Dutton has spent years cultivating his image. Now he faces a dilemma

Peter Dutton prides himself on his gut feel for politics, born of having to defend one of the most marginal seats in his home state of Queensland for the past 24 years.

“You have to be yourself, and comfortable in your own skin,” he tells me, in an interview at the end of the federal election campaign’s opening week, where he’s been facing the toughest test of his political life.

“The best leaders have been those who have a core instinct. They have difficult issues to deal with but their instinct guides them through the first 10 items on their to-do list [on any given] day. And I’ve also seen other leaders who are tortured on items one to 10 before they get to the tough ones, and it becomes debilitating.”

Dutton, of course, implicitly places himself in the first category. Never have his instincts been more critical, as the 54-year-old former Queensland cop, son of a brickie turned small-time builder, seeks to do the near impossible – overturn a first-term government for the first time since 1931.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison says Dutton’s years of defending his slender margin (currently 1.7 per cent) in his Brisbane seat of Dickson has made him a “very formidable operator on the ground”, someone “with a view much closer to the edge than most MPs”.

Yet, the Queenslander faces an unanticipated dilemma. Having forced his political opponent onto the ropes for most of last year, constantly labelling him “weak”, he now finds the hardman image he’s channelled for most of his career tainted by association with an out-of-control strongman in the White House. Donald Trump has changed the campaign calculus for the Coalition in a potentially profound way.

“Peter is not agile. He doesn’t like surprises,” one of his former frontbenchers tells me. “His public persona has been carefully curated. He will be doing all he can to remain calm, not to look flustered.”

Morrison’s former communications chief, Andrew Carswell, says: “Nothing can prepare you for what comes your way in the first week if you haven’t done a campaign before. Every time you stand up, there’s a multitude of cameras in your face. One mistake can derail you.”

Dutton may have been better prepared if he’d ditched the notoriously selective approach to media engagement he had adopted over his three years as opposition leader. Instead of engaging the media broadly, he has favoured conservative commentators on Sky, and like-minded talkback hosts such as Ben Fordham and Ray Hadley on Sydney’s 2GB, while avoiding the National Press Club (his last appearance was in May 2022) and limiting his exposure to a full court press by the Canberra press gallery. His appearance on ABC TV’s 7.30 on the night he delivered his budget reply three weeks ago was the first time in nearly a year.

He has refused repeated requests to meet with ABC chair Kim Williams, telling me: “I like Kim. But I’ve met with previous chairs, and it’s a waste of time because the culture is too ingrained and nothing’s going to change. Nothing has changed on Kim’s watch, despite his good intents.” (Williams did not wish to comment.)

This masthead, which is seen as frequently antithetical by his team, experienced months of equivocation over whether he would grant a one-on-one interview during the campaign (usually standard for leaders on both sides). I stuck with the media caravan for a week, up and down the east coast and in the west, before they relented.

Peter Dutton says the day-to-day realities of the campaign have been “eye-opening”.Credit: James Brickwood

Despite this, he’s affable when we meet for a hasty 37 minutes, in a small room next to the tarmac in the general aviation offices at Sydney airport, where he’s accompanied by senior media aide Nicole Chant.

He says the logistics of the campaign have been “eye-opening” but that he’s trying to keep up the regimen he’s held to for most of his time as Liberal leader: rising no later than 4am, reading the papers around 4.30am and when possible, hitting the gym or taking a walk by 5am. The punishingly early flights often eat up the time for exercise.

But he’s adhering religiously to his habit of meditating twice daily, once around 4.30 in the morning, then later in the afternoon or on the plane.

He picked up the technique from former AFL player, businessman and media personality Luke Darcy, after meeting him through a mutual friend about six years ago. “It’s just a mantra,” he says “and it’s trying to clear the mind and trying just to reset for the next part of the day, and particularly before you go to bed.”

No doubt it has helped steady him after the rookie mistakes of the first week. Dutton was just two days in when he made ill-advised comments on FM radio about his preference for living on Sydney Harbour at Kirribilli, rather than The Lodge in Canberra, should he win. Labor has accused him of “measuring up the curtains for Kirribilli” ever since.

He didn’t visit a service station for the entire first week, despite the fact that TV images of him filling up a large, shiny ute were the surest way of publicising the Coalition’s 25¢ a litre reduction on fuel excise. And while the more seasoned Albanese has become adept at turning every question into an answer he wanted to give, Dutton kept trying to provide methodical answers to anything the travelling media pack threw at him, rather than controlling the agenda. It had some of his advisers tearing their hair out. He’s tightened his game a lot since.

