Just over a week to go in what is being condemned as the most turgid, dull, boring election campaign in Australia’s history.
Daily politicians on both sides announce this, that and the other, all their various empty schemes backed with eye popping price tags in the billions.
Nobody believes them. Nobody likes them. And few if any understand the detail of all the many conflicting promises.
As numerous commentators have observed, the electorate is either switched off or pissed off; a plague on all their houses being a common sentiment.
And they’re falling over, like trees being felled in a forest, resigning over alleged homophobic, Islamophobic, sexist or inappropriate comments captured on social media.
Hands up anyone who’s ever had a politically incorrect thought. Go to the back of the queue!! And in this age of groupthink, never ever run for political office.
While professional pundits bore us all witless with their endless analyses.
Which brings us to the Seat of Dickson: Ground Zero in this election campaign. The seat of Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton.
No one’s ever accused him of being captive to the latest intellectual fad.The animosity against Peter Dutton drummed up by the left is not evidenced in Dickson.
Every major media organisation has sent journalists to the seat in the north of Brisbane; almost all of them with an agenda to discredit and if possible help unseat the sitting Member.
And they all had the same problem: Oddly, perhaps, for a man with a kind of Darth Vader presence in the national parliament and reviled by swathes of Australia’s left leaning media, Dutton is seen as a good local member.
He is well respected. On the streets and in the pubs, there is not the visceral dislike all these journalists expected to find.
It is noticeable that as the campaign has progressed, the left campaign by GetUp targeting Peter Dutton is facing ever stronger resistance. The group’s local credibility has plummeted during the course of the campaign.
Instead of joining in the baying of the crowd, A Sense of Place Magazine did something entirely revolutionary.
We went and interviewed the people who knock off after work and go to the pub to relax.
Alcohol, of course, is also politically incorrect these days. But never mind.
Peter Dutton’s family settled in the Dickson area in the 1860s. You don’t have to go far to find someone who went to school with him, or knows the family. These people know a different Dutton to the one portrayed in the national media. He knows them and they know him. And this is what they say.
Quote:
Although I have always been a party voter I find myself cringing at times for the party I would normally vote for. It has been so hectic lately it is really hard to pick up what is really going on.
Quote:
The fact is we used to regularly hear about all these boats turning up in our country. I don’t know whether they’re sinking them or turning them away. But whoever is doing that is obviously doing a better job than what was being done.
NEXT
THE VOICES OF DICKSON
PART TWO
RUNNING TO STAND STILL
Written and compiled by John Stapleton, editor of A Sense of Place Magazine. A collection of his journalism can be found here.