Outrage is a key performance indicator for Peter Dutton, the ‘bad cop’ of politics. But what does he value?

Lech Blaine and Peter Dutton are both from Queensland, where the political culture is tough and masculine and politics south of the border always good for a spot of confected outrage.

So Blaine, author of Quarterly Essay 83: Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power, is a good choice to try to make some sense of the federal Liberal Party’s current leader.

Who is Peter Dutton? What drives him? Why did he choose politics? What does power mean to him? And what does he hope to achieve if he wins government?

Bad Cop, Blaine’s second Quarterly Essay, mixes straightforward narration of events in Dutton’s life with perceptive interpretation and one-liners like: “Politics would enable Dutton to be the bad cop without fear of physical injury.”

Dutton’s first job was as a policeman, which exposed him to the worst of human behaviour. He took from this experience a suspicion of the legal system’s presumption of innocence and its strict rules of evidence, disdain for those who try to understand human criminality and transgression, and no compassion at all for the criminal and depraved.

When on Kitchen Cabinet, Annabel Crabb put to him his wife Kirrilly’s description of him as black and white, without shades of grey, he agreed.

But, as Blaine shows, we know much more about the black in Dutton’s world than the white: African gangs, illegal immigrants, Islamic terrorists, Lebanese criminals, paedophiles, Indigenous sexual abusers, welfare cheats.

It is a richly peopled world, compared with the bland suburbia and regional Australia he wants to protect, with much more energy expended on blaming and punishing than on praising. Compared with John Howard, with whom he shares aspects of political style, we know little about Dutton’s heroes and what he values about Australia.

We know little about what Peter Dutton values about Australia.

In his interests to stoke fear

Dutton is a boundary rider. As a politician whose main offering is the promise of safety, it is in his interests to stoke fear.

He thrives on conflict and when he is not fighting the criminals and depraved, he is fighting those who are not as alert as he is to danger: human rights advocates, inner-city elites, bleeding hearts, the welfare lobby, the Greens, and of course his arch enemy in our two-party Westminster system, the Labor Party.

Mostly, it seems what he wants is a reaction. For Dutton, says Blaine, outrage from Labor, the Greens and on Twitter is a key performance indicator. Hence his political strategy of abandoning the inner city to Labor, the Greens and the Teals – and winning government from the outer suburbs and the regions.

The big question facing Dutton’s political future and his electoral strategy is whether Australia is quite as fearful and homogeneous as he imagines, or whether, as Blaine argues, he is forever riding a time machine to 2001.

Dutton resigned from the police after he crashed his car during a chase. He shifted into property developing with his father, and then into politics. In 2001, John Howard’s Tampa election, Dutton won the seat of Dickson, which he still holds.

It was, says Blaine, a fateful moment for an ex-policeman with authoritarian tendencies to embark on a political career. But compared with Howard, we have little sense of what else, besides safety and not being Labor, Dutton is offering.

Style over substance

Howard had enduring policy interests – in economic policy and industrial relations. Does Dutton have any policy interests, besides law and order? He was not even especially competent in his supersized ministry of Home Affairs, where his obsession with keeping out asylum seekers at any cost distracted him from the border incursions of organised crime and the systemic rorting of the immigration system, together with problems with the award of contracts.

As Minister for Home Affairs, concludes Blaine, “His bad cop act was a triumph of style over substance.” His championing of nuclear power to reduce Australia’s emissions, despite all the expert evidence it is much more expensive than renewables and will take too long, shows that opposing Labor rather than solving problems is his primary motivation.

Lech Blaine gives ‘a compelling account of Dutton the strong man’. Black Inc.

Blaine gives a compelling account of Dutton the strong man, but he also claims that if you watch him for a long time, you see a man who is small and scared. The pioneering political psychologist Harold Lasswell says politicians like Dutton, preoccupied with the management of aggression and with provoking reaction, are driven by low self-esteem and a compulsive need for deference.

This fits Blaine’s observation, but I needed more on this side of the man. What is he scared of and why? Of being ignored and irrelevant? Of inner demons that need to be kept under lock and key? Of a world that is changing? All of the above?

Writing about the moving target of a politician seeking power is a tough gig. Some learn as they go, some don’t. It’s too early yet to tell is Dutton is a learner or not – but Blaine has told us what to watch out for.