The most startling development at the end of week one was an extraordinary mea culpa, as he abandoned the policy to crack down on federal public servants working from home, which had alarmed women voters, in particular.

“It was a good policy that hadn’t found its appropriate time,” the policy’s original architect, opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume, told me ruefully several days later. “It didn’t land in a way we wanted it to. It got captured by a terrible scare campaign by Labor and perhaps that was on me. There just wasn’t the appropriate clear air to be able to communicate [it].”

‘Ten years is a long time to live your life in that bubble. It’s not a normal life.’

Liberal senator James Paterson

Dutton lacks the freewheeling avuncularity of Albanese, or the hail-fellow-well-met schtick of Morrison. He tells me: “I always felt for Julia Gillard, that she was having to live a double life and present in a way she thought people would want to see her. If you’re contorted each day, and you’re guarded in what you say, then I think they’re long days and you struggle in the job.”

Yet in the white heat of the election campaign, he’s facing his own imperative to step out of his comfort zone and unleash a bit more showmanship (cue the entry of eldest son Harry on the campaign trail). Morrison says: “He does hold things back. I think it’s because he’s been a target, like many of us have over our political lives.”

It’s not well-known outside political circles just how much Dutton’s private life has been affected by the additional security he and his family have had to accept, as a result of his years of tough rulings and militant rhetoric in the immigration and home affairs portfolios.

The opposition leader and his son Harry campaigning in Brisbane on April 14.Credit: James Brickwood

When news broke of a terror plot against him and his family a week ago, allegedly targeting the family home on acreage at Dayboro, north of Brisbane, he was quick to brush off any suggestion of vulnerability. “I’ve never felt unsafe one day in this job, particularly with the protection from the AFP,” he said.

Yet, Dutton and his wife Kirilly, and their sons Harry, 20, and Tom, 19, together with Dutton’s daughter from an earlier relationship, Rebecca, 23, have known what it’s like to live under 24/7 protection for close to 10 years, according to opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson.

“More than most politicians, his family have suffered very serious threats over a long period of time,” Paterson says. “Ten years is a long time to live your life in that bubble. It’s not a normal life. It takes a lot of spontaneity out of it.”

His friend of 25 years, Queensland property developer and former Olympic swimmer Mark Stockwell, says: “When you go walking with Peter, you’ve got to go walking with the whole crew [the security detail]. He’s never alone from that point of view.”

Dutton’s ability to maintain his composure, and focus, during the first leader’s debate on Sky TV on April 8 despite learning shortly beforehand that his father, Bruce, had been hospitalised for a heart attack, was a measure of his ability to mask emotion. When a climate protester sprang up barely a metre from him on day one of the campaign at the XXXX brewery in Brisbane, he was mid-sentence but he didn’t miss a beat as the woman was dragged off by security.

His facial expressions often don’t give a lot away. I wonder whether he learnt this during his nine years in the Queensland police.

“Probably,” Dutton says. “Yeah. I think that’s a fair observation.” (Several days later, in a soft-focus video played at the Liberal launch, Dutton says he inherited his “father’s emotional gene”. “I think I’ve worked pretty hard at the years to hide it. It doesn’t really get rewarded in our business, so better off not to show the vulnerabilities, be stoic and carry on,” he says in the video.)

Paterson says his leader is “guarded”. “I wish the Australian people could see the self-deprecating, humorous Peter,” he says.

Stockwell sees another side of Dutton, “He’s like a high-performance athlete in many ways. We have that in common. The other thing I see is that he is a shepherd, a protector.” He says Dutton makes him laugh, but “he’s not outgoing. He doesn’t have to be the centre of attention. And when we get together with mates, he just sits there and, you know, doesn’t dominate the room. He doesn’t want to be the loudest voice or tell everyone how smart he is. He’s very comfortable in his own skin. And that’s a very attractive thing for me.”

“If everyone knew Peter like I know him, he’d be the prime minister,” Stockwell says.

When Dutton challenged Malcolm Turnbull for the Liberal Party leadership in 2018, one of his chief complaints was that the then-prime minister “couldn’t make a decision”.

Turnbull later branded him a thug, and in his memoir A Bigger Picture, observed of Dutton that: “He is very loose and imprecise, he lacks the intellect and discipline that he needs to perform at the highest level, very woolly.”

