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December 31, 2024
The Victorian Labor Party has been criticised for launching a personal attack on Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and his wife, Kirilly, after the state branch posted a meme mocking the couple on its Facebook page.
The image of Dutton and his wife uploaded to social media sites yesterday morning was taken from a 2019 article in Brisbane's CourierMail newspaper in which Kirilly Dutton declared her husband was ''not a monster'' and detailed some of the death threats he had faced in his then role as minister for home affairs.
The full quote was: ''He is a really good man. He is a really good father and he's not a monster.''
Victorian Labor repurposed the picture and added the captions ''Justifying dating your new partner to your friends who don't like him'' and ''we all know that one couple''.
The post was meant to be a humorous dig capitalising on perceived voter dislike of Dutton in Victoria. All political parties are increasingly using jokes and memes on social media to convey their messages to voters who don't follow mainstream news.
But Coalition home affairs spokesman James Paterson, a Victorian senator, said the meme was offensive and in poor taste.
''Family should be off limits from political attacks,'' he said. ''Labor would be rightly outraged if the Liberal Party ever went after Anthony Albanese's family like this.
''This just reeks of desperation from a government lagging in the polls and bereft of any solutions to the cost-of-living crisis facing Australians. Smearing Peter Dutton and his family is all they have left.''
Victorian Labor Party state secretary Steve Staikos played down the personal nature of the meme, stating ''it's not a personal attack, that's a mischaracterisation of the post''.
''It's a screenshot from a newspaper article that they [the Duttons] willingly participated in. It was posted as a bit of commentary, like a lot of memes are by all political parties,'' he said.
Staikos did not say whether the post would be withdrawn.
Much like Anthony Albanese's partner Jodie Haydon, Kirilly Dutton rarely grants interviews and rarely appears alongside her husband at public events. The couple have also jealously guarded the privacy of their three children.
As a leading conservative, Dutton has long been seen as a drag on the Coalition's vote in Victoria, Australia's most progressive state, and he was roundly criticised in 2018 for his claims that people in Melbourne were ''scared to go out to restaurants of a nighttime because they are followed home by these gangs''.
The loss of the Melbourne seat of Aston in a 2023 byelection and the failure to win Dunkley in a 2024 byelection exacerbated fears within the Coalition about Dutton's ability to win over voters in Melbourne, where the party holds just a handful of metropolitan seats.
But as federal Labor's standing has fallen across the country, the Coalition has become more confident about claiming four metropolitan and outer suburban seats in Melbourne in next year's election.