Peter Dutton

Peter Craig Dutton (born 18 November 1970) is an Australian former politician who served as the leader of the Opposition and the leader of the Liberal Party from 2022 to 2025. He was the member of parliament (MP) for the Queensland division of Dickson from 2001 to 2025. Dutton previously held various ministerial positions in the Howard, Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison governments.

Dutton grew up in Brisbane. He worked as a police officer in the Queensland Police for nearly a decade upon leaving school, and later ran a construction business with his father. He joined the Liberal Party as a teenager and was elected to the House of Representatives at the 2001 election, aged 30. Following the 2004 election, he was appointed as Minister for Employment Participation. In January 2006, Dutton was promoted to Assistant Treasurer under Peter Costello. After the defeat of the Liberal-National Coalition at the 2007 election, he was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Minister for Health, a role he held for the next six years.

Upon the victory of the Coalition at the 2013 election, Dutton was appointed Minister for Health and Minister for Sport. He was moved to the role of Minister for Immigration and Border Protection in December 2014, where he played a key role in overseeing Operation Sovereign Borders. He was kept in that position after Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott as prime minister in September 2015. In December 2017, he was also given the new role of Minister for Home Affairs, heading a new "super" department with broad responsibilities brought together from other existing departments.

After the defeat of Abbott, Dutton became widely seen as the leader of the conservative faction in the Liberal Party, and began to be spoken of as a potential leader. In August 2018, after a period of poor opinion polling for the Coalition, Dutton unsuccessfully challenged Turnbull for the leadership. He then was defeated by Scott Morrison in a second leadership ballot days later after Turnbull chose to resign. He was retained as Minister for Home Affairs by Morrison, later becoming Minister for Defence and Leader of the House in March 2021. Dutton went on to succeed Morrison as party leader unopposed after the Coalition's defeat at the 2022 election, becoming leader of the opposition. He was the first Liberal leader to come from Queensland, and the first leader since Alexander Downer to represent a seat outside New South Wales. Dutton led the Coalition to a landslide defeat at the 2025 Australian federal election, reducing the Coalition's 58 seats in 2022 to 43 of 150. Dutton himself lost his own seat of Dickson to Labor candidate Ali France, becoming the first federal Opposition Leader to be voted out by an election. He is also the second incumbent Liberal leader to be voted out by an election after John Howard.

Early life and education

Peter Craig Dutton was born on 18 November 1970 in Boondall, Queensland, a northern suburb of Brisbane, to Bruce Dutton and Ailsa Leitch. Dutton is the great-great-grandson of the pastoralist squatter and politician Charles Boydell Dutton. He is also a descendant of Captain Richard James Coley, who was Queensland's first Sergeant-at-Arms, who built Brisbane's first private dwelling and who gave evidence confirming the mass poisonings of Aboriginal Australians at Kilcoy in 1842.

He is the eldest of five children. His father worked as a builder, and his mother worked in childcare. Dutton finished high school at the Anglican St Paul's School, Bald Hills. He worked cash in hand at a butcher shop during his school years, and his parents separated shortly after he graduated.

Dutton joined the Young Liberals in 1988 aged 18. He became the policy vice-chair of the Bayside Young Liberals the following year and chair of the branch in 1990. At the 1989 Queensland state election, the 19-year-old Dutton ran unsuccessfully as the Liberal candidate against Tom Burns, a former state Labor leader, in the safe Labor seat of Lytton.

According to a leaked transcript of his academic record, in 1989 Dutton failed four of six subjects in his first year of a Bachelor of Business degree at Queensland University of Technology. This prompted him to join the police force and study business part time, graduating a decade later.

Career prior to politics

Police career

Dutton graduated from the Queensland Police Academy in 1990. He was a Queensland Police officer for nearly a decade, working in the drug squad in Brisbane in the early 1990s. He also worked in the sex offenders squad and with the National Crime Authority. In 1999, Dutton left the Queensland Police, having reached the rank of detective senior constable. Documentation filed in the District Court of Queensland in 2000 describes his resignation as being prompted by a loss of driving confidence after a car crash in August 1998. During a covert surveillance operation, he rolled his unmarked Mazda 626 car while in pursuit of an escaped prisoner who was driving erratically. Dutton suffered numerous injuries in the accident, and was hospitalised briefly and bedridden for a week. He sought damages of A$250,000, equivalent to A$472,006 in 2022, from the escaped prisoner's insurance company but dropped the claim in 2005.

Business activities

On leaving the police, he and his father founded the business Dutton Holdings, which was registered in 2000; it operated under six different trading and business names. The company bought, renovated, and converted buildings into childcare centres. In 2002 it sold three childcare centres to the now defunct ABC Learning, which continued to pay annual rent of A$100,000, equivalent to A$165,647 in 2022, to Dutton Holdings. Dutton Holdings continued to trade under the name Dutton Building & Development.

Howard government (2001–07)

Backbencher, 2001–2004

In early 2001, Dutton won Liberal preselection for the seat of Dickson in Brisbane's northern suburbs, reportedly with the support of Liberal powerbroker Santo Santoro. He was elected to the House of Representatives at the 2001 election, aged 30. He defeated the high-profile incumbent Australian Labor Party (ALP) MP Cheryl Kernot, a shadow cabinet minister and former leader of the Australian Democrats, with Dickson regarded as a key target seat for the Coalition.

Dutton's first overseas trip as an MP was a visit to the site of the September 11 attacks in New York City. In his maiden speech in February 2002 he stated that the "silent majority" and "forgotten people" were dissatisfied with "the boisterous minority and the politically correct" and "the dictatorship of the trade union movement". He was also critical of members of the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, who he said were "obsessed with the rights of criminals yet do not utter a word of understanding or compassion for the victims of crime".

Dutton had a relatively high profile as a first-term backbencher. He was appointed to the House Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs in 2002 and served on an inquiry into family law and the Child Support Agency, where he advocated for lawyers to have less of a role in determining parental custody. The inquiry's report was publicly criticised by Alastair Nicholson, the chief justice of the Family Court of Australia, who said its proposals were "impractical and naive".

Dutton also spoke frequently on crime topics, including supporting the death penalty for the perpetrators of the 2002 Bali bombings and supporting legislation that would allow businesses to refuse service to drug addicts. In 2004, following the High Court decision in R v Carroll, he accompanied Faye Kennedy, the mother of murdered infant Deidre Kennedy, on a statewide tour to promote "Deirdre's Law", which sought to amend the double jeopardy provisions of Queensland's criminal code.

Minister, 2004–2007

On 26 October 2004, Dutton was appointed Minister for Workforce Participation in the Howard government, following the Coalition's re-election at the 2004 election. He was seen as politically close to Prime Minister John Howard. In July 2005, he was one of the few government ministers to support Howard's suggestion that a national identity card be introduced as an anti-terrorism measure, with a number of cabinet ministers publicly opposing the idea.

Dutton was responsible for the government's suite of "welfare-to-work" policies, which were intended to break generational poverty and welfare dependency. In November 2004, he flagged that the government would be looking at measures to encourage disability support pensioners to enter the workforce. The following year he announced that disability support pensioners deemed capable of working more than 15 hours per week would be moved to the Newstart Allowance. Changes were also made to rules for single parents, with recipients required to prove that they were not in a de facto relationship or face a reduced payment. In April 2005, Dutton announced that single parents would be required to seek employment once their youngest children entered school or receive a decrease in welfare payments. He stated that the changes were necessary to "ensure welfare dependency is not entrenched".