It took just over two hours to call time on Peter Dutton's two decades in federal politics

In the end it took just two hours to call time on two decades in politics. 

Opposition leader Peter Dutton lost the Brisbane seat he has held for 24 years to Labor, one of a long list of Coalition casualties in a landslide victory that delivered the government a second term. 

The Dickson result — which came in just hours after polls closed and shortly after the race was called in Labor's favour — makes Mr Dutton the first opposition leader in Australian history to lose their own seat at a federal election.

"Twenty-four years is a long time in public life and that is an amazing honour," he told party faithful in his home city as he conceded the loss on Saturday night.

"I thank the Australian people for the faith they have placed in me."

It was a devastatingly quick downfall for a man who not long ago was plausibly in the running to be Australia's next prime minister after a long career on the Coalition frontbench. 

The early days of Dutton

Peter Craig Dutton was born at the dawn of the 70s and spent his childhood in the suburbs of Brisbane, where he has lived ever since.

He joined the Young Liberals at just 18. Shortly afterwards, in 1989, he ran for office for the first time in the Queensland state seat of Lytton. Up against former Labor leader Tom Burns, the first-year university student stood little chance.

The defeat set him on a very different vocational path, but one that would end up underpinning his future political persona. 

Mr Dutton joined the Queensland Police Force the following year. He would stay there for almost a decade, achieving the rank of Detective Senior Constable before resigning in 1999 after he was injured in a car chase with an escaped prisoner.

His time on the force coloured his world view, the now 54-year-old has said, regularly harking back to it. 

"I can remember going to crime scenes when a young girl had been raped and to this day you can still remember the full name of the victim," he told the ABC in 2023.

"The viciousness of some people, the depravity of others, it's a small element of society, thank goodness, but it does stay with you because it jars and I think it scars as well."

After handing in his badge, he joined his father's construction business. Then in 2001, more than a decade after his first electoral punt, Mr Dutton was back on the ballot with a law and order agenda — this time for federal parliament.

Two decades in Dickson

Dutton beat Labor's Cheryl Kernot in the outer Brisbane seat of Dickson, which he held until Saturday night, with 45 per cent of the vote.

The young politician met his wife, Kirilly, the same year and they would go on to have two sons together. Mr Dutton had already been married and divorced and his former partner was pregnant with their daughter when they got together. 

Mr Dutton's maiden speech to parliament gave some clues on where his political career would go. More than two decades later, some lines sound almost identical to comments he's made on the campaign trail. 

Unacceptable crime rates had caused "older Australians to barricade themselves in their homes", he said, observing that democracy was at risk from a "boisterous, politically correct" minority.

The hungry, young politician caught the eye of then prime minister John Howard. Within three years, he landed his first ministerial position in the workforce participation portfolio, before being appointed assistant treasurer and revenue minister.

Mr Dutton was the only opposition frontbencher to boycott Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008, something he later said he regrets.

Under Tony Abbott, he was promoted to cabinet as the sport and health minister, during which time he controversially proposed a Medicare co-payment, a plan that was later abandoned. Throughout the recent campaign, Labor sought to focus attention on Mr Dutton's time as health minister as a contrast to their Medicare-heavy agenda.

His time in parliament was dotted with controversy. In 2015, a hot mic caught him joking about rising sea levels in the Pacific, comments that were remembered by the Palau president during the campaign. The following year, he accidentally sent a text to a female journalist calling her a "mad f**king witch".

Defining ministerial role

After three years as immigration minister, Mr Dutton was put in charge of home affairs — a newly created super portfolio that brought the country's biggest security and intelligence agencies together.

The role, perhaps more than any other, would come to define him in the eyes of the public. 

Mr Dutton's leadership aspirations became clear in 2018 when, following a turbulent few years, he launched a leadership coup against moderate Malcolm Turnbull. 

The then prime minister edged out Mr Dutton, prompting him to resign from cabinet. But Mr Dutton was not satisfied and over the next few days his supporters continued to rally support for a second spill.

That vote — less than four days later — handed Scott Morrison the party's leadership. Mr Dutton's final ministerial promotion before taking the leadership came in 2021, when Mr Morrison made him defence minister, a position he had long coveted.

Uniting a fractured party

In the aftermath of the last federal election, which saw the Coalition's holdings decimated by an unprecedented wall of so-called "teal" independents, few would have speculated that a Liberal leader would find themselves plausibly in the running to take over within three years.

The Coalition had lost 19 seats, dropping them down to a meagre 58, at the time the worst election result for the party in 70 years. The lashing was widely attributed to Mr Morrison's personal popularity, or lack thereof.

Mr Morrison dutifully took himself to the backbench, before leaving politics altogether at the start of last year, but caught up in the carnage was most of the Liberal party's moderate wing, including some hailed as future leaders like former treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

Left standing on the rubble of the broad church after retaining his own seat with just 51.7 per cent of the two-party preferred vote was Mr Dutton — a hardline conservative who until then was most known for boycotting the apology to the Stolen Generation, stopping the boats and his role in the au pair visa saga. 

When it came time to anoint a new leader, he ran unopposed.

