The deepening mystery of a Peter Dutton apology
Calls by the opposition leader to halt arrivals from Gaza have fuelled doubts over whether he ever apologised for earlier comments about Muslim immigration.
Hussan “Harry” Chahoud, who migrated to Australia after losing a sister in Lebanon’s civil war, says he’s never heard Dutton apologise for his remarks about Lebanese Muslim immigration. Credit: Kate Geraghty
Apologies come in different varieties. Formal and informal, public and private, genuine and insincere.
There’s sorry and there’s sorry you got caught. Sorry not sorry.
And then there’s an apology by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton that belongs in another category again.
It’s the apology that those he offended can’t remember, which he won’t repeat and doesn’t like to discuss. Some wonder whether he made it at all.
Hassan Awada is a Muslim in a broad church. A Liberal Party councillor and former deputy mayor in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, he came to Australia from Lebanon in 1988, got married and had children. He was running a barbershop in Cronulla when the suburb erupted in race riots in 2005.
Awada remembers what Dutton said seven years ago, when he was immigration and border protection minister.
First, Dutton said on Sky News that the Liberal government under former prime minister Malcolm Fraser had made immigration policy “mistakes” in the 1970s.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called for a complete halt to arrivals from Gaza. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Labor pressed him for days on what he meant.
“Which people, from which country, does the minister believe should not have been allowed into Australia when Mr Fraser was prime minister?” Bill Shorten, the then-opposition leader, asked in parliament.
Dutton arrived at the despatch box prepared.
“The advice that I have is that, out of the last 33 people who have been charged with terrorist-related offences in this country, 22 are from second- and third-generation Lebanese Muslim backgrounds,” he said.
One terrorism researcher later described the number as statistically meaningless. In 2016, Australia was home to 34,000 Muslims born in Lebanon.
As the heckling from the opposition benches grew, Dutton said he did not want to see “people who are hardworking, who have done the right thing by this country”, including Lebanese immigrants, being tarred with the actions of a criminal few.
But many within the community heard him doing exactly that; in his eyes, their lives in Australia were mistakes.
“Those comments were very much ill-informed,” Awada says.
His father-in-law, Assad, came to Australia under Fraser in 1976. Assad, he says, had served with the British army in the 1940s and in Australia went to work for BHP before he was killed in a steelworks accident.
“He was one of those people [Dutton] was referring to,” Awada says in a quiet voice.
“Comments like that go to someone like him. He would be extremely offended to hear those comments.”
In a Venn diagram showing members of the Lebanese Muslim community and members of the Liberal Party, Awada is in the sliver of overlap.
He says he cannot remember an apology from Dutton, who last year appeared on a national TV program claiming he had already made one.
Questions about his atonement have grown over the past month, after the opposition leader repeatedly accused the Albanese government of having endangered Australia’s national security by letting in Arab Muslims fleeing another warzone: Gaza.
In August, five Lebanese Muslim community leaders, including representatives of the Lebanese Muslim Association and Muslim Women Australia, said they could not recall any apology.
Malcolm Turnbull, who was prime minister when Dutton made the comments in 2016, says he can’t either.
Writer Lech Blaine, who spent seven months on a 36,000-word Quarterly Essay on Dutton, published this year, says he hasn’t come across one.
Searches by this masthead of newspaper archives as well as Dutton’s X/Twitter account and the years of interview and speech transcripts stored on his personal website have failed to yield a result.
Of all the people likely to have heard about an apology, Mehal Krayem would come near the top of the list.
She has a PhD in representations of Muslim men in Australian film and TV and in 2019 published an academic paper about Dutton’s comments and their framing in the media.
“Perhaps one does exist somewhere,” says Krayem, a manager at the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion at the University of Technology Sydney.
“I’d be keen to hear it if it’s true.”
In an episode of the 2023 series of Kitchen Cabinet on ABC TV, journalist Annabel Crabb travelled to Dutton’s farmstead in south-east Queensland, a rum-spiked custard slice in her basket.
She had gone to see the softer side of a figure known as “the ultimate hardman of politics”.
Peter Dutton told Annabel Crabb on an episode of the ABC’s Kitchen Cabinet that he had apologised for his Lebanese Muslim comments.
Dutton took Crabb to visit a 200-year-old fig tree on the property, his favourite place. He told her he tried to meditate every morning and night using a one-word mantra, which he declined to reveal.
Then they sat down to the meal he had prepared – a smoked cod chowder paired with a South Australian riesling. The conversation became more pointed. The topic of racism poked through like a fishbone.
