Rebranding Peter Dutton: has he done enough to shed ‘heartless hard-ass' image to win top job?

The Guardian

05-04-2025

In the last weeks of winter 2001, Cheryl Kernot was standing in a pavilion shed, preparing to fight for her political life.
Kernot was the Labor incumbent in Dickson, an electorate of sprawling suburbia north of Brisbane, dotted with pockets of semi-rural and industrial land.
The election was three months away and Kernot had set up shop at the Pine Rivers show, an annual fair in Lawnton.
Among the amusement rides, livestock competitions and showbag stands, Kernot and Labor sensed a chance to get their message in front of a large number of voters.
Kernot was battling to hold on to the seat she had won narrowly in 1998, when the national result went against Labor under Kim Beazley's leadership.
But the sands had shifted by 2001. The 9/11 attacks would soon cast a shadow over everything. The Tampa affair was still fresh in voters' memories.
The politics of division held potency like never before.
And the Liberals were ready to capitalise. The party mailed Dickson voters, warning them Labor was 'soft on illegal immigration'.
The Coalition brought out the big guns – Peter Costello and Amanda Vanstone, among others – to campaign in the seat and preselected a young challenger: a former Queensland cop whom Kernot and her team knew next to nothing about.
His name was Peter Dutton.
Kernot remembers speaking to showgoers inside the pavilion when she noticed something strange.
Dutton, she says, was leaning over a wheelie bin, in her direct line of sight. He and a Liberal colleague were watching her as she spoke with her constituents.
'It was unusual behaviour for a candidate, I think,' she says. 'They were assessing who was stopping at my stall, they were monitoring me.'
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It wasn't Kernot's first unusual encounter with the man who would soon unseat her.
Sometime earlier, she was holding a press conference outside a post office that was at risk of closure. As she spoke to journalists, a van pulled up close by.
'He roared up in a van and jumped out, and … started interrupting the press conference and contradicting me,' Kernot remembers.
'Again, it was a slightly unorthodox way of campaigning in those days.'
Dutton achieved a swing of 6% and unseated a shadow minister as the Coalition under John Howard was returned to office.
Dutton, who has held the seat ever since, later described the 2001 campaign as 'robust'. He did not respond to a request for an interview for this profile.
Kernot says her experience in 2001 formed her view of Dutton's style of politics and she has seen nothing in the years since to persuade her that he has changed.
'He's just a natural head kicker,' she says. 'And I think the one thing that frustrates me most about his rise to where he is, is that he's got there without any massive scrutiny of his policy.
'He always played the politics and never the policy. And he just got away with it.'
Ask the Liberal MP Warren Entsch about Dutton and he will tell you two stories he says run counter to the prevailing narrative.
Stories that, in Entsch's eyes, show the 'heartless hard-ass' image attributed to Dutton is false.
First, Entsch says Dutton helped chart a path forward when Malcolm Turnbull was Liberal leader and marriage equality supporters such as Entsch were becoming despondent at the deadlock in parliament on the issue.
'It was Dutton who came to me and said, 'Entschy, we've got to get this off the agenda. What are your thoughts on a postal plebiscite? I said I tried to get that past Tony [Abbott] and he refused to do it. So I said, do you think you can get it past [Turnbull],' Entsch remembers. 'He said, 'yes I can'.'
Entsch says Dutton told him: 'What you've got to understand is that if we do a postal plebiscite it won't have to go through the Senate.'
'I give him full credit for it,' Entsch says. 'He is astute.'
Many marriage equality campaigners viewed the postal vote as unnecessary and a process that caused pain to LGBTQ+ communities.
But Dutton's former chief of staff Trevor Evans, who went on to become Queensland's first out gay MP, said marriage equality would not have happened without his former boss.
'That might surprise people,' he told the ABC in 2022.
One Liberal MP who sat in government with Dutton, who declined to be named so he could speak freely, says Dutton has a 'pragmatic streak that occasionally comes through'.
