Dutton Dressed As Lamb
Australia isn’t facing an election. It’s facing a slow-motion hostage situation dressed in high-vis and false humility. And at the centre of it, grinning with all the warmth of a military checkpoint, is Peter Dutton — the Liberal Party leader trying very hard to appear not like the Antipodean tribute act to Donald Trump.
Don’t be fooled. Dutton may lack Trump’s clown-car charisma, but the politics? Every bit as dangerous — only dressed in better tailoring and bureaucratic double-speak.
We are being sold a rebrand: “reasonable,” “mature,” “tough but fair.” This, from a man who once boycotted the national apology to the Stolen Generations, who presided over the brutalisation of refugees, who used his power not to protect the vulnerable, but to codify cruelty into border policy. And now he wants to run the country on a platform of “security” and “economic responsibility.” Let’s be clear: when Peter Dutton says “security,” he means more boots, more jails, and more surveillance — just not for corporations, cops, or the climate criminals lining party coffers.
The Liberal Party under Dutton isn’t swinging back to the sensible centre. It’s tunnelling deeper into the subterranean panic rooms of culture war politics: fear of trans people, fear of First Nations sovereignty, fear of the poor. It’s welfare as moral failure, immigration as threat, protest as terrorism. It is government by dog whistle — pitched perfectly to the white suburban id.
And what is Labor’s response? A whimper wrapped in a suit. Anthony Albanese’s technocratic team offers so little ideological contrast it’s like voting between a gas-lit prison and a better-lit one with solar panels. Labor won’t even touch the scorched earth Dutton walks on — from indefinite detention to the mining lobby’s chokehold. They’re too scared of Murdoch headlines and suburban polling to call fascism by its name.
Dutton’s genius — if you can call it that — is in understanding one simple thing: Australians don’t want to think they’re voting for Trump-lite. They want to feel reasonable while doing it. So he’s wrapped his platform in “concern,” “tough love,” and “family values,” while the policies remain a copy-paste of the global hard right — just with fewer baseball caps and more flagpoles.
This is how fascism sneaks in through the front door: not with a bang, but with a tax rebate and a smirk.
So what now?
We do not debate this man. We do not humanise his ideology. We expose it — relentlessly.
We refuse to let anti-trans bigotry, Indigenous erasure, or punitive border brutality be smuggled into the mainstream under the banner of “economic discipline.”
We organise — unions, renters, youth, climate collectives, First Nations resistance — to resist the narrative that this is the best we can do.
Because Peter Dutton isn’t just a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
He’s the wolf, the shears, and the abattoir.