Peter Dutton claims Australia’s three flags ‘dividing our country’

Flying the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags alongside the Australian flag is “dividing our country unnecessarily”, Peter Dutton has declared, vowing a major change.

Flying the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags alongside the Australian flag is “dividing our country unnecessarily”, Peter Dutton has declared, saying he will only stand before the national flag if he is elected prime minister.

In conversation with Peta Credlin on Sky News on Monday night, the federal opposition leader was quizzed on why he made a habit of only standing in front of the country’s national flag during his press conferences.

Asked whether that will remain the same if he was elected the top office at next year’s federal election, Mr Dutton said he would.

“Yes, it will, I’m very strongly of the belief that we were a country united under one flag,” Mr Dutton told Sky News.

“We’re asking people to identify with different flags, no other country does that, and we are dividing our country unnecessarily.”

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, who visited the Adass Israel Synagogue on Monday, later declared he would only stand in front of the Australian flag if he is elected prime minister. Picture : NewsWire / Brendan Beckett

“We should have respect for the indigenous flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag, but they are not our national flags.”

Mr Dutton accused Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of “sending a confusing message” to Australians about the country’s values and celebrating Australia Day.

“The Prime Minister is not out there calling out Woolworths and not out there calling the pubs who don’t want to celebrate Australia, etc, because he wants to be all things to all people, which is why people rightly perceive him as being the weakest Prime Minister that we’ve had in our country’s history,” Mr Dutton said.

“I think the fact is that we should stand up for who we are, for our values, what we believe in. We are united as a country when we gather under one flag, which is what we should do on Australia Day.”

The Opposition leader also urged Australians to “value and respect our heritage” and reflect more on the country’s history of migration in decades gone by.

“We should also speak a lot more about our migrant story, the incredible story of people who came here, particularly in the post Second World War period, with nothing, and have worked hard as tradies, as farmers, and they’ve educated their children,” he said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in font of the three flags at a press conference in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / David Beach

“The next generation has done incredibly well. They’ve done well themselves. We’re a great country today because of that. We don’t talk anything of that part of our history.”

During the chat, Mr Dutton also promised to deliver his party’s policy on gas and its role in the nation’s energy production before Christmas, calling the need for businesses to be asked to power down in order to conserve NSW’s grid “absurd”.

We’ll have a lot to say about gas and the way in which that is integrated into a nuclear base load system,” he said.

“There’s a lot of gas required in the system and as we’ve said before, it needs to come into the (capacity) mechanism as well. If we don’t do that, then the lights are going out, if we don’t have base load 24/7 power, this fantasy of being able to pretend that the batteries can last for 40 hours or four days, or whatever it might be, it’s nonsense.”