(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

Had Peter Dutton been able to leave his male pattern baldness as it was, he’d be in a much better position than he now is. The fuzzy circle of hair around the ears is not only the mark of middle age, it is also the mark of acceptance and contentment with life’s lot: with ageing and no longer being the blade you once were.

But during the Coalition’s decade of waste, they needed someone to play the hard man. Dutts proved to be that man, and the fact that his gleaming pate says “punk” helped cement that reputation.

A bald head marks you apart from the human herd, and it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that it has nobbled Dutton for the job of opposition leader (how good that sounds!) almost before he has started. Tanya Plibersek and others should stay away from the insults. It’s our job to say the last time we saw Dutton he was coming out of John Hurt’s stomach in a spaceship (I think we have some footage of his preselection now).

The actual appearance of the non-hair style is not the principal problem. Maybe on someone else it would look hip. But with Dutton it is the mark of the assassin — the man who has set himself apart from the human race, in order to serve his cause with a knife carried between his teeth. The shining dome reminds us, in one stark element, of who Dutton has been: the relentless prosecutor of the Coalition’s pointlessly cruel refugee policy, the warmonger, the cheap shot merchant, looking to get under his opponent’s skin.

The right commentariat is going whack trying to insist on what a good guy he is, courteous and gentle soul, listens to Taylor Swift, etc. All of which may be true, but the private life has nothing to do with the public persona, in which he has been, and remains, ghostface killah.

The whole look has a very specific heritage. Dutton is an ex-cop, and a Queensland cop at that (as Jacqueline Maley pointed out in her entry for the Bad Take Brownlow), and he has what one associates with Queensland cops: that smirking self-assurance that they can do what they like, and the sense that violence is never very far away, albeit “on water”.

That was Dutton’s selling point in the immigration portfolio. He was offered to the public as the man who had enough of the bastard in him to do what many people wanted to be done, but couldn’t acknowledge what was involved in it being done: the systematic existential torture, denial of essential medical services, the destruction of young children’s lives and psyches, all as a deterrent to people trying to get here by boat. That he adopted the gangsta demeanour in the role was a sign that the Coalition was emphasising the sadism inherent in the policy, again as a selling point. 

You don’t come back from that, one suspects. Someone from the political right can modify the public’s view of them by actually changing their policies and accepting the popular view. Howard did it steadily in his return to power in the 1990s, accepting Medicare, becoming the politician who wanted people to be “comfortable and relaxed”, having hitherto presented himself as the one to shake the joint up.

But the role of the bastard is one that can only be played as a supplement. The conservative thinker Joseph de Maistre identified this in his essay “The Executioner”, identifying the pitiless deliverer of death as the essential role to guarantee conservative rule. However, the executioner is in internal exile from their fellows, and must be. Only by not acknowledging that what we do is who we are can cruel things be done to guarantee a life where love and mercy are possible.

Furthermore, for southerners, Dutton represents everything we think is the bloody streak in our history that comes from Queensland. There is plenty of hypocrisy in that, to be sure: we’ve got no shortage of horror down south. But Queensland, in the southern mind, represents not merely massacres, death, and killing on a vast scale, but also the slavery of blackbirding, anti-Asian pogroms, and then the whole Joh era — with its pro-apartheid politics, good ole boy corruption, and then Pauline. It’s a place that seems to have an easygoing relationship with brutality.

Dutton is, for many, many Victorians and South Australians who might sometimes have swung towards the Liberals, utterly unacceptable, a complete deal-breaker. He will hasten the process by which many middle-suburban people who might once have been politically, emotionally oriented to the Liberal Party, will decisively and permanently break their emotional attachment to it, and reorient themselves to the teal movement. One would have said that if Alan Tudge were to quit Aston, whether or not to make room for Joshie, Dutton would be good for an extra 2-3% swing against. At least. 

The most amazing part of this is how desperate the Liberals are to put a Queenslander in as leader. The LNP has 22 of the state’s 30 federal seats. It’s at a saturation point. There’s no more to get. The usual thing is to choose a leader from somewhere you need to get seats. Dutton has no seats to get and several he can lose. Most amazingly, he is not actually a member of the Liberal Party. He’s a member of the Liberal National Party (yes, yes, I know it’s more complex than that), whose separation made it possible for Queensland Liberals to avoid, in-state, the taint of being associated with the southern Liberal parties.

The plain fact is that Dutton’s elevation demonstrates not merely that the opposition Coalition has no-one to lead it who can combine moderate and right policies and persona, but that the Liberal Party — the flagship, the jewel, the command centre — has no-one to lead it at all.

Doubtless, Peter Dutton will get a few wins at the opposition despatch box. Maybe he can, as the pick-up artists say, “talk away his face”. And it’s true that if the gentle bunyips of the Labor leadership don’t devise a strategy against him, he will win a few mongrel points. But it seems likely that for every voter he gains with an attack, he will lose one or more simply by reminding them that he exists. He created the persona he is now trying to dissolve; now it follows him like it got aboard his rocket.