Peter Dutton says he regards John Howard as more of a role model than Donald Trump.
That’s a relief. Hang on, though, which John Howard is he talking about? When it comes to race and immigration, it’s a fair bet it’s not the earlier, long-forgotten, version — the one who worried about how combustible issues like race and immigration could be.
It was 1984, the second year of the Hawke government, when historian Geoffrey Blainey triggered a fierce debate by expressing concern about the rate of Asian immigration and declaring the government was shunning a vital section of public opinion. As quoted in Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty, Blainey, an influential figure in conservative circles, said: “It is in the interests of those Asian immigrants already here, and especially those who have contributed so much to this country, that the pace of Asian immigration should be slower.”
He found a receptive audience among some Liberal politicians, including immigration spokesman Michael Hodgman, who practised a form of muscular politics that earned him the nickname “the mouth from the south,” a reference to his Tasmanian electorate. Hodgman declared an end to the bipartisanship that had long ruled on immigration policy and said the Coalition could win twelve Labor seats on the issue at the next election.
Opposition leader Andrew Peacock was a little more circumspect. But, ever the political opportunist, he imagined exploiting this issue could put a dent in a very popular first-term government. Rather than arguing for a cut in Asian immigration, he said the number of European immigrants should be increased to correct the “imbalance.”
It was the first time since the abolition of the White Australia policy, initiated by the Holt government in 1966 and completed by the Whitlam government, that race had been seriously exploited as an issue by one of the major parties. The Asian-born proportion of the population was rising but was still less than 4 per cent.
Howard, then deputy opposition leader, was one of the speakers on a censure motion moved by the opposition against foreign minister Bill Hayden, who had sought to exploit the controversy. “It is very important that we try to have a bipartisan approach and that we completely avoid the kind of cheap-jack point scoring that the Minister for Foreign Affairs engaged in today,” Howard said, as recorded in Hansard.
He recalled the motion that he had moved at the NSW Liberal Party convention two weeks earlier in which he had “expressly rejected the proposition that the Liberal Party should take a stand against Asian immigration.” And he mentioned a letter he had recently received from a close friend at Sydney University, now a well-known member of the Jewish community with Labor connections, pleading with him to do his best to ensure racism didn’t intrude into the election campaign, and adding that he would do the same within the Labor Party. “I agreed very much with those sentiments and they were expressed in a very genuine fashion,” said Howard.
Howard made a brief reference to this speech in his 2010 autobiography John Howard: Lazarus Rising, saying that “for immediate impact it was probably as good a speech as I delivered during my thirty-three years in parliament.” But his version of this little piece of history is interesting particularly for what it omits:
Before the [1984] election there was speculation, both amongst some colleagues and in the press, that if the Coalition performed badly, and many expected this, then I would replace Peacock as leader of the opposition. My own stocks within the party had been bolstered unexpectedly by a very successful parliamentary speech on race issues in August 1984. I effectively attacked a speech by Hayden, the foreign minister, in which he had clumsily attempted to smear people in the opposition as racist. I drew attention to the Labor Party’s long historic support for the White Australia policy and managed to capture the moment.
As far as the media and some of his Liberal colleagues were concerned, the speech had “immediate impact” for quite different reasons: his appeal to restore bipartisanship on immigration, his distancing himself from Peacock and Hodgman, and the well-known fact that Howard coveted Peacock’s job. The press gallery interpreted it as a display of leadership that contrasted with Peacock’s opportunism. It also reflected a strong view within the Liberal Party that there were some issues, such as a non-discriminatory immigration policy, that the national interest determined should not be politicised.
The speech has been forgotten not just because of Howard’s deliberate omissions. It was also supplanted by the controversy a few years later when Howard himself challenged bipartisanship on immigration.