'Marriage equality was one of those moments. Otherwise, I did find him to be doctrinaire on some issues,' the MP says.
'In general, he was a little more hard-nosed than I thought he might be. He is not religiously motivated, which can often make you more inflexible.'
Entsch's second anecdote relates to Dutton's intervention to help a fugitive, Patton Eidson.
Eidson had been living in the small town of Julatten in far north Queensland, using the name Mike McGoldrick and running a spa retreat that was the town's biggest employer. He was a much-loved figure in the community, law-abiding and respectable.
Eidson had also been wanted by the US for three decades, having been convicted 32 years earlier for his involvement in an operation running marijuana between Thailand and the US.
In 2017, when Dutton was immigration minister, police arrested Eidson and he was held in immigration detention.
The arrest prompted an outpouring of support and pleas to Dutton to intervene and help Eidson return to Australia once he had dealt with the outstanding charges in the US.
Entsch had met Eidson and became convinced he was rehabilitated and an asset to Australia.
He implored Dutton to intervene and help.
Dutton agreed.
'Once Mr Eidson is back onshore, my powers to intervene will be enlivened and I undertake to grant Mr Eidson a permanent visa, subject to Mr Eidson have been of good character in the intervening time,' Dutton wrote, in a letter seen by the Guardian.
Entsch is now preparing to retire after a long career in parliament.
He pulls no punches as he says the way Dutton is portrayed in the media is 'bloody totally inappropriate'.
'It always projected him as a heartless hard-ass,' he says. 'Nothing could be further from the truth.'
Not everyone is so glowing.
Apande Bol Gong, who is of South Sudanese origin, lives in Dickson.
In 2018, after Dutton blamed 'African gangs' for trapping scared Melburnians in their homes, unable to go out for dinner, she tried and failed to secure a meeting with her local MP.
She wanted to explain to Dutton what his words had done to her children.
'We left our country because of government persecution, and now the very people who are supposed to be protecting us are throwing us to the wolves, wolves being the racists who already didn't want us in the country,' she says.
She remembers her 15-year-old son confiding in her that, during a family trip to South Sudan, he had felt safe for the first time.
'He said 'for the first time, I didn't feel like I was a suspect'.'
She doesn't think Dutton's 'African gangs' comments were motivated by anything other than politics.
'That's the sad part. I don't see him as a bad man, I just see him as an opportunist politician,' she says. 'Where he sees members of his own electorate as an opportunity to win votes from others who may be biased against them … it's fine to throw other people under the bus to get what you want.'
Dutton declined to back down or apologise in 2023.
Maker Mayek, a lawyer and South Sudanese community leader in Melbourne, says he remembers children being bullied in schools after the 'African gangs' controversy.
Families were denied rental properties. Young South Sudanese men were reported as suspicious simply for being in public spaces, he says.
Mayek says Dutton's actions showed he was prepared to tar an entire community to make a political point.
'More than ever before, Australia needs a leader who can unite,' Mayek says. 'A leader who looks after the interests of all Australians. Not a leader who panders to a particular section of the Australian society. It will be a catastrophic mistake to elect Mr Dutton as the prime minister.'
Critics of Dutton see consistent threads running through his career.
In his maiden parliamentary speech on 13 February 2002 he spoke of economic aspiration and the hard work of his middle-class parents. He spoke of his natural attraction to the Liberal party's embrace of 'principles of individualism and reward for achievement'.
He also railed against political correctness and a 'sometimes overtolerant society'. He criticised generational welfare dependency.
Dutton attacked refugee activists and civil libertarians, describing the Council for Civil Liberties as the 'criminal lawyers media operative'.
He spoke of crime, at length, and attacked judges for weak sentencing. He called for more rights and powers for police.
At one point, he suggested crime had become so bad that it was 'causing older Australians to barricade themselves in their homes'.
Dutton also left no doubt about the source for much of his worldview: his experience in the Queensland police.
