Peter Dutton and the right’s alliance with fundamentalist murderers

Peter Dutton provided a new low point in the already barrel-bottom nature of the Coalition’s exploitation of the Israel-Hamas war yesterday, in his attack on Tony Burke for explaining what his own constituents have been telling him about the siege of Gaza. Dutton’s words:

Tony Burke, to his great shame, is playing to his constituency within his own electorate when he should be acting in the national interest. He’s just going after his own local political opportunity and putting our national interest at a second.

Apart from the standard hypocrisy of trying to score political points by accusing your opponent of playing politics with an issue, Dutton — who returned to attack Burke again and again during the course of an interview on Sky News — was engaging in something much darker. In rejecting Burke’s comments as illegitimate, and as parochial politics divorced from the national interest, Dutton was dismissing the grief and anxiety of Australians with friends and family in Gaza, who can only sit by and watch as loved ones are killed, or endure the developing humanitarian disaster created by the Israeli siege.