Turnbull’s Defence Of Peter Dutton Makes You Wonder Why We Had A Spill In The First Place

Malcolm Turnbull is the family friendly face of politicised oppression the Liberal Party needs to win the election. There’s a good reason he was able to topple Tony Abbott. But by rushing to the defence of Immigration Minister Peter Dutton this week, has he completely undermined the legitimacy of September’s spill?

Peter Dutton, having 24 hours earlier characterised refugees and migrants as lazy, good-for-nothing dole-bludgers simultaneously out to steal local jobs, was described shortly after by Malcolm Turnbull as “an outstanding minister”. This is the same minister behind the failed Border Force operation to stop-and-frisk any vaguely foreign looking people and assess them for their immigration status. The same minister who earlier this month tried to deny an abortion to an asylum seeker raped in a detention centre his department oversees. The minister who thought he would get this image removed from the internet:

Peter Dutton wants this photo deleted, so please delete it ASAP!
I’ll just pin it here so you know which one it is. pic.twitter.com/n05I34bD2o

— Dave Donovan (@davrosz) May 3, 2016

The Prime Minister’s support for Dutton has a sort of war-time joviality to it. If Minister Dutton is the proverbial old-school army general — hardened and plain-spoken — then Turnbull is the effete narrator from old recruitment advertisements, smoothing over the unpleasantness with a calming, fatherly hand. But is this really the kind of change we were promised last year?

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A Refusal To Get Misty-Eyed

Seeking to contextualise the minister’s comments that refugees are “innumerate, illiterate, languishing in unemployment queues” while simultaneously stealing Australian jobs “no question”, the Prime Minister said that what Dutton really meant to say was that people fleeing war-torn countries should be met with compassion not intolerance, and that Australia was actually one of the world’s more caring countries for refugees.

What a warm and fuzzy portrait he paints of what has historically been a brutally oppressive regime of incarcerating those fleeing religious, political and economic persecution in legally questionably offshore detention centres.

You could even argue that the PM’s support for Dutton — who has developed a reputation for putting his foot in it whenever there’s a microphone present (and sometimes even when he doesn’t know there’s one around) — doesn’t sound too dissimilar from Tony Abbott’s. Turnbull promised Australia “a different style of leadership” from his predecessor — “the kind of leadership that respects people’s intelligence”.

For all the talk of change Australia believed in, by supporting Dutton, Turnbull has demonstrated that he is prepared to abandon all principle at the first sign of trouble. His conflicting comments suggest voters aren’t intelligent enough to understand nuance. You can be strong on national security and compassionate to those fleeing civil war, famine, disease and terror at the same time. His supporters wanted to believe this political upheaval was for something; that change would be tangible. But this week the Prime Minister put his cards on the table: political pragmatism trumps real leadership.

By the way, while Opposition Leader Bill Shorten can make as many comparisons between Peter Dutton and Pauline Hanson as he likes, it won’t distract the electorate from the fact that Labor’s position on asylum seekers is not in anyway dissimilar.

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Are The Votes Worth It?

The disappointing reality of spending 24 hours making headlines with offensive caricatures of migrants more akin to the sort of propaganda you read about in WWII history textbooks, is that it will likely precede a nice little boost in the polls. Closet nimbys will emerge from everywhere to vote Liberal on election day. The Immigration Minister is still standing by his comments, telling 2GB’s Ray Hadley that his position had been vindicated by facts (momentarily ignoring that Australia’s future economic prosperity hinges on the participation of migrants). “My job is to keep people safe in this country; to protect our borders,” Dutton said.

As Osman Faruqi pointed out on Junkee yesterday: “Far from ‘stealing Australian jobs’, the Department of Immigration found that refugees ‘often fill important labour shortages in the economy by working in low skill, low paid positions, which are difficult to fill from the Australian born labour force’. In other words, they don’t steal ‘Aussie jobs’; they do the low-paid work that we don’t do ourselves.”

Australian migrants face the following conditions: along with having to jump through “bureaucratic hoops” (that can cost tens of thousands of dollars) to satisfy the requirements of their visas, Australian migrants face a significantly higher rate of tax, though they do not qualify for any concessions, and a cost of living that is significantly more expensive than it is for Australian residents. Working visas also have a compulsory two-month waiting period between jobs, during which time you are not allowed to work, meaning that migrants are forced to rely on their savings or under-the-table cash jobs to fill in the gap. Delays of up to 18 months of decision-making and appeals can be financially crippling.

But when confronted with overwhelming evidence that counters the idea that refugees are illiterate, lazy job snatchers welching off the public purse, the Minister refused to comment, despite encouragement from his own department that he, in fact, should.

Despite the continued existence of facts that refuse to conform to his worldview, Minister Dutton batted away resignation murmurs, confident his comments would power a tsunami of confirmation bias from fringe voters that tend to add a nice heft to the ballot box on election days, claiming his support from both the party and the Prime Minister was “rock solid”.

There has never been a more terrifying time to be a refugee in Australia. Makes you wonder why we needed a spill in the first place. Or why we even need an election.

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Feature image via Peter Dutton/Facebook.

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Claire Connelly is an award-winning freelance writer, journalist and consultant. She writes for The Australian Financial Review, SBS, The Australian, The Age, specialising in finance, technology, economics and policy. She tweets here.

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Related: Karl Stefanovic Has Called On Peter Dutton To Apologise In A Stirring Speech About Refugees