Peter Dutton has a Problem: He’s a Huge Fucking Freak

is it the age of the orc or what???

In 2018, which was seven years ago (you take 20 psychic damage), in the pages of now defunct literary journal The Lifted Brow (you take suffer poison damage, -5 HP per sentence going forward) I wrote an overly verbose, far too long, incredibly autistic (even by my standards), essay in which I argued Peter Dutton was an orc.

I spent a pretty depressing couple of months reading everything I could about the man, from early parliamentary speeches to what anecdotes I could source (and verify) from his time as a Queensland cop, which I interwove with a strange only child’s knowledge of Tolkien’s mythopoeia. There was a certain style of overtly-academic writing that TLB was into at the time (a style that’s not a natural fit for me, an idiot) and I did my best to write a quasi-intellectual portrait of a bloke I loathe via semi-serious (being generous) literary ‘theory.’

This is my long way of saying that 27yo me had a long way of saying the patently obvious: Peter Dutton is a fucking freak (and an orc).

Now, I hear you say, “but Patrick, aren’t all our pollies freaks?” and yeah, you’re not wrong, sadly. Focus groups, consultants, and think tanks have spent the past thirty odd years plaster moulding Pollie-Golems designed to be as smooth and frictionless as a Brazilian wax. The problem is, of course, that Australian politics has long been the dream destination of our most gum-toothed, BPD riddled, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? lickspittle weirdos, and the combination of their incurable stupol-mutoid vibes with many a multi-million dollar marketing firms’ attempts to make them seem vaguely human has resulted in a generation+ of Australian politicians who are as uncanny and off-putting as the old Polish lady from Inland Empire.

the Teal candidate for Curtin

Not to fall back into orcs, but our pollies are an army of min-maxed Uruk-hai, cooked up in party room vats so slimy that to pass through once is to live out the rest of your days permanently slick and sticky.

Dutton may just be the apex of this intergenerational, intentional, inbreeding. He came in 2001, hot in the heels of 9/11 (his first overseas trip as an MP was to Ground Zero) and its resulting nervous breakdown, establishing himself from the get-go as a new creature of the fringe-right of Howard’s remodelled LNP, which, even then, was busy setting up the next generation of Li’l Johnny’s Goons.

Howard, himself removed from Goblin-hood by half a chromosome at best, was the Ur-Freak of the 21st century’s New Ozpol, a nightmarish truth I think only Paul Keating, for all his short-sightedness, truly understood, as early as the 1980s. Here was someone so blandly grotesque and galling, so void of charm, wit, and taste, so animated by spite and stinginess, that their mere presence in the chamber was an insult to the likes of Keating, who, suits aside, was very much a pollie in the traditional sense. He could wrap his mind around losing out to the likes of Hawke, but not to someone as gormless and ghoulish as Howard. The desiccated little coconut, as Keating once called him, despite his desire to Return, signalled something entirely new: shadow and flame and, well, freakdom.

Howard’s success set a lot of grim precedents in OzPol, but the subtlest, and perhaps the most important (besides killing unions), of which was his normalisation of the unabashed nutter/weirdo in public office. For 12ish years, we were led by a man who looked like he’d stepped out of the bowels of Weta workshop, and who's un-humanism — both his cruelty and his general wackness — inured us to the coterie of creeps he had coming up behind him, the murkiest of which was, and remains, Peter Dutton.

Of Howard’s CHUD squad, two of the CHUDiest (Abbott and ScoMo), somehow became Prime Minister. Tony ‘The Mad Monk’ Abbott was such a perfect amalgamation of crony and cretin that his fostering into the role by the rightwing media, and the inner turmoil stemming from the Coalition’s ever roiling internal psychosis, seemed inevitable, almost right. But he walked, talked, and acted like a man who’d spent too much time seeing how long he could hold his breath underwater for indifferent parents, and voter’s were left with the sense that, not only was he probably being chased by men with butterfly nets between press conferences, he was most likely fervently practicing flagellation in his down time.

If Abbott was a Frankenstein beastie stitched together from his party’s disparate strands of hatefulness and contempt, Morrison was a Corpo Creeper designed by the world’s most evil HR department. Again, the uncanny dissonance: ScoMo was branded as a ‘daggy dad,’ but that only worked to emphasize his innate unlikeability, itself spawning from a very suburban dad style ‘mow the lawn or i’ll put your skateboard in the woodchipper’ energy that’s rumbling darkness could not be disguised, disavowed, or disowned. On weekends he was screaming and foaming at the mouth like a paunchy Eli Sunday, and towards the end you got the sense Australians wanted a Daniel Plainview to roll on in and (spoilers) club his head in with a bowling pin (dare to dream!).

Lost in this interplay of Kobolds was poor Malcolm ‘Mr. Trumble’ Turnbull, whose belief in his own normalcy was so tragically misplaced that it led to his sad, if inevitable, death via autoerotic asphyxiation in 2019 (remember the headlines? “Sleeve of 10 Thousand Dollar Leather Jacket Used to End Mr. Internet’s Sorry Life” — sad!).

a visit from the Gooner Squad…

These were the big dogs at the front of a pack of mangy curs and hairless cats that was/is the Coalition. They thought they were clever sitting themselves next to Barnaby Joyce, who has the aura of an uncle banned from attending family birthdays, and undoubtedly stinks like rancid deli-meats. But Barnaby’s ugliness (red-faced drunk/perv/dipshit) is a relatably Australian one, something which has endeared him to sensitive souls taken in by sad cases and visually impaired secretaries alike. He is yucky, but in the knowable way an elderly and gropey swimming instructor is.

