Dutton’s pitch to protect women and girls will strike a chord. Is it the right one?

Peter Dutton took a moment to go off script and tell a story during his hour-long address to the Liberals’ official campaign launch, about a female factory worker who recently stopped him at the door. “She said, ‘I just want to say thank you and give you a hug’. And I said, ‘Well, why?’ And as she hugged me, she broke into tears, and she said, ‘Because you saved my daughter’s life’.”

Dutton was home affairs minister when her daughter’s partner had his visa cancelled. She had been the repeat victim of domestic violence. “That loving mother was fearful that her daughter would lose her life,” Dutton said. “To me, that was the human face of the decisions that we have to make.”

Peter Dutton pitched himself as a protector at Sunday’s campaign launch.Credit: James Brickwood

Dutton pitched himself as the protector of women and young girls in Sunday’s televised address. He also showed up as a family man. The former police officer has long cultivated the image of a strongman leader. A combination of all three is how he wants voters to see him in the election.

As women’s attitudes towards Dutton have become a loaded issue – polling this month showed female voters drifting away from the Coalition after its work-from-home misstep – the opposition needed to offer women a way back.

It has just three weeks to refine its message, and Sunday’s Liberal Party launch set the tone. Women were mentioned twice as victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. As economic contributors or political agents in their own right, not so much.

That’s not to say the Coalition has nothing to offer them. Sunday’s announcement of a one-off tax offset and first home buyer benefits will assist women as much as men. Families are name-checked when the Coalition campaigns on housing affordability, fuel prices and energy bills.

But when it came to rhetoric around women, it was all about safety. In contrast, the party launch made several odes to tradies on the tools, boys in blue, and sheep shearers in sheds who make our economy go around.

It was hard to miss the masculine overtures. “You need a man that has the courage not to kick the nation’s problems down the road, but to face up to them,” Nationals leader David Littleproud said.

Peter Dutton embraces his wife and family at the Liberal campaign launch. Credit: James Brickwood

Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley, the Coalition’s spokeswoman for women, directed her shout-outs to the boys. “The boys in the blue singlets, toiling in the heat and the dust of the shearing sheds, know a thing or two about hard work and reward for effort,” she said.

“Whether it’s the boys in Thargo or the tradies in western Sydney, they know, as we know, that tough times call for strong backs and steady hands. And Australians know all too well, these are tough times.”

Anthony Albanese, she said, wouldn’t last an hour in the shearing sheds. Not like Dutton. “He [Dutton] doesn’t shy away from doing the hard yards or making the tough calls,” Ley said.

“He has been the thin blue line protecting women and children from harm.”

This frame will have been tested in Coalition focus groups. Men prefer a strongman leader more so than women, but the protector image appeals to voters who say they’re afraid of crime, and those seeking safety in a time of uncertainty wrought by Donald Trump. (Notably, the US president also pitched himself as a protector.)

For working women who have been turning away from the Coalition, however, the blokey tones might have done little to bring them back. Nor will they go far to counter impressions of the Coalition’s approach to gender issues that formed during the Morrison years.

Women are only slightly more likely to vote Labor, with 51 per cent giving the party their support in two-party terms, according to this masthead’s March Resolve poll. They don’t vote as an entity, and they don’t cast their vote on “women’s issues”.

But for Australian women who have been waiting to see how the Coalition would come knocking on their door, Sunday has given them the opening pitch: Dutton wants to protect them.

Women don’t take safety issues lightly; they have protested often about domestic violence and sexual assault. For thousands of women with first-hand experience, stories like the one Dutton told on Sunday strike a chord. But as a rallying cry in a federal election campaign, is it the right one?

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