Peter Dutton’s one-hit wonder plays to the media’s crime addiction

Peter Dutton has gone over the edge of what Australia’s arbiters of political standards in the Canberra gallery consider acceptable — again. But when the opposition leader plays crime, he shows he understands the media better than the media understands itself.

This time, it was his apparently “foolish attempt” to link the release of 83 asylum seekers as a result of a High Court decision with anti-Semitism in Australia as a result of conflict in the Middle East. In the Nine mastheads, David Crowe called it an “overreach” and a “disgrace” that “poured petrol” on the debate. It was more than a “tactical blunder”, he tweeted — it showed “bad judgment and poor leadership”.

Maybe. But the global experience of the right’s embrace of often racially charged rhetoric, coupled with a moral panic over crime, suggests that Dutton’s overheated claims aren’t just breaking the bar of political gentility — they’re shattering all restraints, rendering permissible what was once indefensible. Australia’s media have had more than eight years of watching American journalists struggle with Donald Trump, that world-beating breaker of political decorum, but they’re no closer to knowing how to handle people emulating his tactics.

With Dutton, it’s a feature, not a bug. He’s long got himself noticed, played journalists, built his political career through extravagant claims about crime — particularly when there’s some connection to be made (flaps arms) with border security. 

It’s a one-note register, lacking the diversity of even, say, a Tony Abbott. It’s consistently in the key of shrill, lacking the winking humour of a Trump that brings the voting audience in on the joke. There’s none of the glissando that can see Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, slide from Wolverine to Elvis Presley, and none of the television-friendly showmanship of Brazil’s gun-toting Jair Bolsanaro. 

Luckily for Dutton, he’s not a solo act. He’s the lead singer in a ritualised call-and-response with the News Corp media chorus, with the greatest hits of the pairing reliably echoing through the rest of the media.

We saw it again last week, with the News mastheads highlighting worst-case examples being unleashed on the Australian community. “Frightening face of High Court fallout hunts elderly women”, warned The Australian‘s front page last week, with its report positioned immediately below a report on rising anti-Semitism. 

“We live in fear”, shouted the Herald Sun on Saturday, with a double-deck eyebrow lead-in that left little for the story to add: “Sisters terrified man who killed their mother and dissolved her body in acid will be freed after detention debacle.”

As Paul Bongiorno pointed out in The New Daily, much of what Dutton was urging — defy the courts, unleash terrorism laws — was often without legal foundation and, after the High Court decision, likely to be unconstitutional. Who cares? As Dutton knows, even the best journalists are suckers for the “if it bleeds, it leads” sensibility.

Remember how Melbourne’s African gangs panic, ginned up in the Herald Sun in 2016, turned into the centrepiece of the Liberal Party’s attack on the then-first-term Andrews government, sent national by Dutton in 2018 with the claim people were fearful of going out to restaurants at night? Or his defending of his accusation a year later that pregnant refugees on Nauru alleging they were raped were just “trying it on” by seeking abortions in Australia? Or just this year with his opening salvo against the Voice to Parliament in Alice Springs with unsubstantiated claims of widespread sexual abuse?

As the usually perceptive Bongiorno asked in his column this week, why can’t Prime Minister Anthony Albanese push back? Because journalistic practice means a government response threatens more harm than good. It sustains and amplifies the false claims and racialised rhetoric that feed the media’s crime narrative. It allows right-wing media to roll the debate into a repeat news cycle with government disrespect for public safety at its centre (precisely where Dutton’s attacks last week were trying to take it). And it lets more neutral media off the hook, with the soothing balm of the “both sides” mantra. 

Sure, Crowe led off his piece that Dutton had overreached. But Albanese’s response was “too angry”. The subeditors back in head office further sanded off the criticism, heading the column: ”An ugly fight we do not need in anxious times”.

As long as Peter Dutton has been in Parliament, Australia’s media has been rewarding his repeated overreach with attention, so why wouldn’t he keep singing the same old hits? Particularly with News Corp around to keep pushing him to the top of the charts. 

Is Peter Dutton’s songbook getting a bit yesterday for you? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.