Peter Dutton has defended his decision to attend a lavish fundraiser in Sydney as then Tropical Cyclone Alfred approached Queensland last week, claiming those criticising his decision were seeking “political advantage”.
The opposition leader’s Monday morning interview on Sky News came after Queensland Labor senator Murray Watt claimed Dutton had “sold out his constituents” by not staying in his Dickson electorate.
Last Wednesday, the Australian Financial Review reported Dutton was in Brisbane on Tuesday morning, where he described the impending cyclone as a “very serious” situation, before flying to Sydney that same day for a fundraising soiree at the harbourside home of Justin Hemmes, the Merivale hospitality entrepreneur.
Guardian Australia reported on Thursday that other fundraising events in Melbourne that Dutton was due to attend last week, including at the headquarters of Macquarie Bank and a lunch hosted by the Pharmacy Guild, on Wednesday and Thursday respectively, were cancelled at the last minute.
The morning after he attended the Hemmes event, Dutton had told Sky News: “I think it’s really the occasion for the prime minister to be governing, not campaigning.”
Making his first comments on the fundraiser controversy, Dutton on Monday said he had returned home before the cyclone was due to hit, and that he had several other engagements in Sydney on the visit that also included the Hemmes event.
“I flew home on the first flight on Wednesday morning back into my electorate, and the [cyclone] obviously hadn’t started by then, didn’t start until Friday,” Dutton said.
“I think people who are using that for political advantage in the time of a natural disaster, frankly, that’s a poorer reflection on them than it is on me.”
Dutton said the Hemmes event “wasn’t a party, it was a fundraising dinner. The prime minister and I are doing them around the country at the moment.”
“I’d received a briefing in the morning, went down – I had diary commitments, including lunch with an archbishop and a number of meetings otherwise in Sydney.”
The AFR had also reported Dutton met with a Greek Orthodox bishop on Tuesday.
Dutton held a press conference on Sunday but was not asked about the fundraiser. His last media appearance before that had been a 2GB radio interview on Thursday morning, where he was also not asked about the event.
The Daily Telegraph reported on Sunday the Hemmes fundraiser had raised $500,000, with a “$25,000-a-ticket price, with ‘nearly 20’ invited guests turning up to spend a few hours with the Liberal leader”.
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Watt, Labor’s senior frontbencher from Queensland, posted a screenshot of that article on X on Sunday, writing: “We now know how much Peter Dutton raised for the Liberals’ money bags, while his community was packing sandbags. Dutton sold out his constituents for $500,000 at Justin Hemmes’ Sydney harbourside mansion.”
Dutton told Sky on Monday that his family was “trapped at home” due to the flood waters from Alfred.
“Fortunately our house is fine, but the water’s up over our front gate so that’s the reality at the moment,” he said.
“It bucketed down all night. The night before that, we were just awake all night waiting for a tree to land through the house because the winds were just phenomenal and there was a lot of rain then as well.”
Asked in the interview about the Liberal party’s thin agenda of policy announcements so far, Dutton said his team would announce more policies closer to the election date, due by 17 May.
“All of these critics, most of them from the Labor party, who demand our policies to be released now, I think are fully of the understanding that people move on very quickly,” he said.
“So, we’ll announce our policies closer to the campaign, but it will be squarely focused on helping people recover from what has been a horrible three years for our country, particularly economically, but also from a safety perspective as well, and we’ll release those policies as we see fit, and we think they will be well received by the public.”
