Of all the useful idiots who populate Sky News after dark, there’s none more ideologically blinkered and all the way with Donald J. Trump than TV talk show host Rowan Dean. Dickwit Dean’s advice in recent days for Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, the wannabe PM who faces a perilous orange-hued haze between him and The Lodge, is to embrace all things Trumpian as the one true path to victory.
“Stop running away from Trump, stop being scared of Trump … Embrace the Trump philosophy. Why can’t the Libs understand that the blueprint is there for success?”
Not reading the room, mate. Right now the smart money is on Dutton crab-walking away from Trump as the 47th US president tariff-imposes, Putin-smoodges and alliance-busts his way into whole new levels of unpopularity with Australians, according to opinion polls and also gut feel, with the zeitgeist in anti-Trumpian overdrive.
Poll positions
There’s a live-fight federal election just weeks away. It was meant to be a cost-of-living election, but is becoming more complex and multifaceted thanks mainly to pseudo-divine international intervention, Trump-style.
Of course it’s not easy for Dutton to disentangle himself and MAGA-lite members of his Coalition team from their Trumpian self-associations. For starters, there is their policy dog-whistling from the Trump/MAGA playbook: forced deportation of dual citizens who err under law; stripping back immigration; rejecting the Aboriginal flag and welcomes to country; dismantling diversity and inclusion; laying waste to public service jobs and work-from-home … the list goes on.
Just this week in his major pre-election foreign policy speech to the Lowy Institute, a chest-beating Dutton was proclaiming his superior “common ground” with Trump, calling PM Anthony Albanese “limp-wristed” on China’s recent warship adventurism, and promising his first overseas trip as Australia’s next PM would be to Trump’s White House. Is this really the time to suck up harder to the big fella?
Name your poisons
Trump and his sidekicks — the increasingly bizarre, chainsaw-wielding, world’s richest man Elon Musk, and Vice-President J.D. Vance (aka the “knob”) — are being described as “political kryptonite” for both Labor and the Coalition. Kryptonite is not what you want in your pre-poll kitbag. It takes away your propaganda superpowers. And, like dynamite, it can blow up in your face.
But rapid de-Trumping is challenging for Dutton. He’s hugely invested in demonising Labor and Albanese as “weak and woke”, and promoting himself as a “strongman” in the Trump mould. His No. 1 sponsor, multi-billionaire mining heiress Gina Rinehart AO, is a Trump mega-fan and a regular at his Florida home base, Mar-a-Lago. A Trumpette no less! Rinehart’s website — and we double-checked it wasn’t a parody site — proudly showcases a News Corp Australia-sourced story headlined: “ ‘Australia’s Trump’: the push for Peter Dutton to embrace Donald Trump’s campaign style”.
That was in November, soon after Trump had won back the presidency but before his inauguration in January ushered in the past two months of frenetic White House activity, turning the world order on its head. The article quoted La Rinehart herself, calling her a “close friend of Mr Dutton”, and urging Australians to “watch and learn” from Trump and his “full-throttle repudiation of all things left”.
Did I say that?
Of course, presumably a pragmatic Rinehart will understand if the Peter “win-at-all-costs” principle requires him to disassociate from Trump at least a little — in order, that is, to win back power for the conservatives and give her the kind of pro-mining, pro-fossil fuels, pro-nuclear policies she craves.
Pro-Trumpian guilt by association, however, is just one of Dutton’s issues. Arguably more important is his own mouth and on-the-record statements. Perhaps he was just being cryptic when faced with Trump’s loony-tunes February proposal to forcibly depopulate the war-torn ruins of Gaza and transform it into a luxury resort town owned by America. Dutton was reported as describing the president as “shrewd” and a “big thinker” (when even the Australian Jewish lobby thought it was “loopy”).
But dig a bit deeper into Dutton’s pronouncements on Trump’s now-fading Gaza thought bubble and you can see a real, almost desperate desire to twist it into political point-scoring with Australians as well:
“There are as many Americans in middle America as there are in middle Australia who feel ripped off by the system, who feel that, well, why are we paying as American taxpayers for peace in the Middle East or peace in Europe? And why are we paying more at the bowser [or for] insurance premiums or more for our mortgages because our government’s out spending our money that we’ve paid in taxes on causes around the world?”
