Peter Dutton, your Home Affairs minister, is fighting to hold his seat of Dickson in the suburbs of Brisbane. It’s considered one of the most vulnerable seats in Queensland and is held by a slender 1.6 per cent margin – which is unusual in a seat with a high profile frontbencher for an MP.
PM Scott Morrison is certainly expressing his hopes that Dutton will triumph – indeed, earlier today he reiterated that he hoped that both Pete and the similarly under-fire Tony Abbott would feature in his post-election-victory government.
And heck, it would be such a shame to break up this legendary comedy triple act.
Anyway: the Labor candidate for the seat is Ali France, a disability advocate who lost her right leg above the knee when saving her then-four year old child from an out of control car at a shopping centre in 2011.
She currently lives two kilometres outside of the electorate’s boundaries, which she has previously explained is in part because of difficulties in finding a property which is wheelchair accessible.
A lesser MP would have said “Fair enough, this is a problem which disabled people face on the regular, my sympathies,” and then decided not to make a big deal about it.
But that is not how Dutton rolls.
Scott Morrison backs up Peter Dutton, who has attacked Labor candidate Ali France for using her disability as ‘an excuse’ for not buying a home in the seat of Dickson.
Background on Ali France here: https://t.co/6XDYvAzzvw #auspol
— Bevan Shields (@BevanShields) April 11, 2019
“There are plenty of people with disability living in Dickson,” he opined to The Australian. “A lot of people have raised this with me. I think they are quite angry that Ms France is using her disability as an excuse for not moving into our electorate… If you are serious about representing an area, you live in that area and using her disability as an excuse for not living in our area is really making residents angry.”
Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down at all well with the non-Dutton bit of the nation.
On @PeterDutton_MP's claims his comments about @alifrance5 reflect concerns raised with him by voters: "Well, I hear from some people that Peter Dutton is a horrible human being – put that on the record" – @tanya_plibersek #AusVotes19 #auspol @SBSNews pic.twitter.com/DLCKpuKqpy
— Brett Mason (@BrettMasonNews) April 12, 2019
Public outrage swelled, including the re-trending of the #DumpDutton hashtag, with Labor’s deputy leader Tanya Plibersek taking up the battle on ABC radio:
“[France] is a journalist. She was working in palliative care. She has got two young kids. She is an international champion sports person canoeist and she is missing a leg. And she has also, consequently, been a fantastic advocate for people with disability… When she gets home after a long day, she takes her false leg off and she gets around her house in a wheelchair [and] she hasn’t found a wheelchair-accessible house to move into, so Peter Dutton is attacking her.”
Yeah, that doesn’t look great. But she went on.
“Now this is from the bloke, by the way, who owns I think at last report it was nine homes, and spends most of his time in his Gold Coast mansion… She actually lost her leg protecting her kids in a carpark accident, and he’s using this against her.”
.@PeterDutton_MP's comments about @alifrance5 have disgusted me so much I've donated to her campaign. Dutton is unfit for any public office in the land. Please help Ali defeat this monster, and donate if you can. #auspol #dickson #qldpol #election2019 https://t.co/1UDCduZG2x
— ?Aaron Dodd (@AaronDodd) April 12, 2019
With that sort of narrative you might think a swift apology would be in order to defuse what seems like a pretty dangerous vote-bomb. And Dutton, backed into a corner… um, immediately doubled down.
His office issued a statement on Friday afternoon that read, in part, “Dickson constituents believe Ms France’s refusal to live in the electorate, even if she won the seat, is more about her enjoying the inner city lifestyle, as opposed to her inability to find a house anywhere in the electorate.”
Dickson has historically been described as one of the nation’s least engaged electorates, but the demographics have changed in recent times with a lot of young families moving to the area for affordable housing – families who, it might be said, would have a bit more sympathy for the woman who risked her life to save her child than the guy accusing her of “using her disability as an excuse”.
Will Pete’s bold strategy of attacking a disabled woman for having difficulty finding wheelchair accessible accommodation pay off? Guess we’ll see in May – but Dickson, you deserve better than that, surely?