And, after that brief flurry of violence, peace would reign over that cop’s domain – the townspeople would laud him as a community-spirited gentleman and the swagger of the local louts would lessen. I always suspected Peter Dutton was that type of copper.

But, when I put my character assessment to him, he notes that, firstly, my “tough cop” scenario is set well before the corruption-busting Tony Fitzgerald cleaned up the Queensland force in the 1980s and got rid of the cowboys.

And, secondly, the even-tempered, soft-spoken Dutton was never really that type of tough cop at all.

“I think I was a black letter police officer,’’ he says, using a judicial phrase more often applied to judges who go strictly by the rule book.

Then he embarks on a thoughtful discourse on how, far from wading into the criminal class with flailing fists, many police officers actually find the villains confronting.

“I was a 19-year-old brought up in a pretty sheltered suburban environment when I entered the police force,’’ he says.

‘’I was never exposed to the criminal element, but as a police officer you’re seeing murders and rapes and vicious assaults, and I think it hardens you.

“And, because you are dealing with the hard element all the time, that becomes (in your mind) what society is all about and, of course, it is not.”

Dutton’s “black letter’’ approach to law enforcement extended to his view on how the judiciary should approach its role. But he was often disappointed in how acts of crime were processed in courtrooms.

“You see someone who has committed a terrible crime and destroyed someone’s life and they get a slap on the wrist without ever being really accountable,’’ he says.

“So there is a level of frustration which grows.’’

Today, one quarter of a century on from leaving the police service, Dutton reveals he still believes there are serious problems in our courtrooms.

“Many of the magistrates appointed come from a civil libertarian background,’’ he says. “Some don’t have a belief in locking people up even if they are repeat offenders.

“When people do not know boundaries, when the rule of law is not enforced and penalties are not imposed, it creates something like we see with anti-Semitism at the moment. If you don’t have a tough approach, if you don’t deal with it in a firm way, others will believe there is a level of activity which will be tolerated, and it will just continue to grow.’’

We’re sitting at the Eatons Hill Hotel, one of his favourite pubs, and, despite the occasional gravity of the discussion, he’s in a buoyant mood, ordering a medium rare sirloin, chips, salad, mushroom sauce and a full-strength Coke.

He readily acknowledges those 10 years he spent as a Queensland cop are always going to be relevant and not merely because, if he wins next year, he’ll be the first ex-law enforcement officer to become an Australian prime minister.

Not since Ben Chifley entered the Lodge as an ex-locomotive driver has a prime ministerial aspirant’s former livelihood been so tied up with his political persona.

Australians expect lawyers – we’ve had 12 of them – and we even expected the nine prime ministers employed in the business or corporate sector, as well as the dozen or so Labor prime ministers who worked in the trades or trade unions. But few would have anticipated a former detective senior constable taking the top job, and Dutton knows this tough cop persona, which may clash with the prevailing progressive mood, is here to stay. His supporters use it to elevate him, his detractors to diminish him – there’s even a Quarterly Essay out on Dutton called Bad Cop which I’ve brought along to invigorate our lunchtime discussion.

“Haven’t read it,’’ he says dismissively.

Which is not to say he doesn’t keep up the news. Dutton is usually up around 4am to read news media and exercise. He watches his diet and often finds a moment to meditate to prepare himself for days that can be finely filleted down to 15 minute increments.

Dutton, like most politicians, is an engaging conversationalist, with even a hint of the raconteur as he talks of his younger years in parliament.

Prime Minister John Howard marked him out as one of the “most likely to succeeds’’ after he took the north Brisbane seat of Dickson from Cheryl Kernot in the 2001 election.

“I think John Howard liked those who had to work hard to win those seats with big margins,’’ he recalls.

Before his 40th birthday he had been, among other things, a cop, a construction business owner (in partnership with his old man), a federal minister for workplace participation and an assistant treasurer.

The hard-cop headkicker image was crystallising before he became immigration and border protection minister in 2014, but it was in that portfolio that it hardened.

Dutton may be capable of being genial, but he also appears unequivocal, unflinching in his view of the world.

There is right,’ and there is wrong,’ and to illustrate a wrong he returns to the aforementioned anti-Semitism he believes is sweeping the world.

“I cannot imagine another segment of our society, on religious grounds or race grounds, demographics or skin colour, whatever it might be, that we would tolerate what the Jewish people are having to tolerate at the moment,” he says.

Footage of Jewish people being told to move on from protest sites because they were “obviously Jewish’’ was, in his view, simply unimaginable.

“Imagine if you said that to someone of Aboriginal heritage,” he says.

The product of what was once known as a mixed marriage (mum Anglican, dad Catholic), Dutton is just old enough to have captured a faint whiff of the old sectarian divide that was a powerful Australian dynamic from European settlement until the mid-20th century. Police stations were often divided between Protestants and Catholics, but by the 1990s, when the rookie cop turned up for work, the “orange and green’’ factions had largely dissolved.

Today he is by no means overtly religious and doesn’t regularly attend church but, if pressed, would identify as a Catholic. He would also insist that every Australian has the right to follow whatever god they choose, and he’s watching the progress of religious discrimination bills in state and federal parliaments. So far, he doesn’t like what he sees.

Government, in his view, does not have the authority to tell people what they can or cannot believe in.

“When parents send their kids to an Islamic school or a Christian school, they do so for a reason,’’ he says. “They want to know that the teachers there are providing an education based on their system of belief in that religion. I think that is entirely reasonable.’’

Dutton says there is now a common interest between the Muslim imams and the Christian bishops in Sydney.

Anglican schools with evangelical influences as well as Islamic schools want to teach children their faiths, and he suspects the ruling Labor government is going to make that difficult. He believes that could make seats held by federal Labor MPs such as Tony Burke and Chris Bowen vulnerable.

“There is talk of independent Muslim candidates who are socially conservative running in those seats because they feel let down by Anthony Albanese over the religious discrimination discussion,” he says.

Dutton hasn’t yet seen the weekend polling which will put a spring in his step with a strong popularity rating in the Sunshine State, but before he goes I ask him how the nation will change if he does get the keys to the Lodge next year.

I remind him that John Howard said in 1986 when contemplating the prime ministership: “The times will suit me.’’ So it is with Dutton.

“I think the times might suit me,’’ he says. “We are coming into a period of geopolitical uncertainty, where crime is such a significant issue, where people are looking for strong leadership … and someone with a capacity to make tough decisions that, even if they are not always universally popular, are nevertheless, in the best interests of families, or communities, or the country as a whole.

“I think we need to be proud of who we are as a country rather than continually apologising … and I think part of our national identity has been lost because we don’t talk about it, we don’t celebrate … what we have achieved.”

STEAKS: Medium rare sirloin steak, chips and salad, mushroom sauce

LOCATION: Eatons Hill Hotel, Eatons Hill

PETER’S RATING: 10/10