The gorgeous, blonde-haired 11-year-old has listened to her dad’s maiden speech from when he entered Parliament in 2007, the same year she was born, where he described her in that way.

Now, she cheekily won’t let him forget it. And, while he laughs at her, he knows she is right. The Prime Minister and his wife Jenny, who met at church when they were 12 years old before marrying at 21, had a very difficult battle conceiving that stretched over 16 years.

Morrison tells Saturday Extra it seemed “like an eternity” and changed him profoundly.

“It was hard. It was terribly hard, and it was hard watching the person you love go through something, as you were going through it, but also you’re more concerned about what she was going through, while dealing with your own stuff about it,” he says.

“And it was a long time. It was a really long time. But this is why Jen is so amazing. She just never gives up hope, always has her faith, as I do, and she just kept believing.

“At all times it seems like an eternity.”

After going through multiple unsuccessful IVF rounds, Mr Morrison says the battle to conceive inevitably adds emotional and financial strain to a relationship.

“We wish people going through that all the best, but my best advice I can give is just stay together and support one another because it can put enormous strain on relationships, particularly because there’s the financial side of it as well. It can put enormous strain,” he says.

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“The reason why we’ve always been careful talking about it is because we know that (for) those who are going through that process, there are no guarantees and sometimes the happy stories are the stories you don’t want to hear — and we understand that.”

But for Morrison and Jenny, they did, finally, have their fairytale ending, falling pregnant naturally.

“On the 7th of the 7th of 2007, God sent us a very kind message about his faithfulness. That’s when Abbey was born,” he says. “So she often reminds us that she is the miracle child.” Two years later, the couple had their second daughter Lily, now nine.

“For us, that was just a sign of incredible blessing for us. The gift of life is always a miracle,” he says. “I always saw that in the verses that talk about ‘my cup overflows’.”

Aside from fertility issues, Mr Morrison believes financial strain can be the biggest burden that pushes a family and marriage to breaking point, emphasising why economic growth and security is such a central and crucial policy focus for him.

“The biggest threat to keeping families together is often financial strain,” he says.

“There will be other problems. You know, none of us communicate well enough with each other. None of us make all the right decisions.

“All of us are human beings with our frailties and that puts enough pressure on a marriage or on a family, and what our job is, is to ensure the strength of families by removing as many of the pressures that come from outside.”

Morrison’s reference to religion during this interview is different from the tough, pragmatic persona the public usually sees in press conferences and news interviews. Since his elevation to the top job, Morrison’s religion (he is Pentecostal Christian) has been the subject of some ridicule. It’s a point he has noticed.

“When I simply suggested people should pray for rain, if that’s what they do, some people got upset about it, claiming it was some crisis of church and state,” he says.

“I mean that’s just alarmist nonsense.”

His faith is what is partly driving him to ensure there will be new laws to protect religious institutions and individuals — a policy area that will be highly contentious.

The Prime Minister says he had been deeply concerned that those who did not agree with same-sex marriage suffered severe consequences in their workplaces, indicating this is an area the law could provide protection.

“Your own personal beliefs are just that, they’re personal, and that shouldn’t stop you from serving as a director of a public company, it shouldn’t stop you from being a partner in a law firm, just because you put something on Facebook about your own beliefs all of a sudden you become persona non grata, or you can’t appear on the radio or things like this,” he says.

“That’s not where I want us to be. Is this an overwhelming problem at the moment? No. Are there examples of this happening? Yes. Is there a risk that this could get more of a problem in the future? Yes.”

Morrison makes it clear it’s an area of the law he wants to ensure is protected and says there is a real fear that government funding in the future could be withheld from faith-based schools, hospitals or charities if their beliefs are at odds with other aspects of the law, like same-sex marriage.

“My concern is prospective. I want to be sure whether it’s a Christian school or a Jewish school, or a faith-based hospital or whether it’s a charity, that those organisations have their own belief structure,” he says.

“Now that might not be the belief structure that other people share but they started it as a product of their beliefs, so they should be able to keep running it in accordance with their beliefs and not having other beliefs imposed on them by the state, regardless of even whether there’s public funding which can be attracted.

“I mean they’re not getting the funding because of their faith. They’re getting their funding because they do a good job and they deliver outcomes for the government. That’s reducing homelessness or educating children properly in accordance with the standards that are set.”

In the four weeks since he unexpectedly became prime minister after a bizarre week of leadership spills, brought on by Malcolm Turnbull trying to cement his leadership from a Peter Dutton challenge, Morrison’s life has already changed in both major and simple ways.

He will be meeting with US President Donald Trump later this year at the G20 and he will need to make a decision about who will be the next Governor-General.

But there are smaller things that Morrison is already starting to miss.

