Peter Dutton lies. He lies the way a butcher swings a cleaver: forcefully, deliberately, and without much concern for what’s left on the cutting room floor. His words are not crafted to persuade but to bludgeon, his claims not designed to illuminate but to confuse, distort, and, when necessary, terrify. This isn’t new, but it is getting worse. Worse because it’s working, and worse because the country is letting it happen.
Dutton’s climate change rhetoric is a case study in manufactured stupidity. For years, he has dismissed the crisis as an indulgence of the latte-sipping elite, all while his own government quietly accepted the scientific consensus in its official risk assessments.
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Climate Change
More recently, he’s taken to the American tactic of selective truth-telling, framing net zero policies as a threat to the working class while carefully omitting the costs of inaction—bushfires that burn for months, rivers that run dry, food prices that soar. This is no accident. It’s the same game played by American conservatives: make climate action seem like a plot by the privileged against the battlers.
Immigration deception
Immigration, too, is fertile ground for deception. Dutton has spent his career demonising asylum seekers, peddling the same hysteria that won John Howard the 2001 election. But the substance of his claims has grown ever more unhinged. He talks of Labor’s “open borders,” despite record levels of offshore processing and boat turnbacks. He warns of crime waves linked to refugee communities that do not exist. He knows the truth is more complicated, but he also knows the headlines won’t be.
These tactics are straight out of the American Republican playbook, where lying is not merely tolerated but celebrated as a form of free speech. The same dynamic is now entrenched in Australia’s conservative movement. The old Liberal Party—the party of Menzies, even of Turnbull—was once a home for policy debates and political pragmatism. Dutton’s version is something else entirely: a vehicle for the aggrieved, the conspiratorial, and the downright cynical.
Dutton is aided and abetted by a compliant mainstream media that has long since abandoned its duty to inform. The News Corp empire, in particular, has transformed into a propaganda machine for his brand of reactionary politics, where even the pretence of objectivity has been discarded. Editorial pages rail against the so-called woke agenda, while front pages amplify his latest distortions without challenge. Just as Fox News in the U.S. morphed from a conservative-leaning network into a full-blown disinformation apparatus, The Australian and Sky News have become megaphones for Dutton’s political warfare.
Recent examples are everywhere. When Dutton falsely claimed Labor was opening the floodgates to immigration, the Murdoch press splashed the narrative across its tabloids without scrutiny. When he blamed renewables for rising energy prices, despite clear evidence to the contrary, his claims were echoed uncritically in editorials and commentary. The strategy is clear: drown the public in misinformation, keep them angry, and ensure that dissenting voices are marginalized.
The parallels with Trump’s GOP are unmistakable, but there is one crucial difference: Australia has compulsory voting. Unlike their American counterparts, Dutton and his allies do not need to rile up their base to ensure they turn out at the polls. This makes their embrace of American-style demagoguery all the more insidious. The lies aren’t about voter mobilisation; they’re about voter misdirection. When the electorate cannot be relied upon to voluntarily suppress itself, the next best tactic is to blind it with nonsense.
Dutton is not acting alone. His project has powerful backers among Australia’s wealthiest elite—mining magnates who fear climate regulation, media barons who trade in division, corporate donors who see opportunity in chaos. They don’t need to win majorities to wield power; they just need to muddy the waters enough to make people disillusioned with the alternatives. If the conversation remains fixed on falsehoods—on fantasy crime waves and imaginary threats to freedom—then real change remains impossible.
This is where Australia’s political centre—the teal independents, the moderate Liberals, the still-coherent fragments of the old Coalition—must decide what they stand for. If they cower in the face of Dutton’s machine, if they nod along with the lies because it is easier than confronting them, then they will deserve what follows. And what follows, if America is any guide, is not democracy as we know it, but something darker, more broken, and much harder to repair.
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