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Author: Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
Original article: https://theconversation.com/peter-dutton-a-liberal-leader-seeking-to-surf-on-the-wave-of-outer-suburbia-254590
In searching for the “real” Peter Dutton, it is possible to end up frustrated because you have looked too hard.
Politically, Dutton is not complicated. There is a consistent line in his beliefs through his career. Perhaps the shortest cut to understanding the Liberal leader is to go back to his maiden speech, delivered in February 2002.
The former Queensland policeman canvassed “unacceptable crime rates”, the “silent majority”, the “aspirational voters”, how the “politically correct” had a “disproportionate say in political debate”, the “grossly inadequate sentences” dispensed by the courts, and the centrality of national security. The way the last was handled was “perhaps the most significant challenge our society faces today,” the novice MP told the House of Representatives.
“National security” would be a foundational pillar of Dutton’s career, as well as his political security blanket.
Dutton had been a member of the Liberal Party since about age 18 and hoped “to use my experience both in small business and in law enforcement to provide perhaps a more practical view on some of the issues and problems” of the day.
The 32-year-old Dutton, who’d recently been in the building business with his father, following his nine years in the police force, arrived in parliament on a high, as something of a dragon-slayer in his Brisbane seat of Dickson. He had defeated Labor’s Cheryl Kernot, former leader of the Australian Democrats who had jumped ship in a spectacular defection in October 1997.
Dutton came from Brisbane’s outer suburbia, just as the Liberals were reorienting their focus towards this constituency, the so-called “Howard battlers”.
The eager newcomer was soon noted by the prime minister who, after the 2004 election, appointed him to the junior ministry. One Liberal insider from the time says that when campaigning in Dickson, John Howard saw Dutton “was very good at establishing himself in a marginal seat”. (Years later, when a redistribution turned Dickson into a notional Labor seat for the 2010 election, Dutton tried to do a runner to the safe seat of McPherson. But he failed to win preselection; in the event he held Dickson with a hefty swing. This election Dickson is on 1.7%.)
Dutton brought to his first ministry, workforce participation, the view he had expressed in his maiden speech: “We are seeing an alarming number of households where up to three generations – in many cases by choice – have never worked in their lives, and a society where in many cases rights are demanded but no responsibility is taken.”
By 2006 he had been promoted by Howard to assistant treasurer, a job that gave the ambitious Dutton a chance to work closely with Treasurer Peter Costello. Nick Minchin was finance minister then. He paints a picture of Dutton as a sort of guard dog protecting the revenue. In the cabinet expenditure review committee, “Peter was particularly helpful and supportive of Costello and my fending off the demands of spending ministers”.
The one-time police officer was “strong and resolute in questioning ministers”. Minchin was impressed; the junior minister was “obviously going places”.
From defensive to offensive
After the Liberals went into opposition, Dutton “shadowed” health, becoming health minister in Tony Abbott’s government after the 2013 election.
His legacy from the health portfolio dogs him in this campaign. He presided over the government’s failed attempt in the 2014 budget to put a co-payment on bulk-billed services. A poll conducted by Australian Doctor magazine voted him the worst health minister in memory.
A former senior public servant who observed him at the time presents a more positive picture, saying it was a very difficult time and Dutton was well across the complexity of the portfolio. On the notorious co-payment, Abbott says it was not Dutton’s idea: “It was absolutely 150% my idea”.
When in December 2014 Abbott moved him to immigration and border protection, Dutton was both in his comfort zone and on the escalator. Looking back, Abbott says Dutton was “a better match” for that portfolio. “In health the Coalition tends to play a defensive game. In border protection it plays an offensive game.”
Partnered by empire-building bureaucrat Mike Pezzullo, Dutton agitated for the creation of a mega security department (a push that earlier originated with Scott Morrison when he was in immigration). Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull felt the need to accommodate Dutton – then one of his conservative backers – with the creation of the home affairs super department, which was controversial and divided ministers. Someone who observed him closely in that portfolio says Dutton was always clear what he wanted, but didn’t get too deeply involved in the processes of policy.
