Dutton, the part-time opposition leader, pulls another vanishing act

Where’s Peter Dutton? The opposition leader has disappeared from sight — again.

Apart from a tweet on Saturday, Dutton made no immediate public statement about the Bondi tragedy. Tweeting observations such as “Australians will be in shock this evening at the tragic and terrifying events which have taken place at Westfield Bondi Junction” is now sufficient for the man some journalists dub the “alternative prime minister”.

Dutton tweeted again last night, this time with footage of him commenting on the murders, though not adding materially to his previous comments. The location of the footage is unclear; there has been no media alert, including “not for publication” notices, from his office since Thursday. He has held no media conferences and spoken to no journalists publicly since then. Dutton has so far made no comment on the terrorist attack in Western Sydney last night.

Standards of public discourse change. We could give Dutton the benefit of the doubt and say a couple of tweets is an acceptable response to an awful event that — fortunately for Australia — is still shocking and very rare. He’s not the prime minister, after all.

But there are some complications.

One is that, last week, Dutton — doubtless bringing to bear his expertise as a former home affairs and defence minister — made mass killings a subject of public debate with his grossly offensive comparison of the pro-Palestine protests at the Sydney Opera House on October 9 to the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 that saw 35 people murdered. Dutton’s comparison was an insult to every one of those victims, as well as their families and friends who live with the pain of their loss to this day.

No-one compelled Dutton to invoke Port Arthur; it was a deliberate choice. Days later, an apparently mentally ill man murdered six people and injured several others in a public place, and Dutton, happy to discuss mass murders last week, suddenly went to ground. Did the horrific events at Bondi not fit the narrative Dutton wanted to promote? Was he scared of journalists asking him how appropriate it was to be talking about the Port Arthur massacre?

The second is that, rightly overlooked because of other events, there was a by-election on Saturday that the federal Liberals comfortably won, sending — just for a change — a white male consultant to Parliament in the form of Simon Kennedy. Leadership representation in Cook was left to Sussan Ley, who was also stuck with putting a happy face on the Liberals’ debacle in Dunkley, the former Liberal seat they should have comfortably won in March. It seems that Dutton — having fronted up with Roshena Campbell when she lost the Aston by-election in 2023 — has learnt his lesson and now doesn’t do by-elections.

The third is that, as the Dunkley example shows, Dutton has form in pulling a vanishing act. It’s perhaps understandable that he doesn’t like facing the media when his party has lost a by-election, or when he might be asked difficult questions, but he even pulled one when — ostensibly — things were in his favour. Dutton went to ground in January after Anthony Albanese did what Dutton had been claiming he would do for months, changing the stage three tax cuts, leaving Sussan Ley and Angus “the invisible man” Taylor to shoulder the burden. Ley muffed her lines and allowed Labor to say the Coalition would take tax cuts away from workers.

It’s possible Dutton also prefers to avoid the media given he personally dislikes so many of them. He attacked Katharine Murphy when she left Guardian Australia for the Prime Minister’s Office, and threw in a gratuitous attack on Nine’s David Crowe as well — bizarre, given Crowe’s reflexive fence-sitting and both-sidesism. Dutton also attacked Sarah Ferguson for good measure.

Dutton likes to project a tough-guy image: you may not like him, but he’s the sort of leader the times require, etc, etc. In reality, he’s thin-skinned, with a rotten record of serial incompetence in high office, and prefers to hide rather than face scrutiny — the kind of guy who disappears when the going gets tough.

In the job he wants, you have to front up every day, whether you like it or not, whether you like journalists or not. Perhaps he should start practising.