“I used to like driving myself around in my car. That means I could play my own music, you could get on the phone and talk to colleagues privately and I thought that was good. I miss that, but that goes with the gig,” he says.

On Saturday night, Morrison was planning to cook a lamb curry — one of his go-to dishes.

“But the convoy that was involved in going to Woolies to get the ingredients was just all too much, to get some coconut milk and pick up the lamb and whatever I was short on,” he says. “I’ve got to get more organised for this because I was used to just ducking up and doing this, so we’re making all of those adjustments.”

Even in their new extraordinary circumstances, the Prime Minister, who pitches himself as a daggy-dad from the Shire, would like his family to have as “normal” a life as possible.

“Jen and I, our view has always been, in our time in politics, to keep family life as normal as you can make it,” Morrison says.

“We’ve always been very careful of keeping a pretty big wall between our family life and our public life.”

In the school holidays, Morrison says he will “have to” relocate his family to Kirribilli House — a move that so far hasn’t been a “priority” for him. Much like decorating his prime ministerial office, which has bare walls with none of the usual carefully picked artworks that reflect a prime minister’s philosophy.

The Harbourside move will be a significant lifestyle change for his Shire-bred daughters, who only travel to Canberra rarely, usually once a year for the federal Budget “which they used to love doing because they’d get a new dress,” Morrison says.

While he’s been in politics for 11 years, Morrison describes himself as a regular guy and says he is still dealing with the “same pressures as everyone else”.

“I am a mortgage belt Liberal. That’s my life experience and it’s the family I grew up in as well,” he says.

“My mortgage is about the average size, it isn’t a zero, it’s still got lots of zeros on it and we’ll deal with that like any other family.

“We have our kids in independent school, which is a decision we took, like many families do. I was very happy with the quality of our local public school but we made the choice to put our kids in a faith-based school because that’s very important to us as a family.”

At Kirribilli House, the family will be entertaining world leaders and dignitaries.

“I’ll still be getting down home very regularly, catching up with friends,” Morrison says.

“The family next door who we’ll miss, they work hard, they’ve worked in their own businesses and Joe next door, he’s a pensioner and he’s still working out of the fruit market. That’s important to us to maintain that normalcy.”

But Morrison admits “normalcy” hasn’t always been possible.

He recalls when, as Immigration Minister, he cancelled Rebels bikie boss Alex Vella’s Australian visa and former Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione warned him the dangerous criminal could lash out in any way — and his family needed protection.

Jenny, Abbey and Lily all needed to be under police guard whenever they were in public.

“I had my own daughters going to school with police protection and my wife for some time,” Morrison says.

“They had security at their birthday party,” he says, before adding lightheartedly, “usually you don’t need that until they’re 17 or 18.”

For leadership and policy inspiration, Morrison looks to former Liberal prime minister John Howard and former treasurer Peter Costello, describing them as the greatest influences in his life.

“If there’s one thing I think I learnt from John Howard was he always was able to give people a sense of assurance that whatever happened, they knew which way he’d jump, they knew what his instincts were, they knew what he believed,” Morrison says.

“I’ve always been a lot like that. I’m not saying I’m modelling myself on John Howard, but he’s obviously been a huge influence on me as a politician, as a politician out of NSW in particular, but equally Peter (Costello) in Victoria as treasurer has been an enormous influence on me from a policy perspective.”

The main question is whether there is any possibility of a Liberal Party recovery ahead of the next federal election.

Even most Liberal MPs saw the leadership coup as about saving the furniture, rather than any genuine chance of winning government again.

But Morrison insists he can beat Shorten.

“Absolutely, I believe it. I don’t step up to a challenge I don’t believe I can meet,” Morrison says.

“You know who doesn’t believe it? Bill Shorten. He thinks he has this sewn up, he thinks he’s got this all locked away. The hubris has entered the building with the Labor Party. They’re running around as if they’re already there.”

And the Prime Minister ripped into his opponent.

“Newsflash, Bill Shorten lies. That’s what he does. He lies,” Morrison says.

“He said if we were elected we were going to sell Medicare. It’s a nonsense. We never have and never were. People will feel that they got jibbed around that and hoodwinked.

“At the end of the day, he is just another Canberra politician … engaging in cynical politics. Bill is just another Canberra suit.”

And, a Canberra suit is what Morrison is intent that he will not become.

Morrison says he always tries to be unabashedly himself and has learned not to be embarrassed over aspects of his personality that are less refined.

“We all have our influences but the golden rule is be yourself, don’t be someone else,” he says.

“Your better traits. But frankly don’t be ashamed of your outer awkwardness as well, that’s what normal people are like.

“If I look back over history, I particularly always liked Teddy Roosevelt because he was his own person. He had his strong beliefs, he had his passions and he was always out there everyday seizing every moment, not wasting any time. And that’s certainly my approach.”