It’s unfair to say Dutton lacks intellect. He is articulate; he delivers a speech more smoothly than Albanese; he is across his brief; and on every day of the campaign thus far, despite his early tactical errors, he has shown an impressive command of the details and numbers he needs to have recall of.

What some of those who’ve known him over time query is whether Dutton has the breadth of interest required of an effective prime minister.

Opposition health spokeswoman Anne Ruston says she has no doubts about the opposition leader’s “extraordinarily broad experience, not just in politics, but in other things he’s done in his life: he started a small business from scratch, he’s been a policeman who’s been at the coalface of crime and violence, particularly domestic violence, and he’s held a range of portfolios, including health as well as the ones [which] people have more front of mind, like defence and home affairs. His great strength is the fact that he’s a listener.”

Morrison says: “Those who sort of claim the narrow thing [about Dutton], well, that’s just a function of the jobs he’s had … and I think he’s a lot broader than that.”

However, another long-time insider who has had extensive dealings with Dutton says: “Worldliness and curiosity? Wanting to roll his sleeves up and get into the policy detail? I never saw that. He’s not someone who I’ve ever had a conversation about travel with, apart from national security. I don’t think he’s curious about the world [in that broader way] at all.”

Another senior Liberal says: “National security, defence, and home affairs – that’s been his comfortable space. But the problem is, he’s got to make calls in other areas that are not just locking people up and kicking people out. And the energy policy is the starkest example of where he signed up to something without understanding the risks around it.”

Dutton tends to see the world in black and white, with not much room for shades of grey, according to his wife, Kirilly, as reported by Annabel Crabb on ABC TV’s Kitchen Cabinet a couple of years ago. He is given to overreach and often invokes the need for moral clarity.

Dutton told the Lowy Institute in March: “I believe there is right and wrong – and good and evil – in the world.”

Dutton’s binary view of the world seems to fuel his war on wokeness, elements of which he’s kept up despite the growing risks of resonance with an unshackled Trump.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price with Peter Dutton and Michaelia Cash in Perth on April 12.Credit: James Brickwood

In recent months, Dutton has posited ditching the Indigenous flag for official prime ministerial events; he has taken aim at “cultural and diversity positions”; he has pledged to scrap the Labor-created position of First Nations ambassador; he elevated Indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to an Elon Musk-like shadow department of government efficiency; and he flagged savings from stripping 41,000 jobs out of the federal public service (though that is now supposedly to be done via attrition, voluntary redundancies and a hiring freeze).

Launching the Liberal campaign last weekend, he again raised the spectre of the nation’s classrooms becoming hotbeds of “indoctrination”, a theme he’d first floated in addressing Paul Murray’s “after dark” audience on Sky TV a week earlier.

He renewed a pledge to defund the “activist-led” Environmental Defenders Office.

Yet he says he’s not “dogmatic or blinded by ideology”, and he rejects the label of culture warrior.

“I just think it’s a cheap label said in a derogatory way,” he says. “I like how the ‘warrior’ tag is attached to only one side of the debate. So those who are out championing the different elements that I might have a problem with are ‘big-hearted progressives’; and people who question it and might defend the status quo, are sort of radical warriors. It says something about the debate and the intolerance that’s there. It makes me more determined to stand up for what you believe in and to argue a case.”

How does he see himself, then? “I think I’m an honest and genuine person and transparent and hard-working. Patriotic.”

Dutton’s war against political correctness dates back to well before the MAGA movement sprang into existence.

In his inaugural speech to parliament in 2002, he tore into bodies like the Civil Liberties Council (which he dubbed the “criminal lawyers’ media operative”) and the Refugee Action Collective, saying the silent majority were “fed up” with them. In 2008, he boycotted Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations, a move he later publicly apologised for. In 2011, in an ill-advised tweet, he wished “dirty lefties” a good weekend.

His 2023 decision to oppose the embedding of an Indigenous Voice in the Constitution doomed it to failure, prompting Morrison’s former Indigenous Affairs minister Ken Wyatt to resign from the Liberal Party. Wyatt later accused his former party of going down a “Trumpian” road under Dutton.

Yet Dutton’s supporters saw it as a masterstroke. His shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash says: “We became the credible alternative government the minute he stood up to Anthony Albanese and said ‘no’ to the Voice. I think it was that that was the defining moment for Peter.”

