How Dutton is using local crime to make a national point

The first 48 hours of Peter Dutton’s unofficial election campaign have homed in on one topic. After kicking off in Melbourne on Sunday with a personality pitch that highlighted his nine years as a Queensland police officer, the opposition leader hit the road with crime on his mind.

His first stop, on Monday morning, was a roundtable with victims of crime in the marginal Melbourne seat of Aston. Dutton told the story of a local IGA grocery store manager who was confronted “with a machete and masked bandits who have changed her life”. He was speaking at a press conference broadcast live nationwide as he pledged $7.5 million to Crime Stoppers.

By that afternoon, he was in the electorate of Kooyong, promising $400,000 for floodlights at a local stadium to boost community safety. Then on Tuesday morning, he was flying to Ipswich, Queensland, where a Coles worker had been stabbed the day before.

“This matter obviously is before the courts, so I won’t make any comment in relation to it specifically,” Dutton said.

“But I would point out that the Coalition has had a policy for a long time now to introduce uniform knife laws across the country ... One of the core strengths of a Coalition government is law and order and making sure that we can put everything possible in place to keep people safe.”

Crime is generally the remit of state politics: states set the laws, police the streets and run the criminal courts for most offences. Liberal leaders in Queensland and the Northern Territory surged to power last year on platforms of cracking down on youth crime, and law and order will again feature heavily when Western Australia heads to the ballot box in March.

But if Dutton has something to do with it, it will become a federal election issue as well.

He has been here before. His most famous foray into local crime is his 2018 remark that Melburnians were scared to go to restaurants at night because of “African gang violence”. His then-colleague Christopher Pyne struggled to take the comment seriously, and a review by the Victorian Coalition found it backfired in the state.

Dutton is not deterred. He is taking on Victoria again, where the Coalition thinks it will win seats, by targeting Premier Jacinta Allan’s leadership and rubbishing the state’s bail laws this week. Dutton’s shadow cabinet has not bristled at his tough talking on crime and security, with Coalition frontbenchers prosecuting last year’s captain’s call to stop immigration from Gaza even as it spilled over into allegations of racism.

Talking about crime allows the Coalition to play to its strengths. Of voters surveyed by this masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor late last year, 40 per cent said the Coalition performed better on crime and anti-social behaviour. Just 20 per cent nominated Labor, in one of the starkest differences of all policy areas. While just 5 per cent of voters named it their highest priority, 85 per cent said it was important.

The federal government has few levers to pull on crime, so Dutton can show muscle without too much heavy lifting on policy. At the same time, he taps into an issue that voters say matters.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rebuffed him on Monday. “Peter Dutton will continue ... to look for areas in which he can try to promote fear in the community. That’s something he’s done his entire political life,” he said.

“Primarily, law and order issues are the responsibility of state and territory governments, and I think Australians understand that.”

But a fight over crime was elevated to the federal level when the High Court in 2023 ruled indefinite detention was unlawful, forcing Labor to release former immigration detainees with criminal records into the community. Dozens were charged with further crimes.

It became one of the Albanese government’s most damaging episodes, and Dutton won’t let voters forget it. “We have been an incredible beneficiary of migration to this country, but if people commit crimes as non-citizens in our country against Australian citizens, then they can expect to have their visas cancelled and for those people to be deported,” he said on Monday.

Crime also lets Dutton build his strongman brand as he tours communities across the country. After years in federal politics, his task in this campaign is to reveal more of himself to voters and convince them he can be prime minister. Tough law and order rhetoric amplifies his values, explains his personal story and reinforces the type of leader he wants to be.

This is where he could overstep. Dutton’s popularity is improving but voters have historically associated him with negativity. His team is trying to soften his image with Instagram messages emphasising social unity and a recent podcast interview discussing youth mental health, belly-flopping into a pool and his focus on family.

It will be difficult to deploy both messages at once. Dutton will try, linking his experience as a policeman to his drive to make Australia safer. But in both softening and hardening his image, he risks confusing voters and appearing inauthentic.

Albanese still references Dutton’s “African gangs” claim in political debate. With Labor so prepared to pounce on any sign of Dutton’s divisiveness, he will need to be careful this time around.

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