"Our policies will be squarely aimed at the forgotten Australians in the suburbs across Australia," he said at the time. "I want our country to support aspiration and reward hard work, take proper care of those Australians who, short-term or long-term, can't take care of themselves."

The challenge facing Mr Dutton was immense: not only did he have to convince the remaining moderates that he was the right man for the job, he had to find a way to bring a splintered Coalition in opposition for the first time in a decade back together.

Meanwhile, Labor started its term on a high, buoyed by a historic win in the outer Melbourne seat of Aston almost a year after the federal election. It was the first time in more than a century that a government had won a seat from the opposition at a by-election.

The result was viewed as an indictment of the Liberal Party and Mr Dutton's leadership.

But a shift was coming. 

Sinking the Voice referendum

On election night, months earlier, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had set up what would end up being the defining moment of his first term: Australia would go to a referendum over whether to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the constitution.

For Mr Dutton, the decision to back or oppose the government's proposition would be equally consequential.

After months of ruminations, that call came in April 2023. Mr Dutton announced he would support the No campaign, labelling it "the prime minister's divisive Voice" — a characterisation he has wheeled out ever since — that would "re-racialise our nation". No referendum had ever succeeded in Australia without bipartisan support.

In deciding on a course of action, the opposition leader seemed to find his own voice, even if members of his party publicly disagreed with him. Retired senior Liberal figures and state leaders voiced their opposition, while the Coalition's then Indigenous Australians spokesperson Julian Leeser quit the frontbench so he could campaign for change.

Then, on October 14, 2023 — almost exactly at the halfway point of the parliamentary term — the referendum was resoundingly defeated. 

It marked a turning point for the government and the Coalition: Mr Dutton was vindicated and Labor would spend months trying to claw its way back in the polls.

War, social unrest and economic turmoil

As 2024 kicked off, wars continued to rage in Gaza and Ukraine, while at home, the cost-of-living crisis rolled on unabated, spurred by successive interest rate hikes.

On the first sitting day of parliament for the year, Mr Dutton shrugged off Mr Turnbull's description of him as a "thug" and waved through the government's changes to the stage 3 tax cuts.

The Coalition found fertile ground in the cost-of-living crisis, which began during the Morrison government but continued for much of Labor's term. Borrowing a phrase from Donald Trump's campaign, the opposition leader regularly asked voters variants of "are you better off now than you were three years ago?". 

Then, midway through the year, Mr Dutton unveiled his most ambitious policy yet: if elected, the Coalition promised to introduce nuclear into Australia's energy mix for the first time, promising to build reactors on seven sites around the country. 

The proposal was met with scepticism from some experts and opposed by the premiers, who would need to overturn state nuclear bans before the project could go ahead.

As calls for further detail about the policy grew louder, Mr Dutton directed his attention to the NZYQ High Court decision, which saw a number of convicted criminals released from immigration detention, and the brewing social unrest sparked by the war in Gaza. 

In August, he took aim at the Gazan asylum seekers arriving in Australia, alluding to possible Hamas affiliations and calling for them to be banned. 

He simultaneously ramped up his attacks on the government, blaming them for allowing a rise in anti-Semitism to go unchecked. The political row deepened after an attack on a Melbourne synagogue in December, with the opposition seeking paint Labor as soft on national security and Mr Albanese as culpable due to "weak leadership". 

The times seemed to suit a strongman opposition leader. Mr Dutton was in his preferred territory and his relentless attacks allowed the Coalition to control the narrative for much of the second half of last year.

A rocky campaign

Days after Donald Trump returned to White House in January, Mr Dutton revealed his long-awaited frontbench reshuffle. 

The most notable change was the creation of a new role, Minister for Government Efficiency, an apparent nod to Elon Musk's controversial role in the Trump Administration. 

While Mr Trump's victory in November was initially seen as a bad sign for Mr Albanese, another omen of a global shift towards strongman leaders, that changed once the unpredictable reality of the administration's trade agenda set in. 

Throughout the campaign Mr Dutton would struggle to shake the associations with Mr Trump, despite repeatedly denying he had taken inspiration from the US president. 

But his focus on cutting back the public service appeared to suggest otherwise. Just a week into the campaign, Mr Dutton abandoned his party's policy to force all public servants back into the office full-time after it failed to resonate with voters. 

The leader admitted he had made a mistake, a rare admission in the heat of an election. 

The Coalition's campaign launch sought to present a dual picture of Mr Dutton, painting him as both a tough guy and a emotional family man. In a video that featured his wife and children, Mr Dutton reflected on having his "father's emotional gene, unfortunately".

"I think I've worked pretty hard over the years to hide it, it doesn't really get rewarded in this business, so better off not to show the vulnerabilities," he said.

The video also featured John Howard — who Mr Dutton said he had styled his leadership on. His message and policies were targeted at battlers in outer suburban seats, and in the process, did little to win back the inner-city seats his party lost to independents in 2022.

But on Saturday night it quickly became clear that strategy hadn't worked. 

"We didn't do well enough in this campaign, that much is obvious, and I take full responsibility for that," Mr Dutton said.

"It's been an great honour to be a leader of this amazing party for the past three years."

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