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Travelling with Peter Dutton through the final week of the election campaign, it was clear the opposition leader was running on avoidance – of scrutiny, mistakes and imagination. By Jason Koutsoukis.
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This man is not going to win – probably
On Monday night, standing under fluorescent lights at Gladesville Sporties, a popular local sports club and restaurant in the Labor-held Sydney seat of Bennelong, Peter Dutton delivered a full-throated endorsement of his candidate, Scott Yung.
This was no ordinary stop. Bennelong is sacred Liberal ground – the former seat of John Howard, Dutton’s political hero, who has returned to the trail this election to campaign hard for Dutton’s leadership. With redrawn boundaries shifting Bennelong into more favourable territory, the party sees the seat as one of its best chances to claw back something from Labor.
Yung’s candidacy has drawn repeated controversy. In March, he admitted to falsely claiming he had raised $60,000 at a fundraising dinner attended by Howard in the lead-up to the 2019 state election. More recently, he was rebuked by a school principal for handing out Easter eggs outside a Lane Cove school, a stunt that prompted a formal complaint to the Department of Education.
Still, Dutton didn’t flinch. “Scott Yung will be the next member for Bennelong,” he said, “because he is somebody who people can see has a genuine desire to help fellow Australians.”
The event quickly turned into something the Liberal campaign didn’t want: a media scrum. Reporters mobbed Yung after the formal part of the evening, interrupting the candidate as he tucked into a steak and pressing him on both controversies as the cameras rolled.
“Can I just say, what a joke that I got slammed for that,” Yung said, defending his Easter egg handout. “I think it’s in the spirit of Easter. I asked parents if I could give an Easter egg to their children.”
Several members of Dutton’s media team – along with the current Liberal MP for Cook, Simon Kennedy – tried unsuccessfully to shut down the scrum.
The incident did little to shift the story forward, but it reinforced something the less media access, the better. The tight choreography of the final week felt like more than just strategy. It was damage control.
By then, signs of strain were beginning to show. Campaign events were thinning out. Candidates, especially the more contentious ones, were increasingly kept away from the cameras. Announcements came late and landed flat. Dutton’s message – a handful of cost-of-living pledges and attacks on migration numbers – began to feel less like a plan and more like a placeholder.
His defence policy amounted to little more than a loosely defined promise to spend more. On migration, the messaging became murkier by the day, with sudden shifts on working holiday visa rules and contradictory statements from candidates, giving the impression of a platform being improvised.
In private, Dutton can be warm, even disarming – funny, loyal, attentive to detail. On the trail, that side of him rarely surfaced. His public persona remained clipped, cautious, emotionally remote. When asked tough questions, he defaulted to the language of discipline: tight answers, familiar lines, quick pivots to Labor’s failings, or just ignoring the question altogether and moving on to the next one. What was becoming clear was that this was not a campaign animated by purpose, but one defined by avoidance – of scrutiny, of mistakes, of imagination.
Even when Dutton means well, he can startle.
On Tuesday morning, he walked into the Nowra Farmers Market in the hyper-marginal seat of Gilmore, held by Labor’s Fiona Phillips on a margin of 0.2 per cent. Former New South Wales transport minister Andrew Constance is making another tilt at federal politics in the seat, under the quiet guidance of former foreign affairs minister Marise Payne.
Greeted by co-owners Jeffrey Coe and Paul Sassall, Dutton listened as they explained how they had built the business together. “Was there a lot of fighting?” Dutton asked.
Fighting? Blank looks from Jeff and Paul.
“Well, there must have been a lot of fighting, there always is,” Dutton added
with a grin.
Dutton’s hunch, it turned out, was true, but he caught both men off guard and they skipped a beat before answering. The moment passed quickly and Dutton was soon pacing the aisles, hammering his cost-of-living lines.
A woman named Sofia, a swinging voter in her 60s pushing a trolley, lit up when Dutton stopped to chat. She told him she’d seen him on A Current Affair the night before. After he moved on, she turned to the media pack and said her mind was made up – she was voting for him. If only all voters were so easily won over.
Dutton’s wife, Kirilly, trailing a few steps behind, moved with less force but more feeling – quietly filling a bag of groceries, listening without inserting herself. When Sassall insisted the groceries were on the house, she just as firmly refused and headed straight to the checkout.
She didn’t have her wallet. Her phone, too, had been handed to one of the ever-present close protection officers. It would’ve been easy to accept the gift, but she didn’t.
Where Peter Dutton prods, Kirilly often deflects. Where he leans in, she has a knack for stepping lightly.
The next day, in the NSW seat of Shortland, not normally on the Liberal Party’s radar, Dutton held a low-key cafe roundtable with a group of local mothers at Papatya Cafe. The seat is held by Labor’s Minister for Defence Industry, Pat Conroy, but the local dynamics are shifting. Dutton’s presence there wasn’t just symbolic – it was strategic.
“I’ve voted for the Liberals,” said Graeme West, a passer-by who interrupted the event after spotting the cameras. “People say you have a woman problem, but it doesn’t seem like it – you’ve got so many around you.”
Dutton gave him a thumbs up. “Thanks, mate.”
Inside, mother-of-three and nurse Leonie Hall described the pressure of juggling shiftwork with a strained local health system. “GPs in the area have closed their books,” she told Dutton. “It’s hard to find bulk-billing doctors.”
