More about Peter Dutton

Peter Dutton’s outburst last week, in which he compared the (disputed) chanting of antisemitic slogans at a rally to the 1996 massacre at Port Arthur, has not won him many friends. Even his usual supporters seem to be just pretending it didn’t happen. But it casts light on two interesting points: one about the debate on Israel/Palestine, and one about the Liberal Party.

For the background to the first point, go back and read my post from 2017 on “What does Israel want?” Discussing the objectives of the Israeli far right and its western supporters, I concluded that “It might be too much to say that Likud’s agenda is implicitly genocidal, but the logic of its position seems to be pushing it towards ethnic cleansing.” Any room for doubt on that front has been dispelled in recent months.

But rhetoric, and especially rhetoric at a distance, often lags behind reality. For some years, Likud’s supporters in the west continued to pay lip service to the two-state solution, even as the Israeli government itself made it abundantly clear that it regarded it as unacceptable. The fact that some on the left were edging towards support for some sort of one-state solution – although not at all, of course, the sort that Benjamin Netanyahu had in mind – enabled their opponents to keep thinking that “two-state solution” was a formula that worked in their favor.

As last week demonstrated, that era is over. Rhetoric has caught up with reality, and Likud’s western supporters now understand that the two-state solution is their enemy. In Dutton’s view, the federal government’s support for a two-state solution makes it ipso facto hostile to Israel: which, once you take the step of equating Israel with its far-right government, makes perfect sense.

The second point is about Dutton’s relationship to his party’s hard right and its associated media ecosystem. Regardless of whether or not he is also a true believer, the accepted wisdom is that Dutton uses the right’s talking points as part of an electoral strategy. He is willing to write off the previously Liberal-voting territory populated by the educated middle class in the hope of making greater gains in the outer suburbs, from culturally conservative former Labor voters.

There are good reasons to doubt whether this is a winning strategy (some of which we might look at another time), but it’s the sort of thing that conceivably might work. Dutton’s problem, though, as last week made clear, is that his media allies do not have the same end in view that he does. Manufacturing outrage might well work for them without working for him.

Again leaving aside the question of whether either of them believes what they are saying, Dutton’s objective is to win elections, while News Corp’s is to make money. Both depend on winning people over to a certain point of view, but not in the same way. Winning an election requires a majority, but a profitable media empire does not: you can make a lot of money out of a highly energised minority, but you can’t win government that way.

Malcolm Turnbull made the point well last year: “Murdoch’s diminishing and ageing audience is large enough for him to monetise, but it is not a large enough constituency to win state or national elections.” Monetisation doesn’t require broadening the size of the audience; you can increase your take from the existing audience by deepening their commitment. (Indeed, that commitment might slacken if their preferred party was actually in power.) But a political party can’t do that – it needs new voters, not just extra outrage from the old ones.

Dutton’s problem is that he is (willingly or not) the mouthpiece of people who take the News Corp view of the world as gospel, in which left-wing protests really are just like mass murder. Which works just fine for News Corp, but might not be a sensible electoral strategy.