Dutton doesn’t have an ideology, he has a personality

Peter Dutton is not known to attend church. If the opposition leader has an outward faith, it is in his own judgment.

So it was on Wednesday when he went on Radio National and declared: “I support a woman’s right to choose.”

Tony Abbott’s maiden speech was suffused with soaring religious rhetoric. Peter Dutton’s reflected the view of a workmanlike Queensland cop.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Anthony Albanese has faced moments like this when asked to touch the third rail of politics. He often vacillates. Take the census saga that ran from August to September. Gay people weren’t to be counted, then they were. Trans people weren’t to be counted, then they were.

Yet faced with perhaps the most contentious culture war issue, one that has split his party in South Australia and Queensland, Dutton acted as if the answer was obvious.

“Of course”, he supported abortion, he said. The choice of forum was hardly accidental.

Dutton was delivering a moderate message to an ABC audience primed to hear it, unlike Malcolm Turnbull who had the temerity to go to an Australian Christian Lobby event in 2008 and defend abortion rights. It went down poorly. An audience that had enjoyed hearing from Turnbull – who is Catholic – about family and scripture began to grill him on abortion.

But unlike Turnbull, no one questions Dutton’s conservative bona fides. His disdain for anything he thinks smacks of woke frippery is obvious.

“We’re not going to be wound up in all of the Voice and Makarrata Commission and pronouns and all of this business,” he told a press conference last week in regional Tasmania, far from the ABC’s office.

Like the arch-conservative former US president Richard Nixon forging diplomatic relations with communist China, Dutton’s hard man persona has given him the heft in his party to not just quieten the abortion debate but declare his active support for a woman’s right to choose.

“I’ve been in very difficult circumstances where, as a detective working in the sex offenders squad, I’ve dealt with women who have been raped,” Dutton said. “Ultimately, [abortion] is a choice and a decision for that individual to make, and that’s the position I support.”

The British writer, Helen Lewis, is fond of saying that “people don’t have ideologies, they have personalities”.

Tony Abbott began his soaring first speech to parliament with the story of Australia’s first Christian service. Scott Morrison concluded his with a prayer to God to “bless and guide us all”. Turnbull spoke of the diverse prayers that his electorate of Wentworth offered up to the heavens.

In his workmanlike maiden speech 22 years ago, Dutton made no mention of spirituality at all. Instead, he described himself as believing in the “rights of the individual”, but lashed the Civil Liberties Council that exists to defend them. Law enforcement needs should trump a right to privacy, he said.

A former Queensland cop, Dutton is prone to view things in black and white. But that doesn’t mean he sees everything in the same shade as his predecessors.

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