Peter Dutton’s rise and brawls
The Brisbane battler has always been ready to give it a go.
“Being realistic, I know I don’t have a good chance. But there is always next time.”
This is Peter Dutton speaking, not yesterday, after he inflicted what’s almost certainly a mortal wound to Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership, but way back when he was a newly minted Young Liberal with a mop of dark hair and plenty of ambition.
The year was 1989 and an 18-year-old Dutton had been preselected to run against Labor legend Tom Burns, soon to be the deputy premier of Queensland, in the seat of Lytton on Brisbane’s bayside. Talk about a hiding to nothing.
But here he is, Australia’s next prime minister in waiting, biding his time on the backbench for what will inevitably be a second strike. If John Howard’s iron law of political arithmetic applies, the numbers foretell Turnbull’s doom.
In the partyroom yesterday, the vote was 48-35 against Dutton, who quit as home affairs minister after contesting the Liberal leadership. History says it’s only a matter of time before the sums come out his way, and Dutton’s pointed refusal to rule out another challenge underlines his determination to take down Turnbull.
If so, the man who would become Australia’s 30th PM will need to introduce himself to voters quick smart. Dutton, 47, may have forged a formidable reputation as a can-do minister and hero of the conservative Right, but he is less than a known quantity for the wider electorate, as we discovered when we showed his photograph to shoppers in Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall while the drama unfolded in Canberra.
Of the 56 people approached yesterday, only 17 could name Dutton unprompted; a further eight did so after being told he was a senior politician. Remember, this is his home town and Queensland is the must-win state for both the Coalition and Labor. Turnbull’s purported failure to cut through there has been one of the more corrosive factors eating away at his leadership. Yet 31 of those we sampled did not recognise the would-be PM. “He seems familiar,” said Chloe Hastie, 18, of Grange, puzzling over Dutton’s visage. “Is he a politician?”
Assuming he is elevated, Peter Craig Dutton will be Australia’s seventh prime minister in the 11 years reaching back to Howard, the last PM to serve a full parliamentary term. Bill Shorten could well stretch that to eight if he wins the general election that is due by next May, but either Turnbull or Dutton could bring that forward now that the leadership roulette is playing out for yet another federal government.
Either way, you will be hearing a lot more about Dutton, where he came from, what he stands for and how he hopes to lead the country now that he has declared his hand. Those who know him insist the headkicker the public has seen in his time as an assistant treasurer under Howard, health minister to Tony Abbott and border protection minister and home affairs super-minister serving Turnbull doesn’t add up to the sum of the man or the politician.
Dutton gave a hint of how he will try to recalibrate his image. Importantly, there was no critique of Turnbull’s performance yesterday, no tally of Newspoll losses or rundown of where the government had gone wrong. Dutton emphasised that his differences with the Prime Minister weren’t personal, a declaration Turnbull also made when he knifed Abbott in 2015, but with less conviction given that Abbott had deposed him as leader in 2009 while Kevin Rudd was PM, backstopped by a certain Julia Gillard.
Dutton said he was proud he had got children out of detention and that 400 people were moved from the offshore centres on Nauru and Manus Island — hardly achievements that usually get trumpeted in discussion of his uncompromising handling of the immigration portfolio. Explaining why he challenged Turnbull, he said: “I made a decision not because I had any animosity towards Malcolm Turnbull; I made a decision to contest this ballot because I want to make sure we keep Bill Shorten from ever being prime minister of this country.”
Give Dutton his due: he’s a fighter. Back in 1989, he took it up to Burns even though he didn’t stand a ghost of a chance in Lytton. The brash, neophyte candidate who impressed The Courier-Mail with his suntan and designer shirt said he wanted to do something about youth homelessness in the electorate. “A lot of people say I’m too young to be doing what I am, but I’m going to give it my best shot,” he said at the time.
His critics would no doubt question what happened to that idealistic young man. Dutton’s rising stocks in the Liberal Party, as he climbed from one important ministerial job to another to become the ranking conservative in Turnbull’s line-up, were mirrored by the hostility of the Left.
