A few thoughts about Dutton's leadership challenge. Firstly let me state plainly, the man is a first order creep and singularly undeserving of the title (not that his recent predecessors have set a high bar there). He is an unrepentant liar and dog-whistler who was a failure as health minister and a monster as immigration minister. His shamefully deceptive claims that he removed children from detention several years ago are particularly hard to stomach. Especially as a 12-year-old detainee who has spent years in Nauru was flown to Australia for medical treatment in the same week. There are still over 100 children held in overseas detention at his behest. Dutton does not care for children. He has routinely blocked requests to transfer those who need acute medical treatment to Australia where they can receive the treatment, and only relented when forced by the courts. This makes him complicit in at least one avoidable death.
Under his auspices, Borderforce has been characterised by scandalous behaviour (successive commissioners have resigned amid scandals), heavy-handed thuggery, unaccounted for budgetary oversights and blowouts. The fact that he would even be considered a possible Prime Minister of this country is sad indictment on the ignorance of many Australian voters. For what it is worth, on the subject of the challenge itself, I don’t have a problem with an orderly (emphasis on that word) transfer of power through a party room vote if a Prime Minister is proving to be (as both Abbott and Turnbull have been) not up to the job. If this mechanism was not in place what would we do when a leader is demonstrably out of their depth (I’m not talking about Tony Abbott level incompetence- I mean an Australian version of Donald Trump)? We would either have to just put up with them for their entire term of office or we would need to use more expensive national elections to have them replaced. Lastly, I note that journalists have all suddenly been reporting that this challenge has been a long time coming. Why then, for most of the year has the only leadership tensions we have been hearing been about Albanese and Shorten, despite there being no actual evidence apart from Abanese’s popularity? Actually don’t answer. We all know the answer to that one don’t we, Mr Murdoch?
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