Albanese orders takedown of Labor attack ad mocking Dutton’s marriage

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has ordered the Victorian Labor Party to take down a social media post mocking the marriage of Peter Dutton and his wife Kirilly, hours after the image was posted online.

The Victorian ALP had been criticised by Liberal senator James Paterson for launching a personal attack on the opposition leader and his wife by posting a photo of the couple on its Facebook page, with the caption: “Justifying dating your new partner to your friends who don’t like him”.

A five-year-old newspaper story about Kirilly and Peter Dutton has been used in a Labor attack ad. Credit: Facebook

A spokeswoman for the prime minister said that when the social media post was drawn to Albanese’s attention late on Monday “the prime minister demanded it be taken down. Families should be off limits.”

Dutton had already demanded the prime minister “respect my wife”, as he pledged in a post on X that he would never go after Albanese’s fiancee Jodie Haydon.

The image of Dutton and his wife that was uploaded to social media sites on Monday morning was taken from a 2019 Courier-Mail article in which Kirilly Dutton declared her husband was “not a monster” and detailed some of the death threats he had faced in his then role as minister for home affairs.

The full quote was: “He is a really good man. He is a really good father and he’s not a monster.”

Victorian Labor repurposed the picture and added the captions “justifying dating your new partner to your friends who don’t like him” and “we all know that one couple”.

The post was meant to be a humorous dig capitalising on perceived voter dislike of Dutton in Victoria. All political parties are increasingly using jokes and memes on social media to convey their messages to voters who don’t follow mainstream news.

Paterson, the Coalition home affairs spokesman, said the meme was offensive and in poor taste.

“Family should be off limits from political attacks,” he said. “Labor would be rightly outraged if the Liberal Party ever went after Anthony Albanese’s family like this.

“This just reeks of desperation from a government lagging in the polls and bereft of any solutions to the cost-of-living crisis facing Australians. Smearing Peter Dutton and his family is all they have left.”

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and wife Kirilly arrive at The Australian’s 60th anniversary party in July.Credit: James Brickwood

Victorian Labor Party state secretary Steve Staikos played down the personal nature of the meme, saying “it’s not a personal attack – that’s a mischaracterisation of the post”.

“It’s a screenshot from a newspaper article that they [the Duttons] willingly participated in,” he said. “It was posted as a bit of commentary, like a lot of memes are by all political parties.

Much like Albanese’s fiancee Haydon, Kirilly Dutton rarely grants interviews and rarely appears alongside her husband at public events. The couple have also zealously guarded the privacy of their three children.

Dutton vowed to never attack Haydon during the election campaign, in a statement provided to The Australian before the prime minister intervened.

“I can assure you the Liberal Party I lead will not be targeting Jodie Haydon,” Dutton posted.

“I respect and like Jodie but she is not an elected official and will not be the subject of humiliation, attack ads or public smear by the Liberal Party. I would ask the PM to equally respect my wife.”

As a leading conservative, Dutton has long been seen as a drag on the Coalition’s vote in Victoria, Australia’s most progressive state, and he was roundly criticised in 2018 for his claims that people in Melbourne were “scared to go out to restaurants of a nighttime because they are followed home by these gangs”.

The loss of the Melbourne seat of Aston in a 2023 byelection and the failure to win Dunkley in the 2024 byelection exacerbated fears within the Coalition about Dutton’s ability to win over voters in Melbourne, where the party holds just a handful of metropolitan seats.

But as federal Labor’s standing has fallen across the country, the Coalition has become more confident about claiming four metropolitan and outer suburban seats in Melbourne, including Aston, Chisholm, McEwen and Goldstein, in next year’s election.

A quarterly analysis of the Resolve Political Monitor shows that Labor’s primary vote has fallen from 33 to 29 per cent in Victoria, while voters in the state have given the Coalition its biggest boost in support since the 2022 election among the mainland states, lifting its primary vote from 33 to 38 per cent.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.