Peter Dutton Is Still Salty About Malcolm Turnbull, Four Months After The Leadership Spill
No one was talking about Dutton's 2018 failures, so he gave them a reason to.
It has been four months and seven days since Peter Dutton tried to take over the Prime Ministership of Australia only to lose to Scott Morrison, and — shocker — he’s still not over it.
I mean sure, it’s embarrassing to lose the dramatic leadership spill that you started, but it’s also time to move on. #NewYearNewMe and all that.
The Minister for Home Affairs and Extraordinary Pettiness gave an interview to Brisbane’s Sunday Mail where he essentially had a massive tantrum about Malcolm Turnbull, who is also old news at this point.
According to Dutton, Turnbull “does not have a political bone in his body”, and “had a plan to become Prime Minister but no plan to be Prime Minister”.
“He didn’t have John Howard’s touch or judgment nor his ability to convey a message. We went from three-word slogans under Tony (Abbott) to 3000 under Malcolm and our achievements weren’t effectively communicated as a result.”
Having delivered those sick burns, Dutton then returned to one of his favourite topics: his own perfection. He even included himself in a select group of ministers who “did everything possible to make the Turnbull government work — we did not leak or undermine and we backed him up at every turn, but there was only so much we could do”.
This is an extraordinarily weird statement coming from the guy who arguably single-handedly destroyed the Turnbull government by repeatedly calling for a leadership spill. Surely that counts as undermining, but Dutton’s mind works in mysterious ways. After all, he did just use the cheerful Christmas period to refocus public attention on his own failings.
you can tell peter dutton is a political genius because he used a period where no one was paying attention to politics and took the opportunity to make sure everyone refocused on how his party is falling apart
— Scott Limbrick (@ScottLimbrick) December 30, 2018
I just love watching Peter Dutton fail.#auspol
— Van Badham (@vanbadham) December 30, 2018
He also touted himself as a family man and a local in his electorate, suggesting that voters will support him for those reasons. The interview even ran with this wholesome, not at all staged photo of Dutton and his family on the beach, being sun-safe.
Remember when Dutton walked out on the apology to the stolen generation?
Or when he warned against a single act of compassion to those in offshore detention?
He's such a family man. pic.twitter.com/eB1vUs8mql
— Anthony Smith (@Anthony_htimS) December 30, 2018
To that, all we can say is that in addition to being a “family man”, Dutton is the guy agitating to strip extremists of their citizenship, keep people suffering on Nauru, and also the guy who boycotted the apology to the Stolen Generations.
He’s also the guy still attacking a former Prime Minister four months after said PM left the job, and the guy dredging up his own failings in national news during the one week of the year that people actually weren’t thinking about them. Combine that with the government’s abysmal recent polls, and we’re sure Dutton will do really well at the election.