As for those across the chamber? Well, say what you want about the ALP, but their freakishness mainly stems from their Vulcan-like neutrality towards all things, with the worst of them seeming like little more than Roombas brought to life by a bored necromancer. They’re only horrifying when/if you stop and stare, an advantage they depend on for everything.

So in the shadow of his party’s fellow freakazoids, Peter Dutton was able to thrive. Over the years, his cumragged-comrades used him as a lighting rod of sorts — a means through which to say “yeah, well at least I’m not as fukt as this sicko” to press and voters, billing him as the gurgling Gollum to their scheming Smeagols. This proved an ironic mistake in Abbott and ScoMo’s cases, as both are deeply weird/offputting in ways Dutton is incapable of achieving, in spite of himself. He recognised this, and rebuilt himself in their dark mirrors as a sorta Johnny Sack alternative to their bumbling/manic Uncle Jr./Paulie Walnuts routine.

So Dutton was left in corner after corner to frot and froth his time away, running mad in ScoMo’s open-aired grift market with rorts of such barefaced crookery they’d have Rene Rivkin doing doughies in his cardboard box. He became the “not a monster” Monster of the LNP’s ascendent wackjob right — the level-headed, competent bloke, in what was/is, admittedly, a gaggle of dicktripping dunces.

sure, Jan.

His tenure as leader was foretold in the Menziesomicon. His faction, and the vast media empire which peddles its wares for their mutual benefit, have spent the better part of a decade lubing up the rectums of power for their would-be Dark Prince to slide down like the Perfect Turd. They’ve nurtured him as you would an incurable disease you hope to unleash on an unsuspecting public. He has seemingly spent more time croaking on 2GB to the Divorced Dad Demo than he has in parliament, and is deft at dodging any journalists that might ask him those most dread of questions (“what do you mean by that?” and “how, exactly?”) as a way to keep seeming like anything other than what he very clearly is: a deadshit.

This coddling may be the thing that’s fucked him, hilariously. Like all of Australia’s leading rightwing figures, Dutton can only thrive in safe spaces. Take the wanker out of his goon cave, and all you’re left with is a public masturbator. Voters don’t like public masturbators, generally speaking — just look at the polls. What we’re witnessing these past few weeks is an age-old phenomena where punters are being made to watch a circus freak being paraded around a shopping mall. Removed from his cage besides the big tent — where they visit from time to time — he stops making sense to them, the sight of him intruding upon their daily routine, bleeding into their reality, making them a tad queasy, and ultimately, bummed-out.

Much like Turnbull, Dutton has arrived at precisely the wrong moment in history. Where “Mr. Trumble” would have loved to have been a minor lord in Hilary’s Neo-Liberal Empire, he found himself a one-off sight-gag in Trump’s early Drongogarchy. If Dutton had ascended to power then, he may have twirled his brand of old-style racism around Trump’s (a fellow land baron!), and ushered in some of the unappealing culture war gunk he’s so hard for with little notice, pushback, or strife. Instead, he’s landed at the Peak of Global Trump Fatigue, where the McNugget-in-Chief’s “I’m a huge moron and a pedo and a cunt to boot” routine has collided cosmically and catastrophically with material reality — the cringe factor exacerbated and accelerated by history’s most gut-churning gimp (and fellow nazi/nonce), Elon Musk.

There are swings against the right in ‘liberal’ democracies like Canada and elsewhere that are taking place in large part because people are sick and scared of America’s Groyper gas leak. Dutton, who has sweatily tried to position himself as a Trumpian figure — if within the limits of our thankfully stagnant system, and his mercifully absent rizz — has been left pissing in the wind these past two months by the man he was once so excited to work with. His pandering to the Incel Squad has curdled into something pathetic and potentially dire for his campaign and career et al, as his attempt to graft his old school Bjelke-Petersen bigotries onto the new right’s roided-up-Reddit-rage-ragtime-act has gone awry.

His abandonment of his attack on work from home policies — and his umming and ahhhing on his long boasted promise to cut 41 thousand public servant jobs in Canberra — can be traced directly to the blowback against DOGE and co.

More significantly, however, they can be traced to a growing sense that said policies, and others he’s toting (impossible nuclear plants etc), are simply too weird for the Australian electorate, and that the person who cooked them up must be, by extension, some sorta freak.

This policy freak factor is inexorably linked to the freak factor of the man himself, who has been revealed to be incapable of holding anything resembling a human conversation with anyone who isn’t Ray Hadley (a level 2 slime, at best). Despite the best attempts of what I’m sure are the most distressed speech and movement coaches in the Eastern States, Dutton still walks and talks like a cyborg constantly coming to grips with its inhumanity and its desire to kill. Watching him go up against Albanese, who has mastered the chinless patter of a local car dealership bigwig, feels like watching the kid who sits in the corner mumbling while tearing the legs off a cockroach all day debate Bob Jelly.

what if I told you Bob Jelly has been the Prime Minister 11 times, at least?

His campaign is in free fall. You can hear the knives being slowly unsheathed as he stands in front of petrol stations, breathing deep the fumes. To quote (former National MP) Uglúk: “it looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!”. What his loss means for the Coalition’s once indomitable Freak Faction is hard to say — they have a deep bench of cryptids to choose from, some of which, I fear, will make Dutton look relatively chill in the long run.

What his win would mean is almost too bleak to consider. It’s clear he would be a continuation of the Gronkification of Australia set rolling by his sensei, Howard, all those years ago, but he’s picked up so much muck and bile on his long journey to the top, like a goose-stepping Katamari that lives in a septic tank.

Either way, it remains undeniable: Peter Dutton is a huge fucking freak. So much so, that I want to extend a belated apology to the orc community for my past comparison. Some monsters are just that. There’s not much else to say about them, beyond what da fuck?