Peter Dutton Is Officially Australia’s Most Hated Politician, And GetUp Wants To Take Him Down

Bad news for Peter Dutton: he’s just been voted Australia’s most hated politician. Last week, GetUp launched a poll asking which right-wing politicians you guys want voted out of Parliament, and 22,000 people said it’s Dutton who’s gotta go.

Dutton won — or lost, depending on your perspective — that poll by a long shot. Tony Abbott came in in second place with 15932 votes, and George Christensen was third with 6090 votes. You can see the full results of the poll here, if you’re interested.

Now, obviously 22,000 people in a GetUp poll cannot directly determine Dutton’s fate. But their vote is going to have serious consequences, because GetUp plans on using the results to work out who to target this federal election. And given that Dutton’s already skating on thin ice, that could just mean he’ll lose his seat in Parliament at the next election.

See, Dutton currently holds the seat of Dickson in Queensland, which has historically been a marginal seat, changing hands between parties pretty often. Right now, Dutton holds the seat by a margin of just 1.7 percent.

And regardless of your political leanings, you have to admit that Dutton’s had a pretty bad year. The guy put his hand up to be Prime Minister in two separate leadership spills, and lost both. He spent most of the year embroiled in a scandal that started in 2015, when he broke with official procedure to grant visas to two au pairs.

He also just did a whole heap of terrible shit, like running Australia’s offshore detention regime on Nauru, scaremongering about “African gangs” in Melbourne, and attacking Australia’s tech industry with some truly scary encryption laws.

The next federal election is coming up sometime soon, most likely in May, and it’s hard to see how Dutton could turn around from all of that in just a few months. It looks like he really might be in trouble once we all go to the polls.