You really want to go there, Pete? And that was only six weeks ago, albeit before the Volodymr Zelenskyy White House meeting debacle that rocked the world, not to mention last week’s decision to hit close ally Australia with 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium.
Pie in the Sky
On the tariffs front, meanwhile, Dutton is sticking with his spurious assertion that, if he were PM, he’d do better at negotiating with Trumpdom. So that’s what he was getting at when he had this to say about Albanese in conversation with another Sky News host, Sharri Markson, in January:
“The prime minister found comfort in his relationship with [former New Zealand PM] Jacinda Ardern and [former Canadian PM] Justin Trudeau and other left-leaning leaders around the world. That’s a reflection just on the prime minister’s life and on his outlook. He’s been the leader of the hard left of the Labor Party for decades. What does he have in common with Donald Trump?”
Sky News was very clear on what it thought Dutton was getting at, headlining that story: “Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has ‘no doubt’ he would have better ties with Trump compared to the Albanese govt”. There you have it, birds of a philosophical feather flock together. Expect to see election corflutes saying things like “Vote Dutton, get Trump”.
As The Conversation’s election analyst Adrian Beaumont wrote on Monday: “Last Wednesday Trump imposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium imports into the US, including on Australia. I believe this will assist Labor as the tariff imposition will appear unjustified to most Australians, and the Coalition is the more pro-Trump party [The Politics’ emphasis added].”
Great writing, might as well laugh when we can!
Dutton may not be a Trump man, but he is certainly a Murdoch man (the Emeritus chairman of the coalition), who is clearly a Trump man, and his new best friend, Gina, is a self-styled “Trumpette”
Dutto has been beautifully described elsewhere as ‘a bollard in a suit’, with, I suggest, a similarly vibrant personality and equally inspiring ideas and the oratorical skills with which to present them. If Dutto and his merry pranksters are the answer, what the hell are the questions?
I love this description of the Thug. and bloody boring he is too.
The proposition that Dutton would do better negotiating with Trump is just farcical. Real world leaders, most much more capable negotiators than ever Dutton could hope to be, have tried – and failed. Trump would wipe Dutton like a dirty backside, and cause a great deal of embarrassment to Australia in the process.
Well said!
That is assuming of course Trump even bothered to meet with Dutton. My money is on him not bothering.
Yes, Trump and the good ol’ USA are on the nose in Australia, and rightly so. But it would be a mistake for we of the left not to recognize that a significant proportion of Australians will be supportive, at least in principle, of a lot of the things Trump is doing. We are no more immune to the appeal of fascism and sectarian hatreds amongst the disaffected than the US was. Cockiness arising from a false sense of security will not help as the election approaches. I would be very loath to write off the Despicable Dutton yet.
I agree with you mate. Lets not get too complacent. There seems to be an undercurrent we should not just write off.
Talk about being on the bugle. A Canadian colleague told me they are boycotting all American products. Many of the retailers have labelled the U.S. products on the shelves to make it easier for them to boycott, or have pulled the products off the shelves altogether. Canadians have also stopped all travel to the U.S. as well. The land borders have been ghost towns. She heard on the news that it has been at the same levels as when the borders were closed during Covid. Overall, they’re taking it very seriously as a country. She said she’d never lived through a war but she imagined it had this same spirit of collective effort that united the country against one enemy.
And to think some of us wanted to be the 51st state.
Is Oz really ready for a hard right Head kicking ex copper to lead us. Remember Abbott, folks. How was Morrison for you?Take a look at America and how it is going. Is that what you want?
Dutton doesn’t want to lead as he has none of the characteristics required for leadership let alone good leadership. No Dutton wants to control us and quite coercively.
Same for Trump as for Dutton. Remember Michaelia Cash assuring the viewers a Dutton government would be “egzackly like” the Trump government!
Trump enjoys power over people, the wealthier the better.