Dutton graduated from the Queensland police academy in 1990, one year after the Fitzgerald inquiry uncovered widespread bribery and corruption in the force.
The young recruit had previously struggled at university and joined the Young Liberals in 1988, aged 18, soon becoming the chair of the Bayside Young Liberals.
In the state election a year later he ran unsuccessfully in the safe Labor seat of Lytton.
Dutton spent nine years with the police. At times he was sent north to Townsville, and has recounted the impact of attending family violence incidents involving Indigenous Australians. On Palm Island, he has said, he brought back the body of an Indigenous woman who had been pushed off a cliff.
In 2023, he cited those experiences to help justify his decision not to attend the chamber for the apology to the Stolen Generations 15 years earlier.
'In 2008, I'd been out of the Queensland Police Force for about nine years and I was still – and probably truthfully to this day still – live with those images of turning up to domestic violence incidences where Indigenous women and children had suffered physical abuse, certainly mental abuse,' he said.
His police career took him to the National Crime Authority, a federal law enforcement body set up to tackle organised crime, and the drug and child sex offenders squads. In 1998, he flipped his unmarked Mazda during a police pursuit.
The crash left him in hospital with lasting injuries, and ended his career.
One former colleague says Dutton's time in the police taught him skills he has deployed repeatedly, and to great effect, during his political career.
'I don't think he has breadth or depth to be an effective prime minister,' the former colleague says. 'But what he does have instead of intelligence is good cunning or instinct, he knows when he has to attack and when he has to defend.
'Like a lot of cops, he has a good ability to identify vulnerabilities, and he'll find that vulnerability and go for it.'
Dutton's abilities helped him rise quickly through the ranks of the Liberal party.
Within three years of being elected, he was made minister for workforce participation in the Howard government.
True to his maiden speech, he targeted what he described as welfare dependency, forcing more disability support pensioners back into the workforce or on to Newstart.
When Howard lost power, Dutton was given senior shadow cabinet positions under Brendan Nelson and later Malcolm Turnbull. But it was under Tony Abbott that Dutton's political career achieved real prominence.
He was first made health minister, before taking on immigration in 2014 and home affairs in 2017.
As a cabinet minister, Dutton endured repeated scandals, some purely of his own making.
In September 2015, he was caught on a boom microphone joking about rising sea levels in the Pacific, comments that outraged Pacific leaders.
'Time doesn't mean anything when you're about to have water lapping at your door,' he joked to Abbott and Scott Morrison.
He later apologised 'to anyone who may have taken offence' over the comments.
In 2016, he accidentally texted the News Corp journalist Samantha Maiden calling her a 'mad fucking witch'. The text had been intended for a Coalition colleague, Jamie Briggs, and he later apologised to Maiden.
In 2018, Dutton provoked more international outrage when he called for Australia to treat white South African farmers as refugees. He said they needed humanitarian assistance from a 'civilised country'. His comments followed allegations that a 'white genocide' was taking place in the country, a theory South African courts have since ruled to be 'clearly imagined'.
Dutton's comments prompted the South African foreign ministry to summon Australia's high commissioner and demand a 'full retraction'. They were also at odds with the stance his own department was taking in asylum seeker cases.
Later that year, Dutton came under fire for 2015 decisions to grant visas to three au pairs in unusual circumstances.
He was accused of intervening to save an au pair from deportation after the AFL's chief executive officer, Gillon McLachlan, raised the young woman's case. A Senate inquiry that investigated two of the cases recommended he be censured for 'failing to observe fairness in making official decisions as required by the Statement of Ministerial Standards'.
Late in the Canberra winter of 2018, Dutton stood in front of the cameras and began his great rebranding project.
Dutton had just made an unsuccessful strike at the prime ministership and moved to the backbench.
He was finally free, he said, of the ministerial positions that cast him as the hard man.
Now, he was here to show the world his softer side, a bid to win back moderate Liberals and seats taken by teal candidates.
