read the essay, I can’t say I remember many details, but I feel like I gained a better understanding of Dutton’s character (or to use my preferred term, his “vibe”).
July 11, 2024
This is the second piece I've read from Lech Blane, and it's been a disappointment both times. This essay seems like it's intended to help us understand the thoughts and feelings that lie behind the Dutton we all know, but about 90% of it is just a blow-by-blow recap of ten years in Australian politics. We learn only the surface-level parts of Dutton's life, we are meant to understand his soul through his tweets and his media soundbites, and large parts of the essay don't involve Dutton at all. It's also explicitly leftist and anti-Dutton, which kills any sense of human curiosity or intrigue, and it's told in a way that's somehow less exciting than just skimming all the relevant articles from a newspaper.
There is also a real problem of writing style here, and it comes in two kinds. On the macro scale, there's simply no thematic through-line that carries us along, and no connective tissue to lead from one political tidbit to the next. The chapters and paragraphs read like montages of facts, stories, moments in time, but there's no sense of purpose to it. How does one point follow from the previous? Why is this story placed next to this other? Montage can be effective if there is a sense of it all heading in one direction, but most of the time it is difficult to know what the direction should be. This essay rests on an assumption that the reader will know enough about the last ten years of Australian politics that they can see the though-lines, but if you've been keeping up with the news you'll find this superficial recounting of the events very boring indeed.
The second problem of style in on on the micro side, and it is that Blane just cannot write interesting sentences. He has a halting, staccato style of short sentences, punctuated almost exclusively by full-stops, which beat you across the ear like a jackhammer outside your window. I suspect he does this to seem objective and journalistic, but instead it smacks of smug superiority and makes reading each paragraph viscerally uncomfortable. It may not come across well in short quotations, but here is a random example.
Though it doesn't seem too bad in a snippet like this, just imagine over 100 pages of it. Here is another one, with a particularly baffling full-stop (after 'being') which shatters any semblance of flow and makes the succeeding sentence a literal non-sentence, grammatically.
Mostly this is down to Blane's poor abilities as a writer, but it also reflects a failure of the editors. The Quarterly Essay, as a concept, feels like it should be a highly regarded instalment in Australian journalism - a weighty addition to the national conversation on the four most important topics of each year. But this might be the tenth Quarterly Essay I've read now, and I think it'll be my last. I keep coming back to them because I like the format, and the subject matter usually seems very interesting from the outset. But somehow they just keep failing to live up to their potential, usually because they don't bring new insights to the table while also being written in an explicitly partisan manner.
On the other hand, one thing this essay does do rather well is to reveal just how petty and dull Australian politics is. It's just story after story of minor scuffles over votes and media attention, playing out before a general public who just don't give a shit, because they have no reason to.
There is also a real problem of writing style here, and it comes in two kinds. On the macro scale, there's simply no thematic through-line that carries us along, and no connective tissue to lead from one political tidbit to the next. The chapters and paragraphs read like montages of facts, stories, moments in time, but there's no sense of purpose to it. How does one point follow from the previous? Why is this story placed next to this other? Montage can be effective if there is a sense of it all heading in one direction, but most of the time it is difficult to know what the direction should be. This essay rests on an assumption that the reader will know enough about the last ten years of Australian politics that they can see the though-lines, but if you've been keeping up with the news you'll find this superficial recounting of the events very boring indeed.
The second problem of style in on on the micro side, and it is that Blane just cannot write interesting sentences. He has a halting, staccato style of short sentences, punctuated almost exclusively by full-stops, which beat you across the ear like a jackhammer outside your window. I suspect he does this to seem objective and journalistic, but instead it smacks of smug superiority and makes reading each paragraph viscerally uncomfortable. It may not come across well in short quotations, but here is a random example.
The Duttons had bought buildings in Acacia Ridge, Logan and Bald Hills. They renovated them into childcare centres. Some were leased to companies for plum sums. Some they ran themselves. Pretty soon, they were employing forty people. Dutton's Australian dream was back on the rails.
Though it doesn't seem too bad in a snippet like this, just imagine over 100 pages of it. Here is another one, with a particularly baffling full-stop (after 'being') which shatters any semblance of flow and makes the succeeding sentence a literal non-sentence, grammatically.
The Historian Manning Clark described Australian public life as a contest between the enlargers and the punishers. Those with a craving for a freer way of being. And those clinging onto the authoritarian mindset of the convict colony. Dutton is a punisher. His desire to discipline the vulnerable comes from a visceral place. For John Howard, punishment was a means to power. For Dutton, power is a means to punishment.
Mostly this is down to Blane's poor abilities as a writer, but it also reflects a failure of the editors. The Quarterly Essay, as a concept, feels like it should be a highly regarded instalment in Australian journalism - a weighty addition to the national conversation on the four most important topics of each year. But this might be the tenth Quarterly Essay I've read now, and I think it'll be my last. I keep coming back to them because I like the format, and the subject matter usually seems very interesting from the outset. But somehow they just keep failing to live up to their potential, usually because they don't bring new insights to the table while also being written in an explicitly partisan manner.
