How Dutton and his dad laid the foundations for prosperity

At a rally for the party faithful in Melbourne last month, Peter Dutton told the audience he grew up “working class”, with a bricklayer father and a secretary mother. It’s a vital first chapter to the success story of a man who worked part-time from the age of 12, bought his first home at 19, and parlayed his earnings as a Queensland cop and politician into 26 properties at different points across his life.

But Dutton’s business endeavours did not begin alone. His father Bruce Dutton, now 79, was instrumental to his son’s early success. After the younger Dutton bought his first property, a freestanding home in the south Brisbane riverside suburb of Yeronga in September 1990, he would not buy another property solo for almost five years.

Peter Dutton during his first federal political campaign at the turn of the millennium. Credit: Angela Wylie

In that time, the policeman-in-a-hurry purchased and sold nine properties. Seven were with his father, through a two-person family investment vehicle called Dutton Holdings, or the pair’s own names.

“Dad and I started with nothing, a small building company,” Dutton told 2GB radio on Thursday morning. “I think half of those properties [we owned together] were where we bought a block of land in an estate, put a house up, and Dad was the builder.”

Peter Dutton’s office declined to make Bruce Dutton available for interview.

After years of relentlessly keeping his focus on the government, Dutton was forced to speak about his financial dealings this week by stories in this masthead and news.com.au on his years of property sales and share purchases during the Global Financial Crisis.

The oldest of five children, Dutton was born in November 1970 and grew up in suburban Boondall in a spacious, but not luxurious, five-bedroom home.

In his Quarterly Essay, author Lech Blaine wrote that as a child, Dutton witnessed difficult conversations around the dinner table about family finances.

“I was born into an outer suburbs working-class family,” Dutton told the Mount Waverley rally on January 12. “Mum and Dad – a secretary and bricklayer – didn’t have much money, but they worked hard every day – and raised their five children with love, support, and a strong work ethic.”

The young Dutton was closer to his mother Ailsa Leitch than his father Bruce, Blaine writes. But as a young adult, Dutton grew closer to his father.

Dutton’s parents split when he finished high school at St Paul’s Anglican College in 1987. The family home was sold five years later. By that time Dutton was working two jobs: as a police officer in the Queensland force, and as principal executive officer, director and secretary of the family company, Dutton Holdings.

This Brisbane home is where Peter Dutton grew up (the above image is from 2019, Dutton’s family sold the home in 1992). Credit: domain.com.au

“My dad and I started literally with nothing,” Dutton said on Wednesday. “[Bruce] worked seven days a week and he has done since he left school at a very young age, and he and I worked very closely together, went into business together when he and mum separated in 1987. That’s what happened.”

Dan Purdie, who worked alongside Peter Dutton as a constable and became friends, told Good Weekend in 2017 that the younger Dutton, like his father, “had an unbelievable capacity for work. No one could keep up with him.”

Dutton and his father purchased, renovated, subdivided and sold 12 properties, including three childcare centres, between 1992 and 2006.

Dutton Sr may have started off as a bricklayer, but as he worked with his son, his business expanded. The family firm expanded into childcare, with Dutton Holdings purchasing a pair of former service stations, remediating the sites and then opening centres. Eventually, the family business employed 40 people, according to Good Weekend.

All told, Dutton Holdings would turn over seven properties, beginning to slim down its holdings after Peter entered parliament. The father and son sold their final property, some land in Gladstone, for $905,000 in November 2006. They had bought it for $750,000 three years earlier.

Across the almost 20 years they had been flipping properties, the Duttons had made a tidy pre-tax profit: $2.81 million outlaid and $5.6 million in sales, though stamp duty, capital gains tax and other expenses would have eaten into that figure, offset by any rent or profit from the childcare centres.

“I was working double shifts as a police officer,” Dutton said of that period. “We sold that, paid the taxes. If I was smart, I would have kept every one of the properties, but instead I had to sell one to buy the next one,” he told 2GB.

Even as Dutton concentrated on his political career from 2001, his family continued to buy and sell property. Dutton’s wife Kirilly joined her father-in-law in the childcare businesses, working alongside Bruce as a director. But even though the Duttons retained the businesses, the one-time bricklayer sold the land on which one of Kirilly’s northern Brisbane childcare centres sat for $3.5 million in May 2016.

The Duttons had prospered.

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