CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
After a full week of radio silence, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has finally made a public comment regarding his decision to flee from Queensland to attend a campaign fundraiser with billionaire donors in Sydney’s affluent Easter Suburbs.
It’s not so much that Peter Dutton fled North Brisbane the night before a Category 2 Cyclone was expected to make landfall directly into his Queensland electorate, it’s the fact that he flat out lied to the Canberra press gallery when his office was contacted by several media outlets to confirm whether or not he had pulled a runner.
On top of this, he had also made headlines earlier last week when he appeared on multiple talkback radio stations to criticise the Prime Minister for focusing on his re-election campaign, when he should have instead been doing his job.
After a week of panicked sand-bagging and days without power, the people of Dutton’s local electorate of Dickson say they still haven’t seen their local member in the streets.
With the region still on high-alert for flash-flooding and schools still closed, there is major cause for concern amongst the Liberal Party that Peter Dutton might be eating away at that 1.9% margin of votes that kept the Labor Party from winning his seat at the 2022 election.
It is not hard to see why Peter Dutton had tried so hard to hide his little junket with property developers and other Liberal-party affiliated billionaires, especially now that a direct parallel has been drawn to the time that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison decided to holiday in Hawaii during the disastrous Black Summer bushfires.
But today, after hiding from both the media and his constituents for an entire week, the man that Australians have colloquially nicknamed ‘Temu Trump’ has finally broken his silence.
In an effort to dismiss all of the criticism regarding his treasonous conduct, Peter Dutton has tried to downplay the scandal.
Speaking to the media today, the leader of the Opposition said “Time doesn’t mean anything when you have water lapping at your door” – a throwback to his hilarous one-liner that was caught on camera with former Prime Ministers Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison, who were joking about our Pacific Island neighbours and their growing concerns about rising sea levels.
But now, after a climate-change aided Tropical Low devastates South-East Queensland, Peter Dutton is attempting a bit of self-deprecating humour, and in turn trying to explain his lack of urgency regarding last week’s extreme weather event.
It is not clear whether or not this joke will be enough to calm down his increasingly angry local constituents, who already had a bad taste left in their mouth by his recent attacks on public servants and young mothers. Liberal insiders hope it will be. Otherwise we are staring down the barrel of Angus Taylor MP of Sussan Ley MP replacing Temu Trump as leader.
