By The Straits Times | Created at 2025-03-27 23:30:41 | Updated at 2025-03-31 00:39:46
3 days ago
SYDNEY - Hardline former policeman Peter Dutton, the man aiming to become Australian prime minister in May 3 elections, is a self-professed sceptic of the rush to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.
The 54-year-old leader of the conservative Liberal Party has climbed in the polls, while attacking centre-left Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s “weak leadership” at a time of rising prices.
Mr Dutton – the son of a bricklayer and himself a former Queensland drug squad detective – accuses the government of failing to tame inflation, responding meekly to a spate of anti-Semitic attacks, and backing a “divisive”, failed referendum on Indigenous peoples’ rights.
But one of Mr Dutton’s starkest policy disagreements with the government is over how to tackle climate change.
He has attacked the speed and scale of the government’s plans to boost solar and wind-driven electricity to slash Australia’s carbon emissions.
Mr Dutton wants to ramp up gas production and overturn a 26-year-old ban on nuclear power with a US$200 billion (S$267 billion) scheme to construct seven industrial-scale nuclear reactors.
He insists it would be cheaper than the existing plan to increase renewable energy – despite the national science agency declaring it would be 50 per cent costlier.
“You can’t run a full-time and functioning economy using part-time power and unreliable power,” he told a conservative campaign rally this year.
‘Civilised country’
Mr Dutton – who has run defence and home affairs in previous conservative administrations – had to apologise in 2015 after a quip about the threat climate change poses to the Pacific was picked up by a microphone.
“Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to be, you know, have water lapping at your door,” Mr Dutton was caught saying.
It is not the only time his rhetoric has caused controversy.
In 2018, Mr Dutton claimed people in Melbourne were “scared to go out to restaurants” because of “African gang violence”.
The same year, he lobbied for white South African farmers to be resettled in Australia on humanitarian grounds, saying they were being persecuted and “need help from a civilised country”.
As immigration minister for nearly four years from 2017, Mr Dutton oversaw the country’s widely criticised offshore detention regime.
In 2019, he claimed some asylum seekers who said they had been raped in detention centres were “trying it on” by seeking an abortion on the mainland.
After being chosen as opposition leader in 2022, Mr Dutton expressed regret for boycotting a 2008 national apology to Aboriginal Australians forcibly separated from their families as children.
At the time he had failed to grasp the “symbolic significance”, he said, believing instead that “the apology should be given when the problems were resolved, and the problems are not resolved”.
Butcher’s shop
Mr Dutton – the married father of three adult children, Rebecca, Harry and Tom – speaks with pride of his blue-collar roots.
“I was born into an outer suburbs working-class family – mum and dad, a secretary and bricklayer, didn’t have much money, but they worked every day of their life,” he told party members.
Mr Dutton said he worked after school delivering papers, mowing lawns and working in a butcher’s shop.
Saving enough money to buy a house at the age of 19 was “one of my proudest achievements”, Mr Dutton has said.
In a rallying cry to fellow conservatives, he said Australians would have a chance to remove a “weak and incompetent” Labor government.
To “clean up this mess”, Mr Dutton said, his government would fight high prices, build a stronger economy and perform “necessary economic surgery” to cut wasteful spending. AFP
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