He has been branded a racist and fascist by Greens senator Nick McKim and seen as a Nazi in a photoshopped image shared by barrister and refugee advocate Julian Burnside; his widely mocked claim that people were afraid to eat out in Melbourne due to African street gangs got another airing on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday when panellists were asked whether they shared Dutton’s apprehension. Answer: no.
But if he becomes prime minister, the Liberal Party will be banking on the circuit breaker delivered by a new leader who couldn’t present as being more different to Turnbull. Dutton lives in brick-and-tile northern Brisbane, not on Sydney Harbour, and is the epitome of the homebody dad who likes to spend his Saturdays roaming the aisles of Bunnings or watching his sons play rugby union. As one of his Queensland colleagues notes: “Peter doesn’t need to develop the common touch. He smacks you with it.”
Dutton likes to cast back to the “humble upbringing” that, he says, taught him the value of money, hard work and family. His father, Bruce, was a bricklayer with his own building business, and his mother, Aisla, worked in childcare. She went on to run centres of her own, a lead Dutton took up by going into business with his dad to convert buildings into childcare centres. This has now led to questions about whether the family trust he set up to house an ongoing investment in the sector amounts to an indirect pecuniary interest from the commonwealth — a function of childcare places being federally funded — which would be possible grounds for disqualification from parliament. Dutton’s office insists he has legal advice showing there is no such conflict.
Dutton lives on a 2ha property on Brisbane’s northwestern outskirts with his wife, Kirilly, and their sons, aged 14 and 12, and Dutton’s 16-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. It was reported last year that the couple have six properties, including a small shopping centre in Townsville and a beachside retreat on the Gold Coast bought for $2.3 million in 2014.
While Dutton identifies as a conviction politician, he is not overtly religious in the way many leading conservatives are. His parents evidently fought about religion — Bruce is a staunch Catholic while Aisla is Anglican — and Dutton largely keeps his views on God to himself, though he is open about his social conservatism. He joined the Young Liberals in 1988, not long before he stood for Lytton, and then entered the Queensland police. Tough and smart, he became a well-performing detective.
In 2001, he was preselected to take on Labor star Cheryl Kernot, the former leader of the Australian Democrats, in her north Brisbane seat of Dickson, where he had gone to school and lived. The campaign turned ugly when Kernot suggested he could have left the police under a cloud, an unfounded accusation that backfired spectacularly when she lost. Dutton later tried to switch from Dickson to a safer seat on the Gold Coast but was opposed by the Liberal National Party’s head office and lost the heavily contested preselection: retaining ever-marginal Dickson, with its current margin of 2 per cent, has been an election-by-election proposition for him.
His elevation to PM would no doubt put him in a stronger position to fend off a formidable Labor opponent, Ali France, a former journalist and high-profile refugee activist who has been on the ground in Dickson since March. He has already brought in former state Liberal director Geoff Greene to run his campaign there.
To add spice to the mix, the progressive interest group GetUp! has set up a branch in the electorate and is vowing to pour in resources to unseat Dutton, who will be its No 1 target at the next election.
The man himself argues that successful leaders don’t need to be liked as long as they are respected — Howard, whom he cited yesterday as a mentor, being a case in point.
“People never spoke about John Howard’s charisma,” Dutton told Fairfax Media’s Good Weekend magazine last year. “At many times during John Howard’s career, he was deeply unpopular.”
The sad, brutal lesson of modern Australian politics is that once a leadership challenge is set in motion within a major party, there can be only one outcome: change. The iron law of arithmetic as articulated by Howard applied to Andrew Peacock when Howard went for the jugular in 1985, and when Peacock returned the favour four years later in a revenge knifing. It held true during Paul Keating’s patient stalking of Bob Hawke and Howard’s triumphant return to the Liberal leadership six years after he lost the job.
The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd merry-go-round and Turnbull’s toppling of Abbott, barely two years into his first term, reinforced how no prime minister could presume to be safe between elections.
Dutton has proved himself to be a solid ministerial performer who, until yesterday, loyally served three prime ministers in Howard, Abbott and Turnbull. He is a formidable grassroots campaigner with six election wins under his belt in Dickson, some of them extremely tight.
But can he lead? That, surely, is a profoundly more testing challenge than those he has risen to during his 17 years in federal parliament.