There are concerns Australia’s Minister of Defence Peter Dutton is misusing his powers. Photo: AAP

Peter Dutton, the “Minister for Culture Wars”, is at it again. Our newly-installed Defence Minister was widely ridiculed on Friday after he ordered the defence force chief, Angus Campbell, to ban a special ‘rainbow clothing’ morning tea to mark the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia and Transphobia.

“We are not pursuing a woke agenda”, said Dutton, a man who clearly prefers a defence force moulded in his own, meat-and-potatoes image.

Never mind that more than 39 per cent of defence force personnel either identified as LGBTIQ+ or “preferred not to” identify by gender or sexuality for the 2015 defence census, or that there’s no proven link between wearing rainbow clothing at a morning tea and our readiness to fight off the Chinese hordes Dutton’s so worried about.

When it comes to archaic attitudes, of course, Dutton has form in both word and deed. He boycotted Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations, said Melburnians were “scared to go out to restaurants” because of ‘African gang’ violence, joked on a hot mic about rising sea levels threatening low-lying Pacific Island nations, accidentally texted a journalist calling her a “mad fucking witch” and, in his maiden speech to Parliament, referred ominously to “people who, frankly, barely justify their existence in our sometimes over tolerant society.”

I can’t provide a full tabulation of Dutton’s shockers here, as the Editor has given me a strict word limit for this piece. Let’s just say his politics, his contempt for conventions and his carelessness with live microphones is both cause for concern and a match made in tabloid heaven.

It’s easy to dismiss Dutton’s ongoing antics as Minister for Immigration (2014-17) Home Affairs (2017-21) and now Defence as buffoonery, an attempt to garner a few votes, “trigger the woke Left” and elicit knowing chuckles from fellow travellers on the Right. But in many cases, they’re deadly serious.

Days after Dutton became Defence Minister, his former right-hand man told Parliament the “drums of war” were beating on China, and Dutton himself tried to normalise the notion that we may soon be at war with Beijing, the region’s superpower and our largest trading partner. What could possibly go wrong?

In just eight weeks as Defence Minister, Dutton has set a veritable clowder of cats amongst several flocks of pigeons. He humiliated Campbell by restoring merit citations to special forces who served amid a spate of alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, tried to ban shadow minister Kristina Keneally from visiting the Biloela Tamil family on Christmas Island and, disturbingly, appears to have introduced red-carpet receptions for government ministers arriving at air bases.

Scott Morrison arrives to a red-carpet reception at Williamtown RAAF Base, NSW. (Photo: PM Morrison, Instagram)

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The red carpet is traditionally reserved for visiting heads of state, monarchs … or tin-pot dictators if you live in a banana republic. Military ‘watch dog’ Neil James, the Australian Defence Association’s executive director, was so shocked by pictures of red carpet receptions he initially thought it was a “photoshopped hoax”.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re visiting a ship, an army base or an air base, this just doesn’t happen”, James told the ABC.

“One of the key points about the defence force is that you don’t bring (it) into political controversy,” James said. Restoring citations to the Afghanistan veterans was another bad example of a minister overriding the chief of the defence force, he added.

James and the ADA refer to “clear breaches” by our current government of the non-partisanship convention, which keeps the military out of politics and politicians from influencing our military. Largely lacking the legal teeth of actual legislation, this glorified honour system, the good faith of politicians and military brass and some limited, patchwork statutory regulation are all that protect our fragile democracy from more serious transgressions.

Enter Peter Dutton, a man who has already shown contempt for convention in what, I repeat, is just eight weeks as Defence Minister. This after being repeatedly accused of misusing the wide powers he was afforded as Minister for Immigration and then Home Affairs.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has shown he lacks the ability and/or the inclination to rein in this loose cannon, raising questions which should vex us all. To whom, or what, is Dutton accountable, and what is stopping this instinctively authoritarian former Drug Squad detective from more seriously assailing our democracy?

No, readers, the author doesn’t think we’ll be Nazi Germany this time next week. In all likelihood, Peter Dutton is testing the boundaries of his power in pursuit of both his personal/political agenda and, more broadly, an Australia which more closely resembles the halcyon mythology of 1950s Brisbane, not 1930s Berlin.

But questions remain. Elections notwithstanding, should Dutton wield the kind of power that allows him to try and impose his version of paradise on the rest of us, and do we need more statutory checks and balances to ensure he can’t?

Most important of all, what happens if someone truly nefarious comes along and seriously tries to compromise our military for the purpose of gaining or keeping power? “Unthinkable”, you may say, but a democracy with which we have much in common came close to collapse just months ago.

That democracy was the United States, where none other than Donald Trump stacked the Pentagon and intelligence agencies with loyalists last November, while disputing the results of an election he clearly lost. “Their sudden appearance (was) a purge of the Pentagon’s hierarchy without recent precedent”, wrote Eric Schmitt in the New York Times.

Had Trump invoked a form of martial law on 6 January, the day a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol to try and halt his rival Joe Biden’s election win, he might have clung to power and plunged America into constitutional crisis.

America’s equally fragile democracy could have been usurped in January. Don’t think it can’t happen here.