Culture

People Are Having Lots Of Fun With This Photo That Peter Dutton Doesn’t Want You To See

The irony of Peter Dutton being worried that a photo will make him look bad.

by Alex McKinnon  3 May 2016
Peter Dutton

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Immigration Minister Peter Dutton is having a rough week, what with all those refugees setting themselves on fire and dying and whatnot. Turns out a dead refugee generates a stack of negative PR, mainly from pesky do-gooder types like your government’s own human rights body and the United Nations. To steer things right, earlier today Dutton tackled the big, knotty issues of his portfolio head-on, acknowledging the hideous consequences of Australia’s offshore detention regime and announcing plans to close our centres on Manus Island and Nauru as soon as practicable.

Just kidding! He didn’t do any of those things. Instead, he hit out at the real villains in this story: refugee and asylum seeker advocates. According to Dutton, who addressed media in a press conference this afternoon, people working with refugees and asylum seekers held in detention are “encouraging some of these people to behave in a certain way”, as they apparently believe “that pressure exerted on the Australian Government will see a change in our policy in relation to our border protection measures”.

“We are not going to change those policies, and the advocates, by providing false hope to these people, really [are] to be condemned. They can provide offers of support, that is reasonable. But to provide advice otherwise is very dangerous,” Dutton said.

It’s not the first time the Coalition has accused activists of encouraging refugees and asylum seekers to self-harm or attempt suicide, but this time, the backlash has been much greater, probably because these new accusations come as a 21-year-old Somali woman fights for her life in a Brisbane hospital. But amid the expressions of disgust from media outlets and social media, a pretty fitting image of Dutton emerged, and a story to go along with it.

Specifically, Fairfax photographer Alex Ellinghausen snapped out a candid photo of Dutton at his press conference which was retweeted by his Fairfax colleague, Stephanie Peatling. It began getting a lot of attention, which makes sense given it dovetails pretty well with Dutton’s behaviour both today and over the last few years:

Dutton’s office was less than thrilled when that photo began doing the rounds, and contacted Peatling requesting she take it down. Peatling complied, but only after explaining to her followers why the image was being removed:

Unsurprisingly, a lot of people aren’t keen on a politician’s office requesting that a journalist make an unflattering photo disappear. Within an hour, the original photo was trending nationally, as were a number of creative variations.

Given Peter Dutton looks like someone left a Cabbage Patch Kid in a nuclear reactor at the best of times, it’s understandable that he’s a little sensitive about his public image. On the other hand, you’d think someone so concerned with how people perceive them would think twice before accusing refugee advocates of schooling asylum seekers in suicide techniques, passing laws that criminalise doctors going public about their patient’s conditions, or just generally running offshore prison camps. None of those things are great for the old image management.

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Feature image by Alex Ellinghausen.