'It is good to be in front of the cameras where I can smile, and maybe show a different side to what I show when I talk about border protection,' he said.
It was a jarring line. One that brought ridicule. Twitter users soon dredged up a 2011 tweet from Dutton warning Julia Gillard to be cautious of colleagues trying to sell a 'softer' side at a time of leadership turmoil. But it was an essential step in a longer-term strategy to rebrand Dutton.
At the time, focus groups were suggesting even voters in his own electorate viewed him as 'uncompromising', 'hard' and 'cruel'.
In an interview with the Guardian earlier that year, Dutton had flagged ambitions to be prime minister and discussed transforming himself from a divisive politician into a national leader, saying he had 'a desire to bring people together' but not if it meant abandoning principle.
'The worst thing you can do in this job is try and please everybody,' Dutton said. 'Paul Keating was … asked to abandon his views around the republic, around Aboriginal land rights and issues around aspects the economy or whatever, and he stood for what he believed in. People voted for or against him on that basis. So sometimes [when there is] a little bit of sanctimony in these judgments about what I should do … there's a whole history of Liberal and Labor politicians in this country that have expressed their views and not everybody agrees with them.'
When Dutton won the Liberal leadership in May 2022, he put further effort into softening his image.
He conceded he had 'made a mistake' by boycotting the apology to the Stolen Generations.
Dutton spoke of leading a broad church – uniting moderates and conservatives – and needing to win back the teal votes of electorates such as Kooyong, North Sydney and Wentworth.
In April 2023, Dutton faced his first major test. Alan Tudge, the former human services minister, had resigned, triggering a byelection in the safe Liberal seat of Aston.
Labor won in a historic upset. It was the first time in a century that an opposition has lost a seat to the government in a byelection.
But lingering doubts about Dutton's effectiveness as an opposition leader were dispelled later that year.
His key role in defeating the voice referendum suggested he had an edge over Anthony Albanese as a political campaigner.
The result helped cement his leadership, particularly among conservatives, and exposed political misjudgment on Labor's part.
But it also raised the question: could Dutton the wrecker, the voice antagonist-in-chief, still present as moderate enough to win back teal voters at an election 18 months later?
The polls increasingly put Dutton in strong contention throughout 2024 as Albanese's government struggled with rising inflation and the cost-of-living crisis.
One senior Liberal source in Victoria put his improving profile down to perceptions around his decisiveness.
'Some of what Peter is projecting has worked,' the source said. 'Maybe not everything, but that decisiveness appeals to a lot of voters in Victoria, even if they're not Liberal voters, they kind of respect it.
'It doesn't explain everything, but it does help to explain why he's doing a lot better in Victoria.'
Another former Liberal told Guardian Australia that Dutton was tactically astute within the party room. As colleagues pinged texts between each other about internal matters, Dutton rarely put anything in writing. He built friendships across the party.
Dutton seemed to have put the Coalition in a winning position.
Kos Samaras, an expert pollster and former Victorian Labor strategist, says Dutton, like all political leaders, is defined to some extent by his former positions in government and opposition.
He describes him as a 'very effective opposition leader'.
'But now that the election campaign has started the challenge for Dutton is to demonstrate to voters that he has the necessary leadership attributes for the job of prime minister,' he says. 'The best path for Dutton is to show the electorate that he offers hope, particularly economic hope which gives voters more economic empowerment.'
In the first weeks of the campaign Dutton has faltered, struggling to articulate clear policy goals, and the Coalition's poll numbers have sagged. Still, he remains a good chance of at least forcing Labor into minority government, if not bringing down a one-term government.
The 2001 battle for Dickson is ancient political history. Kernot has had little to do with Dutton since.
But, on a recent trip to parliament in Canberra with her grandson, she was close enough to draw his attention.
'Peter Dutton waved to us, we were in the front seat,' she said. 'And I thought, 'God, we've come full circle now, Cheryl.'
'I'm no threat – but if you are a threat, my goodness.'