Dutton, however, had another goal, and the turmoil surrounding Turnbull’s leadership seemed to offer the opportunity to shoot for the top. It was a false hope. Tactically outsmarted by Turnbull, Dutton lost the first face-off between the two in August 2018. The second bout, later the same week, provided not victory but a pathway to the prime ministership for Scott Morrison.
It wasn’t all downside for Dutton: during the Morrison government he became defence minister. The post suited a China hawk when the bilateral relationship was in a deep trough.
Early on, he met with one-time Labor defence minister (and later Labor leader) Kim Beazley. Beazley recalls: “He wanted to talk to me about what being defence minister was like”. They spoke about submarines: Beazley suggested Australia should cancel its then-existing contract for French conventional submarines and get a new contract for their nuclear subs (this was before AUKUS).
“He knew a fair bit,” Beazley says. “So he was looking to think a way through the huge problems we confronted.” Dutton was “aware we were slipping into an era of constant danger. He had all the attitude you would want of a contemporary defence minister” (although, Beazley adds, the Morrison government had “a propensity for unfunded defence annoucements”).
Leadership and control
By the time the Liberals went into opposition, Dutton was the only leadership candidate standing. His long-term rival Josh Frydenberg had lost his seat – a bonus for Dutton, who hasn’t had to look over his shoulder in the past three years, but a big loss for a party deprived of choice. The Liberals’ moderate wing had been decimated with the rise of the “teals”.
Many immediately declared Dutton unelectable, a view that would soften over time, then return again, to an extent, close to the election.
As opposition leader, Dutton’s laser-like focus was on keeping the party together, avoiding the backbiting and schisms that often follow a serious loss. Colleagues found him approachable and willing to listen. A backbencher says: “He was always very respectful of people in the party room. He will make himself available if people want to talk.”
Yet how much was he willing to hear? The same backbencher says, “I don’t think there was a lot of consultation in the development of policy – it was a bit of a black box. The emphasis has been on unity and discipline.”
Russell Broadbent, a moderate Liberal who defected to the crossbench in 2023 when he lost preselection for his seat of Monash (which he is recontesting an an independent) says, “I’ve never had a cup of tea or a meal with [Dutton]. I wasn’t in his group – I was on the wrong side of the party somewhere.” He says their only conversation was when Dutton told him his preselection was under threat. Broadbent said he knew his opponents had the numbers: Dutton asked whether he’d go to the crossbench. “I said, ‘probably’”.
Anthony Albanese gave his opponent a big political break, when the Voice, opposed by the Coalition, crashed spectacularly in October 2023. The prime minister had invested heavily in a doomed and faulty campaign that misread the mood of Australians, just when many people were being dragged down by the cost of living.
It took Albanese well over a year to recover his stride. Indeed, he did not do so fully until early 2025, when a pre-campaign burst of announcements put the government in a strong position. Dutton’s miscalculation was to believe that when he had Albanese down, his opponent would be out for the count.
Dutton gambled by holding back key policies until the campaign and making the opposition a relatively small target. The big exception was the nuclear pitch, released fairly early and driven in part by the need to keep the Nationals, a number of whom were restive about the Coalition commitment to the 2050 net zero emissions target, in the tent. Saturday’s result will be the ultimate test of the “hold back” tactic.
As the election neared, there was increasing criticism in Coalition ranks of the handling of the campaign, which has been shambolic at times. One example was the delay in producing modelling for a signature policy – the proposal for a gas reservation scheme. That pales beside the fiasco of the (aborted) plan to force Canberra public servants back into the office.
The bold defence policy, to take spending to 3% of GDP within a decade, was not only released after pre-polling had started, but came without detail.
On strategy and tactics, Dutton is controlling, wanting to keep things tight, in his own hands or those of a small group. Perhaps it is the policeman’s mindset. Certainly it has worked to the disadvantage of his campaign, which has appeared under-cooked on large and small things. Among the latter, Dutton’s office insisted on doing his transcripts, rather than having them done by the campaign HQ. Predictably, they were overwhelmed and the transcripts ran late.
