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A Liberal candidate dumped by the party has forced Peter Dutton to declare his support for women serving in combat roles, after the political aspirant went on the attack and claimed Coalition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie shared his view that fighting units should be male only.
But Dutton threw his support behind a trio of his candidates for marginal seats who have attracted damaging headlines as he seeks a rebound from the Coalition’s slip in the polls after the first week of the campaign.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton with the former Liberal candidate for Whitlam, Benjamin Britton, in January.Credit: Facebook
They include Bennelong aspirant Scott Yung, who failed to accurately declare fundraising and has been tied to a Chinese Communist Party-linked high roller, and Kooyong candidate Amelia Hamer, who has pitched herself as a renter trying to break into the housing market despite owning two properties.
Dutton’s support for the candidates contrasts with his backflip on working from home and decision to remove Benjamin Britton as a candidate earlier this week after the former soldier said women should not serve in combat roles. Both the policy and Britton’s remarks threatened to exacerbate the Coalition’s sliding popularity with female voters in recent polls.
Britton, who was canned from standing for the NSW south coast seat of Whitlam, claimed on Tuesday that he was the victim of a “witch-hunt” from moderate factional forces within the party and reiterated his claims about the army.
“My position is the same as Andrew Hastie, the shadow minister for defence and the great [former Liberal senator] Jim Molan that women should not serve specifically in combat roles, specifically in the army itself,” Britton, who is a veteran, told Ben Fordham on 2GB.
In 2018, Hastie, who is also a former elite soldier, said on Sky News that: “My personal view is that the fighting DNA of a close combat unit is best preserved when it is exclusively male … Now that’s not a popular view, we’ve changed it five years ago, but you’ve asked for my personal view [and] there it is.”
Dutton suggested that Britton was ousted for issues beyond his views on women in combat. “There were a number of issues, not just those made public in relation to the candidate, and we took a decision to replace the candidate,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday. News Corp reported that an online account that appeared linked to Britton had called a moderate Liberal senator, Andrew Bragg, a “piece of globalist shit” last year.
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