In Voice campaign, Peter Dutton found his blueprint for election win

For Peter Dutton, a seasoned performer, depravity is always the feature — never the exception. He has spent decades exploring its boundaries and the scope of its utility. 

During the Voice referendum, he was a defining factor in its defeat, deftly flexing the lessons acquired from a career of punching down and failing forward. Although the Voice to Parliament was designed to appease the constitutional conservatives and further entrenched our structural inferiority, Dutton chose self-gain over bipartisanship, blindsiding his colleagues when he confirmed the Liberal Party would campaign for No.

The opposition leader knew it was the prime setting for a bald-faced opportunist to claw back some ground politically. He gained valuable repetition under his belt. He was able to coach, coordinate and eventually condition his cabinet teammates. He reacquainted himself with how Australians like their meat — red and rare.  

But walking away with a battle-tested blueprint that could see him succeed in the upcoming election? That surely surpassed his wildest dreams. 

So far, polling suggests Dutton’s election strategy — which primarily consists of getting as much mileage as possible out of the referendum and generating confected outrage among the predominately white and middle of Australia — is flourishing.

Removing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags (or the “Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander flags” as he said during one interview), promises to scrap the dual naming of defence bases and the First Nations ambassadorship, and ongoing attacks on Welcome to Country ceremonies each draw from his No-vote formula and cunningly advance his broader strategy. 

These confected debates enable Dutton to successfully tie Anthony Albanese to the wildly resented platform of Indigenous Affairs. Each goaded response from the prime minister enables Dutton to cast him as a distracted reactionary more interested in performative symbolism — or “wokeness” — than the substantive issues facing everyday Australians. 

He has repeatedly connected the referendum with the very real cost of living pressures and ardently endeavoured to cast the entirety of Indigenous Affairs — and, more importantly, Aboriginal people — as one big corrupt and over-funded gravy train propped up by the taxpayers being left behind.

Now that the annual January culture wars are behind us, the “Aboriginal industrial complex” that continues to reproduce the worst life outcomes for Aboriginal people is now the next battleground to which Dutton has predictably turned his attention.

He has appointed one of his most zealous supporters, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price — the single cog upon whom his entire strategy hinges — to lead the new Elon Musk-inspired “government efficiency” platform tasked with cracking down on “wasteful spending” including the “divisive Voice referendum”.

But unlike Musk, Price will be leaning on her decorated experience as an Alice Springs councillor and frequent guest on Sky News to radically improve taxpayer expenditure. Although it reads as satire, it should be understood as strategic and cynical. 

By creating a domestic version of America’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and appointing Price to lead it, Dutton can hitch his campaign to the popular MAGA-universe wagon while cementing the portfolio of Indigenous Affairs as a key proxy for the months ahead. 

Price won’t be probing why defence contracts continually blow out by billions of dollars or how private companies like Salesforce can run a project up from $10 million to $208.5 million. The brief for Price is simple: keep holding up Aboriginal people as a defenceless punching bag for Dutton to lay into. 

But the senator’s role should be seen as an appetiser before the main course. Dutton knows that stories shape laws — and DOGE is a useful mechanism to shape public perception in readiness for his campaign to sink to new lows. 

Although Dutton has temporarily reigned in his public commentary, the Liberal-Coalition platform remains committed to launching “a royal commission into sexual abuse in Indigenous communities to shine a light on the horrors of these crimes and identify systemic reforms to be implemented that will end this scourge”, with the opposition leader recently promising to establish one within “100 days” if elected.

This electoral pledge stems from his referendum campaign, during which Dutton continually referenced alleged sexual abuse when standing side by side with Price on a doorstop in Alice Springs. 

There is no doubt that the acute levels of family, domestic and sexual violence afflicting every community across the country, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations, require urgent attention and ongoing investment. It is not something to fuck around with. 

But Dutton’s singular focus on remote Aboriginal communities — and the charged language he uses — isn’t a domino that is going lead to addressing an endemic nationwide problem. It is an insidious attempt to once again provide a rationale for reinstating draconian intervention-era policies that will dislocate remote communities further — ultimately opening up more land and resources to supercharge the government’s “Developing the North” agenda. 

Dutton’s positioning eerily mirrors that of John Howard and Mal Brough in the lead-up to the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention. Howard and Brough (and before that Amanda Vanstone) ran a relentless and public campaign to delegitimise the status and standing of Aboriginal people. They callously orchestrated a narrative that Aboriginal men were running paedophile rings in remote Australia, invoking the same humanitarian language of “protecting children” that has legitimised extraordinary interventions into the lives of Indigenous people. 

Their campaign culminated with the Northern Territory government initiating a “Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse”. The board handed down its report, titled “Little Children Are Sacred”. It found no evidence of organised paedophilia and determined the claims being made by Howard, Brough and their sycophants in the media were baseless. 

Despite this, the government cherry-picked language and isolated instances of abuse documented in the final report as the basis to suspend the Racial Discrimination Act, institute martial law and impose a breathtaking suite of race-based controls over Aboriginal people. 

When the NT Intervention ended, some 15 years after it was instituted, no politician had contacted the authors, Patricia Anderson and Rex Wild QC, to discuss the report’s findings, its 97 recommendations or its costings. 

Nobody blinked at the imposition or multiple extensions of the NT Intervention. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would blink now — especially considering that the current Country Liberal Party is doggedly committed to the packing, racking and stacking of Aboriginal people and gross exploitation of their lands. 

The public is familiar with royal commissions investigating malfeasance after the fact. But if Dutton wins the election, they’ll see how they can be used as a tool to initiate it.

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