Election 2025: Peter Dutton keeps his distance from CBDs, focuses on outer suburbs

Peter Dutton’s campaign has focused heavily on the outer suburbs of most of the state capitals.

Peter Dutton at the New Touch Industries steel manufacturer in Bayswater in outer Melbourne on Thursday. Picture: Thomas Lisson / NewsWire

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Peter Dutton’s campaign has ­focused heavily on the outer suburbs of three of the biggest state capitals as the Opposition Leader steers well clear of campaign ­appearances in the inner-ring suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in his quest to win enough seats to oust the Albanese government.

Although the Coalition would need to pick up a swag of inner-metropolitan seats – including Bennelong and Reid in Sydney, Kooyong, Chisholm and Goldstein in Melbourne and Tangney and Curtin in Perth – to have any chance of achieving the 22-seat net gain it needs to win majority government, none of them has been on Mr Dutton’s itinerary.

Before he made a mental health announcement at the ­Lifeline headquarters in Melbourne and the latest in a series of pit-stops at a petrol station in Macnamara on Thursday afternoon to spruik the Coalition’s plan to cut fuel excise, Mr Dutton’s visit earlier in the day to the NewTouch Industries steel factory in Bayswater in the marginal Labor-held outer-eastern seat of Aston was the closest he had been to the Victorian capital.

Mr Dutton has entered ­Victoria three times since the election was called and the vast majority of the seats he has visited have been on the fringes – ­McEwen, Hawke and Calwell in the north and northwest, Bruce in the southeast, Aston in the east – with none of those stops taking place less than 29km from the CBD.

Mr Dutton’s entire time in Sydney during three trips covering nine seat visits has been spent in a string of Labor electorates in the western and southwestern suburbs, running from Parramatta through McMahon, Fowler and Werriwa to Macarthur.

The Opposition Leader has made more visits to Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s electorate of McMahon than any other seat in his campaign so far.

The Australian revealed on Thursday that Mr Bowen was in serious danger of losing his once-safe seat, with a poll showing independent candidate Matt Camenzuli receiving 41 per cent of the vote, well clear of Mr Bowen on 19 per cent and Liberal candidate Carmen Lazar on 20 per cent.

The closest Mr Dutton has been to the Sydney CBD was ­another of his almost daily visits to a petrol station – in Carlingford in the marginal battleground seat of Parramatta, held by Labor’s Andrew Charlton – placing him 18km from the city’s heart.

Similarly, in Perth – where Mr Dutton was headed late on Thursday – his one previous trip to the West Australian capital a week ago took him no closer than 18km from the CBD, when he visit­ed Wallis Drilling in Hasluck, formerly held by Coalition cabinet minister Ken Wyatt.

The other Perth electorate where the Opposition Leader stopped was Pearce, another seat lost to Labor in 2022.

In Brisbane and Adelaide, Mr Dutton has gone much closer to the CBDs, with campaign events at the XXXX Brewery in the Queensland capital and one of his many petrol stops at the Perry’s Fuel station in the South Australian capital, when he turned up in the passenger seat of a petrol tanker.

Mr Dutton at a steel manufacturer in Croydon, Melbourne. Picture Thomas Lisson / NewsWire

In Tasmania, Mr Dutton’s one visit so far was to the rural ultra-marginal seat of Lyons that included trips to a berry farm and another petrol station, taking him no closer than 158km to Hobart.

Only nine of the 29 electorate visits Mr Dutton has made have been in seats classified by the Australian Electoral Commission as inner metropolitan. Almost half, 13, have been in outer-metropolitan electorates, while two have been in provincial seats and the remaining five in rural areas.

Mr Dutton has largely been on the offensive, visiting 21 Labor seats, two held by Greens and one by an independent.

However, he has not entered any of the six seats won by the teal independents at the past two elections who are recontesting this election – Zali Steggall, Allegra Spender, Sophie Scamps, Monique Ryan, Zoe Daniel and Kate Chaney – nor Bradfield, under threat from teal Nicolette Boele.