His public addresses are not the quality of leadership. More like “I am your leader, I will follow you”, speaking to the lowest common denominator, the ignorant, the bigoted and the vulgar, who he despises even for supporting him.
Oh dear, “the Despicable Dutton” you say? Shades of Hillary Clinton, and look where that got her.
Oh, for goodness sake, do you really imagine that if that nasty Hilary hadn’t said that mean big word about the poor little preciouses (who, of course, are so honey-tongued that they never say anything rude about anyone different to them) that nice Mister Murdoch wouldn’t have turned on her anyway?
It was only a matter of which statement his media trolls would pick to turn into a quote to rally the ignorant and angry.
If you really don’t understand that people like Murdoch and Advance will attack you whatever you do or say, you must have missed the last fifty years of Australian politics.
It is pointless trying to placate ignorant bigots – they will only misread your politeness as weakness and treat you with contempt. So you might as well speak the plain truth plainly and be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
Strewth! That was gold – plain and simply exquisite. Thankyou👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Never forget that Clinton would have won the 2016 election if she had received about 80,000 votes in a small number of counties in 3 or 4 states. (Forgive me for forgetting the exact numbers – they are well established and I am traveling so can’t check exactly – but close enough). The “deplorable” description was considered at the time to have been a significant factor in those counties.
A post hoc claim that one issue (“deplorables”) caused the outcome (80,000 fewer key votes) as implied here is simply pure speculation.
Even if it could be shown that it was causal, this doesn’t prove that some other piece of propaganda might not have been used just as cynically and effectively.
Why are you living in the past?
Is it because you are nostalgic for when the coalition had policies?
If you want to see both the folly of cuddling up to Trump and the savvy of telling him to stick it, look at Canada. A federal election there this year has been turned on its head in the space of weeks. As of early January, their ‘conservative’ leader, the Trump-like populist, Pierre Poilievre was seen a dead cert to take the Treasury benches. Liberal poster boy Justin Trudeau had decided to fold his losing hand. Then Trump decided to threaten to whack huge tariffs on Canada and make it the 51st state of the USA (and he wasn’t joking). The Liberals (and in Canada, liberal means liberal) came storming back and with the replacement of Trudeau by former central banker Mark Carney are now seen likely to secure another majority. This was unthinkable just six weeks ago. Hopefully Albo’s people are paying attention. Trump is POISON in the rest of the civilized world. Yes, the LNP picked up easy votes for years by kicking down and capitalising on the illusion that we were being swamped by boats of refugees, but Australians don’t like the polarisation and hate-mongering that drives the MAGA cult. They want no part of it. And if Dutton thinks he’s going to win an election with Gina Trumpette Rinehart’s money, Rupert Murdoch’s frantic editorialising front pages and the nutjobs on Sky News, he’s up for a brutal awakening.
Yeah, loved that comment, “Vote Dutton, get Trump”. Keep your sense of humour guys and remember that old Chinese proverb, ‘May you live in interesting times’. We sure are at that!
This is urgent, call Albo now to appoint Malcolm as Australia’s special envoy to deal with
DICK-tata Donald. Malcolm’s done it before & he’ll do it again. He’s our best hope!
Donald Dutton? Please no.
The problem with Dutton is that he is probably the most uninspiring candidate for PM we have had for many years. No warmth, no grace, no compassion, no charm, no understanding and no sense of humour. And, no policies other than a nuclear magic pudding and making life more difficult for women.
And as Trump continues his pro-America/anti-everyone else campaign, I don’t know that Dutton should boast about his connection with the big buffoon.
Dutton is an absolute disgrace
Voters of Dickson vote him out
The rest of Australia will thank you
Hear Hear ☝️💯
Do not Forget Robodebt.
Dutton’s planning and strategy skills were on full display when he led the coup against Turnbull. Morrison played him like a violin and poor old Pete was left grasping. Being outplayed by a buffoon like Morrison is about as bad as it can get. He’s a dope and it’s hard to believe he even qualifies for consideration as PM.
Dutts is more of a banjo than a fiddle. The fiddle is Jacinta price.