Dutton is convinced his stance on the Voice, which broke the hearts of a generation of Indigenous leaders who had fought for recognition for a decade, acted as a force for unity. “I think I demonstrated during the course of the Voice that I had an ability to bring the party together on a very difficult issue, and we were able to guide public debate in relation to [that],” he says.

He sees himself as no ideologue, but “centre-right in the [John] Howard mould and economically dry and pragmatic. I’ve had strong friendships with people from across the spectrum, on the left and right in the Liberal Party, and I’ve been able to work very effectively with them to this very day.”

Coalition Leader Peter Dutton at the Mount Pleasant Bowling Club in Ardross, Perth, on April 12.Credit: James Brickwood

The recently retired LNP MP for the seat of Leichhardt in northern Queensland, Warren Entsch, is one of those moderates who count Dutton as a friend. Yet Entsch didn’t back him when Dutton and Morrison were slugging it out for the leadership in August 2018, after Turnbull had been dispatched.

He was worried about how Dutton’s “shit sandwich” decisions as immigration and home affairs minister would go down in Victoria and NSW.

Others harboured similar fears. Former Liberal MP Tony Smith said the elevation of Dutton would throw the Liberals into an “electoral furnace”, according to Niki Savva’s book Plots and Prayers. Stuart Robert reportedly said that “if Dutton wins, we are in hell”.

Entsch says, now: “I was wrong. He’s been quite amazing in holding the colleagues together. He has grown into the leadership exceptionally well.” He gets angry about people branding Dutton a “right-wing crazy”, he says, given the central role Dutton played in facilitating the national postal vote, which ultimately delivered the country marriage equality. Dutton also has to be given credit for steering the Coalition clear of fraught debates about gender and abortion.

In his personal life, he is less conservative than many of his colleagues. His oldest child, Rebecca (Bec), was conceived out of wedlock with a woman he was seeing between his short-lived first marriage at the age of 22 and his subsequent marriage to Kirilly in July 2003. From an early age, Bec was folded into the family he and Kirilly were building. He’s proud of that, he says.

Former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg says the fact that Dutton has put the Coalition in contention after a single term of the Albanese government remains a huge achievement, given the scale of the Liberal wipeout in 2022, when a slew of formerly blue-ribbon seats (including Frydenberg’s own) went to teal MPs.

“Peter has done an outstanding job, uniting his team after the last election, and making this contest very competitive,” he says, commending him as a “tower of strength” in the battle against antisemitism.

Under Dutton, the strained relationships of previous Liberal leaders with the junior Coalition partner, the National Party, have been smoothed. Nationals leader David Littleproud has extravagantly declared that he trusted Dutton with “every fibre of my being”.

Morrison has an interesting perspective on the Liberal party room, believing Dutton benefited from the unity that followed his own elevation to the leadership in August 2018.

“Peter was very supportive after I became prime minister,” Morrison says. “I didn’t have to look over my shoulder once in four years, and neither has he; Peter and I and others of our generation had seen a decade of personality-driven conflict in the parliamentary party. After August 2018, we put that behind us.”

Others, however, fear that that unity has come at a cost. “They have put a premium on unity as opposed to debate,” says one Liberal moderate. Another is adamant that Dutton is not a genuine devotee of the John Howard view of the Liberal Party as a “broad church”.

“In Dutton’s perfect world, someone like Malcolm Turnbull would not be in the Liberal Party,” this source says. “The reason the party is so stable is there has been no leadership rivalry, and the reason for that is that [the then-heir apparent] Josh Frydenberg lost his seat.”

When I ask him about Frydenberg, Dutton describes him as a “big loss” to Coalition ranks. He says he tried to persuade his “dear friend” to run again. The former treasurer turned down his approach.

‘I wasn’t sort of an obsessive young Liberal groupie type. I was more interested in working and trying to make some money.’

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton

On day two of the campaign, Dutton is undertaking repair work with Sydney’s migrant communities. At Prairiewood, 34 kilometres west of Sydney’s CBD, he attends a community feast, attended by hundreds of locals to mark the Assyrian New Year, a joyous and raucous event with pipers and drummers and traditional dancers forming a vanguard as he makes his way slowly through the crowds towards his place at the head of a large, U-shaped outdoor table.

At 188 centimetres, he towers over most of those around him. The previous evening, he’d been at a Chinese community event in Brisbane, where he’d announced funding for a Chinese museum. From the Assyrian event, he is heading straight to a meeting with elders at a western Sydney mosque that services the Pakistani community.

