Peter Dutton launched a new attack line, six days out from polling day. The man in the race to be the next prime minister of Australia referred to the national broadecaster as “hate media” during a speech to supporters in Melbourne on Sunday morning.
Dutton listed The Guardian as also joining the ABC under the “hate media” umbrella, along with “the others” – unnamed media outlets that we can presume include those that scrutinise his record, his policies and his campaign tactics.
The irony of this is that Dutton’s speech was aired live and uninterrupted on the ABC yesterday morning, with the very same broadcaster he was accusing of “hate” airing his views to a far greater audience than the few hundred supporters in the room with him.
If the “hate media” line sounds familiar, it’s because it is. US President Donald Trump has long called out the “fake news media” as any outlet that fails to swoon over him.
Why Dutton would leverage such a Trumpian tactic, at a point in his campaign when it seems clear (to most of us) that Trump-lite tactics in our Federal election campaign are not working, is anyone’s guess.
But it suggests several possibilities from the Liberal party leader: that Dutton still believes it’s a winning formula for appealing to his base; that he genuinely think that the ABC and The Guardian are “hate media” and has an issue with scrutiny; that he’s so arrogant he believes any scrutiny can simply be dismissed; or that he felt so comfortable in the crowd he was in that he was looking for more kudus, laughs and cheers than his other comments had garnered.
Dutton’s inability to deal with scrutiny appears to be the issue, which suggests he may find the job he’s gunning for tougher than he’s able to cope with.
Taking aim at the ABC and The Guardian is nothing new for Dutton, he referred to both of them together as being “dead to me” back in 2018, noting “some of the crazy lefties” at these outlets “drawing mean cartoons about me”. Dutton was Australia’s Home Affairs mininster at the time, and shared the comments with 2GB regarding the “outrage” he had received for a plan to fast-track visas for white South African farmers.
If you’re a journalist, you should be calling out this kind of rhetoric about he media, regardless of whether you’re on the “hate side” or the side Dutton embraces.
If you’re a voter, you should be demanding more from candidates to uphold the pillars that make our democratic institutions what they are in Australia: not perfect but still far more robust than when other countries are dealing with.
And if you’re a person leading a party to form the next government of Australia, you should know better.
When political leaders seek to delegitimise journalism by referring to it as “fake” or as “hate”, they erode a key pillar of democracy: that of trust in media, which is necessary for supporting well-informed voters.
“Hate media” rhetoric merely further undermines trust in the electoral process as well as in the institutions established to scrutinise announcements, behaviours and records. We don’t need to look far into history or too far geographically to see what happens next.