Under Dutton, an Oz MAGA Would Increase Authoritarianism and US Control

Australian radio waves were in a tither on Monday, as the final leaders debate the night before saw potential next PM Peter Dutton unaware of the price of eggs during a cost-of-living crisis. But if that’s the major gripe against the pollie, who’s been playing Trumpian politics long before the current US president first took office, well, our nation is currently teetering on a very dangerous precipice.

Dutton said eggs cost $4, yet Channel 7 revealed they cost $8.80, but perhaps more concerning is that the Liberal leader has too been bragging about having deported 6,000 noncitizens whilst he was in charge of Immigration, he supports war criminal, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now committing a genocide, visiting this country, and he’s long been gunning to war on China based on US interests.

The globe has looked on in shock as the Trump administration not only halted programs for Global South asylum seekers, but it also announced early on that it would be accepting white South Africans farmers as refugees due to land disputes, which is exactly the same policy Dutton spruiked in March 2018, stating that “persecuted” white South Africans needed “help from a civilised country like ours”.

Dutton praised Trump as “a big thinker”, when he recently declared the US would be illegally acquiring Gaza, presumably after Israel has finished off ethnic cleansing the region, but as the local constituency later recoiled over the US head of state’s approach to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his global tariff war, the Liberal leader attempted to retract his support.

But the fact is Trump’s shift to authoritarianism and his attempt to reestablish white supremacy not only domestically but across the globe, is the political terrain that Dutton has inhabited since he entered parliament in 2001, and despite his recent assertion that he is his “own person”, he’s spent the last week promising to raise defence spending to 3 percent of GDP at the behest of Trump.

A MAGA vassal state

Despite earlier understandings that the Trump administration had plans to drastically transform US society prior to taking power in January, no one had quite expected that it would try to roll back the gains of the 1950s civil rights movement and the other fundamental freedoms for other minorities that flowed from it, as well as further attempting to tear down the 1930’s launched welfare state.

But this appears to be the end goal of Making America Great Again (MAGA), despite Trump’s huge white working-class supporter base that ensured he took office in 2017 and again this year.

Indeed, the Republican Party is attempting to return to arrangements that saw industrialists, or rather, these days, corporations, lording it over workers without rights, who struggled to progress solely their bosses’ profits, yet none of their own.

A local MAGA, under Dutton, would have many of the same trappings as the US, heightened deportations of noncitizens, crackdowns on minority rights, especially First Nations people and Muslims, as well as attempts to reinstate two sexes in law and the likely reemergence of an earlier promise to slash the federal public service, as Trump empowered Elon Musk to do in the States.

So, in making this country great again, Dutton will not be strengthening Australian relations in the Indo-Pacific, but rather, it will be asserting US authority in the region, which has been the case since World War II, and Australians will have frontline tickets to the war with on China, which is all about reasserting US economic hegemony, with this country shoring up US military protection.

Trumpian by nature

Dutton does not have the charisma of Donald Trump. But in the case of his taking the top office, Dutton would come to the local position with more credentials than his potential counterpart in the US initially brought to the US presidency, which was seen when the Liberal MP was in charge of Home Affairs from 2017 to 2021, via his overseeing the passing of a plethora of rights-eroding laws.

Indeed, when he was home affairs minister, information was leaked from Dutton’s office in April 2018 revealing his departmental secretary and that of Defence tossing around the idea of turning the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) upon the civilian population, which is problematic as the powers international spies have to pry into civilians’ lives are a lot more pervasive than domestic spooks.

But Dutton and the two secretaries immediately released a statement denying having such aspirations. The then minister again refuted such claims to the press two months later but then added that the proposal wasn’t such a bad idea, and he repeated this step again in July 2019. But in early 2020, he then announced the plan to turn the ASD onto the people was almost to fruition.

To repeatedly deny publicly unpopular reforms aren’t underway, and then enact them later regardless is a signature Trump move, and it appears Dutton fulfilled his vision via the enactment of minor reforms in various national security bills that eventually saw the ASD spying on the public.

Another vision that Dutton had, of which he inherited from former attorney general George Brandis and could very well rear its head again under his rule, is the Capability: a system that would involve the mass surveilling of the citizenry, which would enable the matching of CCTV camera stills using facial recognition technology and the official photos of civilians the government has on file via a hub.

A gung-ho prime minister

The Albanese years have seen US military encroachments onto this continent and the increasing interoperability between the two nations’ defence forces, which actually means that Washington often has the authority over local bases on this continent, in seniority to the ADF, and this is only set to expand with the establishment of a base for US submarines in the west of the country by 2027.

Regardless of whether PM Anthony Albanese is returned to office or Dutton takes power, the Trump administration will only be expanding its local presence, which it’s plainly goading Beijing with in the hope of progressing an Indo Pacific war. Yet, the Liberals in charge will only see us take a deeper dive into this engagement with the increasingly fascistic US, despite recent deplorable Labor kowtowing.

Dutton was too Defence minister for the Morrison government from March 2021 until it toppled the following year, and two months after taking the helm, Dutton was suggesting that China was already engaging in “grey zone” warfare with Australia, as he explained this doesn’t involve traditional conflict, but it rather saw this country “already under attack” from China, in the form of cyberattacks.

By November 2021, the then Defence minister was on the record as saying that if China attempted to reinstate its control over the Chinese self-governing territory, it would be “inconceivable” if Australia didn’t “support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action”. And Dutton is hardly likely to have tempered such sentiment in his time in opposition.

The Liberal leader promised on 23 April that he will be lifting Australian expenditure on military spending to 3 percent of GDP, up from its current 2 percent, as the Trump administration has told all its vassal states they should be doing. This would see Australia spending $134.6 billon annually on defence by mid-next decade.

So, as the dual cost-of-living and housing crises are the most prominent issues on the nation’s mind as it heads towards the next federal ballot this Saturday, the Coalition is going to have to do a lot of slashing of social services, just like Musk has done in the States, to ensure the continent can afford all these weapons.

A divided nation torn asunder

Not only is Dutton keen on inviting Netanyahu to visit Australia, despite an international arrest warrant against his name, but he’s repeatedly asserted since February that he will be adding antisemitic behaviour to the character test in section 501 of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth), which will mean this can be used as reason to deny or revoke the visas of noncitizens.

In the United States, this same type of antisemitic trigger has seen over 600 international students having their visas revoked or the status of them altered over pro-Palestinian acts, while there has been a number of high-profile disappearances involving academics and students taken off the streets and placed in immigration centres slated for deportation again over opposing the Gaza genocide.

Dutton has already unleashed an assault upon the First Peoples of this continent, with his waging of the 2023 No campaign in relation to the unsuccessful Voice referendum, and he’s recently spruiked instating Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, as a local minister for the Department of Government Efficiency, which suggests that he might be targeting Aboriginal services with this move.

And this is especially concerning as when the Howard government turned its attention to such matters in 2007, it launched the NT Intervention, which was based on demonising Aboriginal communities, taking control of their land and ultimately, attempting to open up more for corporate interests, and it’s sure that some of Dutton’s mining magnate mates would sit pretty with a rerun.