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https://theconversation.com/outrage-is-a-key-performance-indicator-for-peter-dutton-the-bad-cop-of-politics-but-what-does-he-value-220327>
"
Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics: Quarterly Essay – Lech Blaine
(Black Inc.)
Lech Blaine and Peter Dutton are both from Queensland, where the political
culture is tough and masculine and politics south of the border always good for
a spot of confected outrage.
So Blaine, author of
Quarterly Essay 83: Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class
and Power, is a good choice to try to make some sense of the federal Liberal
Party’s current leader.
Who is Peter Dutton? What drives him? Why did he choose politics? What does
power mean to him? And what does he hope to achieve if he wins government?
Bad Cop, Blaine’s second
Quarterly Essay, mixes straightforward narration
of events in Dutton’s life with perceptive interpretation and one-liners like:
“Politics would enable Dutton to be the bad cop without fear of physical
injury.”
Dutton’s first job was as a policeman, which exposed him to the worst of human
behaviour. He took from this experience a suspicion of the legal system’s
presumption of innocence and its strict rules of evidence, disdain for those
who try to understand human criminality and transgression, and no compassion at
all for the criminal and depraved.
When on
Kitchen Cabinet, Annabel Crabb put to him his wife Kirrilly’s
description of him as black and white, without shades of grey, he agreed.
But, as Blaine shows, we know much more about the black in Dutton’s world than
the white: African gangs, illegal immigrants, Islamic terrorists, Lebanese
criminals, paedophiles, Indigenous sexual abusers, welfare cheats.
It is a richly peopled world, compared with the bland suburbia and regional
Australia he wants to protect, with much more energy expended on blaming and
punishing than on praising. Compared with John Howard, with whom he shares
aspects of political style, we know little about Dutton’s heroes and what he
values about Australia."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