Since the start of the campaign, it is striking how much he now seeks to walk two sides of the street on migration issues. He clads his pledge to cut net overseas migration numbers by 100,000 in the language of mitigating the housing crisis. Every second speech he delivers through the campaign contains a reference to the “good migrant stories” the country should be telling itself.

Many of the outer suburban mortgage belt seats, where the Liberals are on the hunt for votes, have heavy migrant concentrations. Yet some have long memories, and they have not forgotten his incendiary remarks about “African gang violence” or his infamous suggestion that it had been a mistake for former prime minister Malcolm Fraser to welcome so many Lebanese Muslims to Australian shores. (Dutton has said he apologised for this, though it’s never been made clear who he apologised to.) He has a history of apologies. In 2019, he had to apologise to his rival, Labor candidate Ali France, an amputee, for suggesting she was using her disability as an excuse not to find housing in the Dickson electorate.)

Dutton with wife Kirilly and children (from left) Harry, Tom and Bec after his speech at the Coalition campaign launch on April 13.Credit: James Brickwood

Dutton’s tendency to see the world in binary ways is almost certainly a product of his years in the Queensland police force, which he joined at 19, and where he was later exposed to some of the most heinous crimes that could be inflicted on children.

“It jars and I think it scars,” Dutton told Kitchen Cabinet’s Annabel Crabb in one of his more unguarded moments two years ago. He told her he could still recall every detail from a scene where a young girl had been raped. He didn’t deny that he carried some measure of PTSD from those years.

It partly explains his obsession with trying every manoeuvre possible to throw dual-national criminals out of the country, especially those involved in child sex abuse or domestic violence. “It has had a profound impact on him,” Entsch says.

As home affairs minister, Dutton drove the establishment within the AFP of a dedicated Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, and for years he and Kirilly have supported a foundation set up by the Morcombe family, whose 13-year-old son Daniel was abducted and murdered in 2003 by a serial child rapist.

Morrison says: “I’ve never seen any issue motivate Peter more strongly than the issues of child protection and domestic violence.”

The other factor that has profoundly shaped him is his experience of small business, both on his own account, and in partnership with his father, Bruce.

Dutton joined the Liberal Party at 18 and was just 19 when he stood for the first time for a hopelessly unwinnable seat. He tells me: “I wasn’t sort of an obsessive young Liberal groupie type. I was more interested in working and trying to make some money. That was my predominant focus at that time.”

He told businessman Mark Bouris in a podcast that he had developed an “entrepreneurial spirit fairly early on” and that he had picked up a lot from working in a butcher’s shop as a casual all through his high school years. In a revealing moment with Bouris, he recalled being struck by the way a certain woman, a Mrs Holloway, was able to breeze into the shop and order eye fillet, an expensive cut of meat his family never had.

“It was looking at the haves and have-nots and figuring out that you wanted to work hard and achieve as much as you could,” Dutton said.

By the time he left the police force in 1999, nearly a decade after joining it, Dutton was already running three childcare centres on the side, all while doing shiftwork as an officer. It was “exhausting”, he says, and, ultimately, it was why he left the force.

His business zeal carried over into a string of successful property dealings over the years, some in partnership with his father. A recent investigation by this masthead calculated that he’d made $30 million worth of transactions in 26 pieces of real estate over 35 years, although for what net profit is not known.

Peter Dutton with former prime minister John Howard at the Liverpool Catholic Club in Prestons for the Coalition campaign launch on April 13.Credit: James Brickwood

Pressed on why he got into politics, he cites the turmoil of the Bjelke-Petersen era in Queensland and watching his father struggle through the boom-bust times of the late 1980s. He cites Winston Churchill, George W. Bush and even Barack Obama as inspirational figures. “I remember setting the alarm to hop up to watch president Obama’s inauguration speech because I thought it was an inspiration that an African-American was able to take that office,” he says.

But the prime inspiration for his political career, above all, has been Howard, whose “mould” Dutton sees himself fitting into.

It’s difficult to think of the Liberal grandee threatening interventions in the insurance market, forcing divestment of supermarkets, or, the big one, using taxpayers’ dollars to try to launch a nuclear power industry in the way Dutton has.

When I put this to Howard, he says: “‘Mould’ doesn’t mean exactly the same. It means broadly the same.” He tells me the weight of history is still against a Dutton victory but “six months ago, I wouldn’t have thought we had any hope. I have a different view now.”

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