Peter Dutton and Donald Trump have a knack for political division. There’s no doubt that stoking fear and the politics of division can be brutally effective, but the last thing Australia needs is to import the damaging culture wars of the American far right, dominated by bonkers conspiracy theories adhered to by militant acolytes untroubled by reality.

Trump vowed to conduct ‘ideological screenings’ and to bar refugees from Gaza if he wins the Presidency and he’s also said he will bring back his controversial ‘Muslim ban’ on immigration. Similarly, Dutton has been echoing Trump’s call to ban refugees from Gaza, arguing that accepting people coming from Gaza is a national security risk. Zali Steggall described the policy as ‘inherently racist’ and this week Treasurer Jim Chalmers said: “[Dutton] divides deliberately, almost pathologically, and that sort of division in our leadership, in our society, right now is worse than disappointing — it’s dangerous.”

Chalmers is not wrong, but perhaps Labor should consider the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris and her VP pick Tim Walz are having far more political success describing Trump’s Republicans as ‘weird’ rather than ‘dangerous’.

Dutton, like Trump, has a long history of using immigration policy to stoke division. Trump infamously launched his first Presidential bid by claiming Mexico was sending rapists and murderers across the border, then implemented the so-called ‘Muslim ban’ once he became President. Peter Dutton is infamous for his claim that people in Victoria were ‘too scared’ to eat dinner at restaurants because of African gangs, which was news to many Victorians. Prior to that, Dutton suggested the Fraser government ‘made mistakes’ by resettling Lebanese refugees in the 1970s, implying they were disproportionately involved in terrorism.

To Chalmers’ point, is stoking division dangerous? Absolutely. I am old enough to remember the ugly Cronulla riots, when a crowd of predominantly belligerent white men draped in the Australian flag—prompted by a storm of text messages calling for a “Leb and Wog bashing day”—began attacking anyone who looked Middle Eastern, followed by retaliatory attacks. A court later found that broadcaster Alan Jones had incited hatred and vilified Lebanese Muslims in on-air comments made in the lead-up to the Cronulla riots.

Words matter. Stoking division has real world consequences. Whenever there is a rise in Muslim hate, it’s is primarily women in hijabs who cop the brunt of verbal and physical attacks. There was a rise in both Islamophobic and anti-Semitic incidents in Australia following Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza. Just last year, neo-Nazis felt comfortable enough to march in the streets of Ballarat chanting “Australia is for the white man”. That’s where division gets us.

It’s not hard to spot further parallels between Trump’s Republicans and the right of Australian politics. Trump continues to repeat the lie that the US Presidential election was fraudulent and that voter fraud is rampant. During the Voice Referendum, Peter Dutton picked up on this tactic questioning the Australian Electoral Commission’s impartiality. Trump’s lie that the election was stolen resulted in thousands of his supporters storming the Capitol on January 6 to prevent the peaceful transfer of power; Dutton’s misleading claims about the AEC damage its reputation and risks undermining people’s trust in Australia’s election results.

Republicans have waged a decades-long war to ban abortion and control women’s bodies. They won an important battle when Trump’s stacked Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade and a range of states then banned abortion. Trump is still falsely claiming that Democratic states are ‘allowing people to execute babies after birth’. The fact that banning abortion kills women and can damage their ongoing health and sometimes their ability to fall pregnant again, and leaves women unable to access the reproductive healthcare they need when medical complications arise from pregnancy is immaterial in the culture wars. What’s important is controlling women’s bodies and causing enough rage amongst the Republican base to get voters to turn out on election day.

In Australia, a majority of Australians support access to abortion and in recent years states moved to decriminalise it across the board. Yet, the right is attempting to import America’s culture war against abortion. Coalition Senators Matt Canavan and Alex Antic introduced a federal ‘born alive’ bill in November 2022 that was rejected by a parliamentary inquiry and there’s a similar inquiry underway in Queensland now.

The Coalition and the broader right in Australian politics has also picked up a fair bit of the US right’s conspiracy thinking. Senator Gerard Rennick, who just quit the LNP to start his own political party after failing to get preselection, thinks the Bureau of Meteorology is engaged in a conspiracy to rewrite climate records to fit a “global warming agenda” and that childcare “brainwash[es] children early with the woke mind virus”. Topping the Coalition Senate ticket in SA is Alex Antic, who apparently campaigned for preselection warning of a “pandemic of wokeness”, and the evils of radical gender ideology. Antic dismissed concerns about the lack of female representation within the Liberal party as merely ‘playing the gender card’ and nothing more than a grievance narrative. That’s an odd stance considering the Liberal party lost most of its blue-ribbon lower house seats to independent women at the last election.

Now is a good time to rethink our relationship with the US, which has become dominated by AUKUS. There seems to be no recognition that the decline of democracy in the United States is a major threat to Australian interests. Rather than investing in nuclear submarines we’ll likely never see, Australia—as a close ally with the ability to influence the United States—could be doing more to help strengthen democracy at home and in the USA.

Division has been electorally successful for Peter Dutton and the Coalition, as well as Trump in the United States. But the more our leaders treat politics as a contest between ‘us’ and ‘them’, instead of a means to help all citizens flourish, the more we risk damaging our democracy.