Operation Get Dutton fails as Home Affairs Minister wins seventh term
Home Affairs Minister quotes Paul Keating as he sees off Labor, GetUp to win seventh term.
Peter Dutton has seen off an “unprecedented personal attack” by GetUp and Labor to claim victory in the marginal Queensland seat of Dickson.
MORE : Federal Election 2019 Results
The Home Affairs Minister said despite the “mud thrown” he’d been able to run an effective campaign to win a seventh term in the northern Brisbane electorate.
“I want to quote a former prime minister. His name was Paul Keating and the quote was, ‘This is the sweetest victory of all’,” he joked as he addressed about 300 jubilant supporters in Brisbane on Saturday night.
Mr Dutton said there was an “amazing mood” across Australia in support of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
“He’s distilled our message down to one the Australian people have been able to understand,” he said.
“And people have overwhelmingly accepted that.”
Mr Dutton entered the election with a wafer-thin margin of just 1.7 per cent. His campaign got off to a rocky start when he claimed Labor candidate Ali France was using her disability as an excuse not to move into the electorate.
Ms France said winning Dickson was always “going to be a hard slog”. “My opponent completely outspent us. I think (Peter Dutton) probably spent in excess of $1.5 million,” she said.
“It’s very difficult for women in general to get into marginal seats, let alone a disabled woman,” she said.
Ms France’s grassroots campaign was consistently plagued by claims she was a puppet of the left-wing activist group GetUp.
Mr Dutton said campaigning by GetUp, which put 300 volunteers into the electorate in a bid to oust the Home Affairs Minister, had angered Dickson voters in the mortgage-belt seat.
He said he also sensed a lot of anger against Labor because of the tax changes they were proposing.
“People really had their baseball bats out for Bill Shorten,” he said
- with AAP
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