Dutton seemed to be working on the assumption he was in a similar situation to Abbott in 2013, when Labor was gone for all money. But this election people needed to be convinced the alternative was robust and, late in the day, many swinging voters remained sceptical about that. Dutton is a strong negative campaigner, who hasn’t put much work into strengthening his weaker skill set to be a “positive” voice as well.
Going into the campaign’s final days, Labor held the edge in the polls. But the Liberals maintained that in key marginals, the story was rather different.
There is a degree of mismatch between the private Dutton and the public figure. Often those who meet or know him remark that one-to-one or in small groups he is personable. Yet his public demeanour is frequently awkward and somewhat aloof. This leaves him open to caricature, and raises the question of why he has been so unsuccessful in projecting more of his private self into his public image.
The latest Newspoll, published Sunday night, had Dutton’s approval rating at minus 24, compared to Anthony Albanese’s minus 9. A just-released Morgan poll on trust in leaders found Dutton had the highest net distrust score (when people were asked in an open-ended question to nominate whom they trusted and distrusted). It’s a long-term thing: he was third in the 2022 list.
The gender problem that dogs the Liberals
One of Dutton’s problems has been the women’s vote. The Poll Bludger’s William Bowe says looking at the polls, “Dutton wasn’t doing too badly [with women] in the first half of the term, but a gap opened up in 2024 and substantially widened in 2025”. Sunday’s Newspoll found 66% of female voters had “little or no confidence” the Coalition was ready to govern, compared to 58% of male voters.
Retiring Liberal senator Linda Reynolds, who preceded Dutton in the defence portfolio, has worked on gender issues in the Liberal Party for 15 years. She believes this is “a party problem, not specifically a Peter Dutton problem”. She says the Liberals’ failure to embrace and deal with gender issues “leaves the leader of the day vulnerable”.
Kos Samaras, from Redbrige political consultancy, agrees. “It’s a brand issue, rather than him personally. He’s just the leader of [the brand].” Scott Morrison made the brand problem a lot worse. “It’s gone back to a normal [Liberal] problem, be it still bad.”
There are differences between constituencies, but there is a “very significant problem with professional women”, Samaras says, which highlights the Liberals’ challenge with the “teal” seats.
Dutton is classic right-wing on law and order, defence policy, nationalism, anti-wokeness, and much more. But he can be pragmatic when the politics demands.
He was personally opposed to marriage equality, but was behind the postal survey that enabled the Turnbull government to achieve it, so removing the issue from the agenda. And the China hawk has recently softened his line on that country, in part to facilitate a pitch for the votes of Chinese-Australians, alienated by the Morrison government.
In this campaign, Dutton has been painted by his opponents as “Trump-lite”. Confronted with this in the third leaders’ debate, he was unable to provide an answer. Initially expecting the election of Trump would be potentially helpful for the opposition, he failed to appreciate the dangers for him, which only increased as the new president became more arbitrary and unpredictable.
The opposition leader’s anti-public service attitude might be a milder version of Trump’s stand but it is also a Queenslander’s view of Canberra, as well as typical of what the Liberals roll out before elections. But his appointment of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as shadow minister for government efficiency was blatantly and foolishly Trumpian.
Dutton is not nimble or nuanced. He is also prone to going off half-cocked, which can lead to missteps (as when he wrongly said the Indonesian president had announced a Russian request to base planes in Papua). Earlier examples are easy to find. In his autobiography A Bigger Picture, Turnbull wrote of him that he would do interviews with right-wing shock jock in which he would “echo their extreme views […] He always apologised for going too far, and I generally gave him the benefit of the doubt”.
Dutton talks little about Liberal Party history, or political philosophy. Is he ideological? Abbott says he is ideological in the way Howard was. “He has strong instincts, he has convictions but they are more instinctual than ideological.”
Dutton at every opportunity points to Howard as his lodestar. Howard also came from a small business family, didn’t have much time for the public service, and had the quality of political doggedness. Regardless of some similarities, however, it is a very long stretch to see Dutton walking in Howard’s shoes.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