In 1988, after he presided over the 1987 election loss, poor polling figures were putting Howard’s leadership under pressure. After returning from a visit to London, where Margaret Thatcher had instilled in him some of her defiant conviction politics, he was asked by a journalist whether the rate of Asian immigration was too fast. “I wouldn’t like to see it greater,” Howard responded. “I do believe that if… in the eyes of some in the community, it’s too great, it would be in our immediate term interest and supportive of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so that the capacity of the community to absorb was greater.”
It was essentially the Blainey formula of four years earlier that Howard had rejected at the time. He made the comments on the same day that Thatcher landed in Australia for a week-long visit. He was immediately labelled a bigot and a racist and his comments caused unease among many in his own party. But, like the lady, he was not for turning — at least not until years later.
Bob Hawke exploited the controversy with a motion in parliament upholding a non-discriminatory immigration policy. Four Liberals, including future immigration minister Philip Ruddock, crossed the floor to vote with the government on the motion.
In his autobiography, Howard is frank enough to acknowledge that “the whole episode had done me considerable damage” and “weakened my leadership authority within the Liberal Party.” It was a factor in the coup against him the following year that saw the return of Andrew Peacock to the leadership.
In 1994, after another two leadership changes (to John Hewson and then to Alexander Downer) Howard prepared for his restoration by making a public confession about what he called “my serious error of judgement back in 1988” or as the Australian put it in its headline: “I was wrong on Asians, says Howard.” Lazarus was elected opposition leader for the second time the following month.
Today a common reaction might be to ask what all the fuss was about. Race is now exploited in politics with monotonous regularity and Peter Dutton has been near the front of the pack. He has made overblown claims that African gangs were terrorising Melbourne’s restaurant patrons. He has argued that white South African farmers should be given special visas to allow them to emigrate to Australia. He has criticised the Fraser government’s decision to allow Lebanese Muslims to emigrate to Australia. Last year, he said a minority Labor government “will include the Greens, it’ll include Green Teals, it’ll include Muslim candidates from Western Sydney. It will be a disaster.”
His opposition to the referendum on the Voice helped unleash racism against Indigenous Australians. His dog whistling has extended to declaring he will not stand in front of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags as prime minister.
If we needed a reminder of how easily racial tensions can be inflamed, with violent consequences, recent months have provided it. Dutton has wrongly claimed the government had fast-tracked Australian citizenship for people who have fled Gaza and implied they were terrorists. He has been unequivocal in his support of Israel, including its barbaric war against the people of Gaza in response to the slaughter of Israelis by Hamas. His version of social cohesion is speaking out against anti-Semitism but being much quieter about Islamophobia.
He has been backed by colleagues such as senator Dave Sharma, who referred to “a fictitious Islamophobia,” senator Sarah Henderson, who said “there is no issue with Islamophobia” and Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie, who said there “absolutely isn’t… a moral equivalence between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.”
The Scanlon Foundation annual survey on social cohesion found that negative attitudes towards Jewish people rose from 9 per cent to 13 per cent in the year to July 2024. Over the same period negative attitudes to Muslims increased from 27 per cent to 34 per cent.
In the 23 months to the end of November last year, the Islamic Register recorded 309 “in person” incidents of Islamophobia, two and a half times the average of previous periods, and 366 verified online incidents, more than three times the previous average. The Register is a small organisation with two full time and two part-time staff and says the figures are likely a many-fold underestimate of such incidents.
Apart from verbal abuse, including threats of murder and rape, the documented incidents covered physical assaults that caused hospitalisations, a bomb left at a home, an arson attack, graffiti attacks calling for the killing of Muslims, vandalism, hate mail, Muslim women having their hijabs pulled off and being spat on and school children being targeted.
Australian politicians can’t be blamed for those incidents any more than they can be blamed for the upsurge in anti-Semitism, despite Dutton accusing Anthony Albanese of the latter. What they can do is urge calm, preach tolerance and be equally forceful in their condemnation of racist acts whenever they occur and whatever mistaken prejudice they reveal.
Peter Dutton is closer to the version of Howard in 1988 than in 1984. But he has gone way beyond Howard in politicising race. If he sees Howard as a role model, he should look to the 1984 version. •