On the other hand, one thing this essay does do rather well is to reveal just how petty and dull Australian politics is. It's just story after story of minor scuffles over votes and media attention, playing out before a general public who just don't give a shit, because they have no reason to.
April 12, 2024
While this Quarterly Essay has a few too many naff turns of phrase, it manages to do what few have been able to do succinctly: dismantle piece by piece who Peter Dutton is as a politician and ever-eager wannabe Prime Minister.
Knowing where he's come from - his 'bad cop' roots - helps inform just why he acts the way he does. The man clearly needs some form of therapy, or maybe just a mirror.
Blaine expertly breaks him down in a few paragraphs where he outlines Dutton's uncommitted stance on whales and dolphins that he says will die because of wind farms, showing a man who simply has no conviction but that of wedging Labor.
And look, it's not hard to wedge Labor, especially when you're mashed potato and get into every crevice. But, as outlined here, what happens when you get into the crevice and look around and realise you have no vision or policies for the future? Well, you break a nation.
I hope people read this and understand who the opposition leader is. I hope they start to reject his politics. I hope the Liberal party come to their senses and put someone with half a brain in his place.
Knowing where he's come from - his 'bad cop' roots - helps inform just why he acts the way he does. The man clearly needs some form of therapy, or maybe just a mirror.
Blaine expertly breaks him down in a few paragraphs where he outlines Dutton's uncommitted stance on whales and dolphins that he says will die because of wind farms, showing a man who simply has no conviction but that of wedging Labor.
And look, it's not hard to wedge Labor, especially when you're mashed potato and get into every crevice. But, as outlined here, what happens when you get into the crevice and look around and realise you have no vision or policies for the future? Well, you break a nation.
I hope people read this and understand who the opposition leader is. I hope they start to reject his politics. I hope the Liberal party come to their senses and put someone with half a brain in his place.
July 15, 2024
this is peter dutton - tall and strong at first glance. but when you watch him for a long time, you can see that the man is small, and scared
really good quarterly essay !!!
this essay was a really detailed account of dutton's life and career, and helped me understand a bit more Why He Is The Way That He Is. His inability to see Indigenous issues as anything other than a law and order issue, going back to his police days; the fact that he often refers back to his time as a police officer - notwithstanding that he's had a career as a property developer for three times longer than he was a cop.
Ultimately i think that politicians just scare me, like the kind of people who want to go into politics.. well like not just go into politics but who want to be in parliament, and even more those who have an ambition to be PM. this is about all the politicians mentioned in the essay.
In summary, Peter Dutton ***** ** *** **** **** * *** **
August 14, 2024
A great look at the new opposition leader. He epitomises where the Coalition has fallen to, now relying on a policy-free populist as they have lost their quality people in the last few years. Their present obsession with the fantasy of nuclear power as an impossible stalking horse for the fossil fuel industry shows how low they have gone. Blaine's clear and concise picture of Dutton shows a leader of a party that has lost its direction and its relevance. Hopefully, they will be able to find a thoughtful, quality politician in the future and we can move on from this Murdoch sock puppet and have a genuine opposition party again. Blaine cuts through the spin to get at the real character.
May 18, 2024
Blaine uses this easy to paints a believable and unflattering picture of Peter Dutton. He uses short and sharp sentences to portray Dutton as calculating, determined, simple-minded, and traumatised. Blaine also gave a fascinating history of the political context that created the liberal party, and how the party has fundamentally changed since it's creation. I've given only 4 stars because the essay reads as if certain aspects of Dutton's history have been emphasised to exaggerate the narrative used to suit this framing of Dutton.
May 3, 2024
A solid essay - incisive and clever. After reading it, I feel a greater understanding for Dutton. A career politician, a property developer, culture warrior and while not the sharpest tool in the shed, a damn clever politician in terms of marketing himself.
The essay gives some great insight into the making of the man, and how he can't progress beyond the black and white views of the cop he was, and his miring within the 2001 mileau.
The essay gives some great insight into the making of the man, and how he can't progress beyond the black and white views of the cop he was, and his miring within the 2001 mileau.
March 26, 2024
This is Lech Blaine's second quarterly essay, the first being the brilliant 'Top Blokes'. With 'Bad Cop', he takes a much needed microscope to the man who could be our next PM and finds him wanting. Hopefully, this essay is widely read, and people get to see "Dutts" for who he really is, a cross between an Abbott style wrecker and a Morrison style chancer.
A must-read.
A must-read.
April 3, 2024
You can only hope this man doesn't become our Prime Minister. Although he 'fits the bill' perfectly. A racist scare monger who has no wishes to reconcile with our first nations people. This is a brutal account of a life of violence, hate and scaremongering. The fact that he could rise to the second most valued job in Australia is a sad reflection on all of us.
June 5, 2024
Fascinating read. Urgh, Liberal party, we have had to listen to Abbott’s waffle, Morrison’s rants and now Dutton’s spite. I’ve always thought Dutton was a revolting politician, and this sums up his political career so far in one very easy to read essay. What a shame they lost Turnbull and Bishop, 2 intelligent people who can string a coherent sentence together and be kind.
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