“I can’t see how there’s any way of looking at that apart from that it’s a racist remark,” Crabb said after paraphrasing the 2016 comments about Lebanese Muslims.
“You know they’re comments that I shouldn’t have made,” Dutton replied.
“I’ve apologised for that. But again, when you’re in the thrust of it and in the thick of it, we were dealing with people who had been radicalised and many of them shared a background and that’s sort of the factual reality of what we were dealing with.”
Four words – “I’ve apologised for that” – sandwiched between a short expression of regret and a longer self-justification.
Now, a Lebanese Muslim member of Dutton’s own party wants to see a receipt.
“Can he tell us when and where he said that?” says Mazhar Hadid, a Liberal serving on Liverpool Council in Sydney’s south.
“Mate, we never heard that.”
Hadid, who migrated in 1986 after his parents arrived a decade earlier, says he’s worked hard over nearly two decades to educate Lebanese Muslim immigrants about the party of Menzies.
But he’s dismayed by Dutton.
“A leader should unite the community, not isolate any section of the community,” Hadid says.
Hussan “Harry” Chahoud was 11 when the bomb landed near his home in Tripoli in Lebanon’s north.
Years earlier, his aunt had failed to convince his father to bring the family to Australia.
“What have you got that I don’t have?” Chahoud remembers his father replying.
“Like, we’ve got everything in Lebanon. And honest to God, we did. I remember as a little kid growing up, it was heaven on earth.”
That was before two years of civil war, before the struggle to find water and to stay safe.
The day the bomb landed near their home, his family had gathered on the veranda to watch the aftermath. Then a second bomb detonated. His 16-year-old sister was struck and bled to death.
“So that’s the reason, the reason we’re here in Australia,” Chahoud says.
As the civil war escalated, the Fraser government decided in 1976 to accept more Lebanese immigrants – Christian and Muslim – as long as they were supported by relatives in Australia, not the government.
The special program was later wound back after concerns from the then-immigration minister about overcrowding, unemployment and “the possibility that the conflicts, tensions and divisions within Lebanon will be transferred to Australia”.
Muslims gathered for Friday prayers in Sydney’s Lakemba Mosque. Credit: Wolter Peeters
Fraser in his memoirs said if there had been a failure it was one of government resettlement programs and planning, and he warned against concluding that “bad” people had been allowed in.
Living in Sydney, Chahoud, a devout Muslim, fell for a Maronite Christian.
The couple had three boys. Chahoud entered the family smash repairs business and volunteered for Bankstown’s junior rugby league club, working his way up from manning the barbecue to serving as president.
Dutton’s 2016 comments struck him as racist and stupid, coming from a university-educated politician who’s “definitely not dumb”.
“From a possible prime minister, that’s just unacceptable,” Chahoud says.
“I’ve never, ever heard him retract that statement.”
Dutton could end the search for an apology. He could point to a speech, an interview, a letter, a date, a forum.
But his office has repeatedly declined to answer questions about when, where and to whom the apology was made.
“Mr Dutton stands by his comments [on Kitchen Cabinet] and won’t be detailing any private conversations with community leaders,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Hassan Moussa, who lived through the outbreak of civil war as a teenager in Beirut, said: “Beating up the race issue, the race card, could win them votes.”
Moussa was 16 when he arrived in Sydney in 1977 without a word of English. Two decades later, he was serving as an Australian diplomat and principal migration officer in Egypt, overseeing arrivals from North Africa and Sudan.
In interviews for this story, Lebanese Australians such as Moussa quickly shift the topic of conversation away from themselves. They would rather talk about Gaza.
Taghred Chandab says an apology by Dutton would not mean anything given his recent comments about Gaza. Credit: Kate Geraghty
Dutton spent a fortnight in parliament last month arguing Labor was wrong to have accepted Palestinians fleeing the conflict, saying he would prefer a complete halt until more security checks were put in place.
In other words, this was Albanese’s Fraser moment.
“You can apologise to me or to the community until you’re blue in the face,” says Taghred Chandab, co-author of The Glory Garage: Growing Up Lebanese Muslim in Australia.
“At the end of the day, it’s just another word if your actions continue down the track.”
For others, sorry would still mean something. “We’re really upset, because we never do anything wrong, we try our best for Australia,” Omar Kassem, 62, says.
Omar Kassem, 62, would like to see Dutton apologise on TV.Credit: Kate Geraghty
He came from Tripoli as a teenager in 1977, built his own pest control business and raised his children “to love Australia”.
He would like an apology from Dutton. He’d like to watch it live on TV.
“It would be better for us,” Kassem says. “And better for him.”
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