Dutton’s disturbing defence of Berejiklian

On Friday there was one of those odd echoes in public life that on first hearing may seem to mean little but in fact means very much.

Two weeks ago, at a meeting of the Liberal Party’s Federal Council, a video was shown. Available online, it contains snippets of discussions with people who have met Peter Dutton: Syrian refugees; the parents of Daniel Morcombe, who was abducted and murdered in 2003; the father of a young veteran no longer with us. They all speak sincerely, with dignity. At times, the video is moving.

Illustration: Dionne GainCredit:

It is, to my mind, a very effective political video. And it is political, so of course it has been edited to emphasise several key messages. Dutton is not fake, like other politicians. Instead, he is the real deal, who tells the truth. He is a very good listener; he has empathy and becomes emotional. He is not – and this is crucial – what you would expect if you had only watched him on the news. The video – which also includes Dutton and his wife Kirrily – is titled “The Peter Dutton We Know”.

You can usually tell from political communications – an unsubtle art form – both what they are trying to say and the contrast that is being drawn. Usually the contrast is with the leader of the other major party: if their leader seems weak, ours is strong. As makes sense given the parlous position of the Liberal Party right now, there is no real attempt in the video to draw a contrast with Labor.

Instead, it draws a contrast with two Liberal leaders. First, it distances Dutton from Scott Morrison, by stressing authenticity. Mostly though the video distances Dutton from Dutton, or at least his current public image – which of course derives from all the things he has publicly done in his various frontbench roles.

Interestingly, the phrase used as the title – and returned to several times in the video – more or less recurred on Friday, when Dutton chose to defend former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian. In a few pithy phrases he dismissed the findings of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption.

He offered an excuse: “She chose a bum, basically.” Mostly, though, he told us what sort of a person she was. Berejiklian, he said, was “a wonderful person”. She was just “a very decent person”. And, most interestingly, this: “She’s not a corrupt person. That’s not the person that I know, and I think she should hold her head high.”

“Not the person that I know.” He might as well have begun the next sentence with “The Gladys that I know …”

The point is not that Dutton and Berejiklian are similar in any way. But the rhetorical strategy is interesting because in both the video and Dutton’s defence of Berejiklian the manoeuvre is the same: it seeks to place the personal impression of one or several people over what that particular person has done – and been observed doing – with their power.

This is particularly interesting because of an odd confluence of events around corruption and mismanagement. On Thursday the ICAC reported. On Monday the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) properly begins its work. Some time in the next week or so the robo-debt royal commission will report.

Robo-debt was an awful policy that did awful things to people. One of the reasons it was awful is that while its victims could be identified easily enough, it was hard to identify precisely who the perpetrator was.

That is because, in a very real sense, there wasn’t one: that was the point. The entire intention of the scheme was to replace individual decision-makers – with their human flaws and, it turned out, their human mercies – with an algorithm.

I have written before of the writer Mark Fisher’s argument that call centres are the symbol of our time and the bureaucratic capitalism that dominates: try as you might, you can never find an actual person to talk to, somebody who can make a decision themselves and assume responsibility. In robo-debt, this bleak model of our society reached perfection.

Appropriately enough, we saw a repetition of that model when one of the ministers responsible, Stuart Robert, told the royal commission that he had publicly said things he believed false because, as a cabinet minister, that was his duty. Cabinet rules are not an algorithm, but in this case they might as well have been. Stuart Robert the man had vanished; the machine was running things. Like a call-centre operative, he was saying only what his tight script permitted him to say.

One of the important achievements of bodies such as the ICAC, or the NACC, or a royal commission, is that – against a backdrop of impermeable, labyrinthine systems – they reassert the primacy of the individual with power.

This person, elected or appointed to discharge these powers, chose to do a certain thing. They are named, and a label is given to their conduct. The fiction of the machine without a person at its centre is, at least temporarily, banished.

This is why Dutton’s rhetorical strategy is so disturbing. Yes, he said, there is a person – but what matters is not what that person chose to do, it is who I think she is. He sought to replace a cool, evidenced, considered judgment of Berejiklian’s actions with his own impression. In effect, he was saying: yes, somebody did these things, but not Gladys, not the Gladys I know. Who was it then? We are left again with an impersonal machine, in which nobody with power ever has to take responsibility for what they have done.

Politicians will always seek to tell us stories about who they supposedly are in private. But they should not expect us to believe there is some “real” version of them hiding just over there, away from the actions they have taken.

We know enough about Berejiklian now to make up our own minds. If Dutton wants us to know something new about him, it is his right to make an ad. But if he wants us to believe he is somebody other than who he has so far appeared to be, then it is up to him to demonstrate it in his leadership of the federal opposition.

Pretending the ICAC findings are not as serious as they are is not a good first step.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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