Solicitor and mother-of-two Jade Doyle spoke about her father, who had worked in the police force’s sex crimes unit. “It’s pretty cool to have a former cop running for prime minister,” she said, prompting a nod from the Liberal leader.
Dutton responded in kind. “It’s tough work but rewarding,” he said. “I’ve seen the worst and the best of people.”
His exchanges with the women were light, but the awkwardness that dogs his public persona and limits his connection with a broader audience is never far away. When Doyle confirmed she had two children, Dutton asked, “And is that it?”
“That’s it,” Doyle replied, laughing.
Later, he met cafe owners Ashley and Sebiha Patfield, who told him about the cost pressures facing their business. “We’re first-time owners,” Ashley said. “It’s a lot – not just the food prices, but everything else.”
Dutton listened, thanked them and left. No promises were made.
By Wednesday, the tour had moved to Seaford, in Victoria’s Dunkley electorate, another Labor seat the Liberals are targeting. Dutton and his wife visited Mums Supporting Families in Need (MSFIN), a grassroots charity that provides clothing, nappies, prams and food relief to families in crisis.
Charlotte Davies, the manager, told Dutton the organisation had supported 3000 people since January, with referrals growing rapidly. “We are struggling to keep up,” she said. “More and more dual-income families needing support. We feel enormous pressure to respond.”
Dutton nodded as he walked through the warehouse. Picking up a small child’s jacket, he turned to Kirilly. “Remember when ours were that cuddly size?” he said, quietly.
Then, to Davies: “Really confronting stuff when you think about it.”
After learning about the charity’s heavy reliance on donations and volunteers, Kirilly helped pack one of the food boxes. “Not your first rodeo?” Davies asked with a smile, as Dutton folded the box lid. “You’ve moved house a few times before?”
“Kirilly loves moving house,” Dutton responded.
When Davies explained that she was the only paid staff member and the rest of the team were volunteers, Dutton listened, asked about their motivations and offered warm thanks.
When later pressed about whether a Dutton government would offer additional funding, he hedged.
“We’ve provided $50 million, as we’ve said, to provide support to organisations like this,” he said. “I’m sure there’s an argument for more money, and I’d like to get a better understanding of how we can provide more support here.”
It was emblematic of the week: attempts at empathy but distance when it comes to policy.
That evening, Dutton found a more comfortable environment in Kooyong – the affluent Melbourne seat held by teal independent Monique Ryan. At the Tower Hotel in Hawthorn East, owned by long-time Liberal publican Joe Rumoro, Dutton was in safe territory.
Outside, climate protesters in hazmat suits made noise over Dutton’s nuclear energy plans. Inside, it was all familiarity. Dutton sipped a schooner of Balter, mingling with supporters. On every table, stubby holders read: “Monique, please DO NOT take this beer!”
Candidate Amelia Hamer stood beside him, joined by her former boss, Senator Jane Hume – who, as it happened, was celebrating her 54th birthday.
“What do you see in the business – are people spending less or is it equal?” Dutton asked Rumoro. “They’re spending less,” Rumoro replied. “The cost-of-living squeeze has hit hard. We notice it at the till every night.”
Dutton nodded, then addressed the crowd. “Victorians know how bad a long-term Labor government can be,” he said, drawing a line from Canberra to Victoria’s unpopular premier, Jacinta Allan. “The damage that’s been done, the lack of infrastructure that’s been built, the inability to deal with the crime issue, the taxes – all of it.”
On the question of nuclear power, Dutton played it down. “It doesn’t start till 2035,” he said. “It’s on old coal-fired power station sites. It’s not in your backyard. It’s not a big vote driver this election. People are voting on cost of living.”
Later, he briefly held a six-month-old baby before Kirilly stepped in and took the child in her arms. Dutton moved on to the next room.
“We’re hopeful,” one supporter said of Hamer. “She’s young, sharp, local – and Monique’s been distracted with too many national issues.”
At their best, political campaigns build – in size, in stakes, in conviction. They gather speed and create an inevitability about them.
Dutton’s final week did none of those things. Instead, it unfolded as a sequence of stage-managed movements: a candidate entering, speaking, leaving. Photos taken. Lines repeated. Random encounters avoided where possible.
Apart from filling up Aston candidate Manny Cicchiello’s car with petrol – as the overhead radio played Tina Turner’s “The Best” – there were very few stunts for the cameras. No theatre or stumble into spontaneity that might have revealed something unforced or real.
Dutton’s predecessor as Liberal leader, Scott Morrison, famously embraced the stunt. Dutton – perhaps hoping to prove he is Morrison’s opposite – has no faith in it.
He has offered nothing in its place, however: no serious policy argument, no governing vision, no clear sense of what this campaign is for, or who it is meant to serve, beyond cheaper petrol and a tax rebate of up to $1200.
What remained was the shell of a campaign. Inside it is a candidate who, despite insisting his opponent is one of Australia’s weakest prime ministers, seemed unable or unwilling to summon the strength to break out.
In the final days, as Dutton moved from seat to seat in his government-issued BMW, a pensive brains trust trailing behind in a Mercedes mini-van, what lingered was not momentum or a message but a vacuum of his own making.
Dutton and his team built an airtight campaign, sealed off from risk. Yet in sealing it off, they emptied it out. By the time he approached one of his final stops – in his own outer-Brisbane seat of Dickson, hanging on a knife edge – his message was unchanged and there was almost nothing left inside.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 3, 2025 as "This man is not going to win – probably".
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