‘Reeks of desperation’: Dutton’s marriage mocked in Labor attack ad

Victorian Labor Party state secretary Steve Staikos played down the personal nature of the meme, stating “it’s not a personal attack, that’s a mischaracterisation of the post”.

“It’s a screenshot from a newspaper article that they [the Duttons] willingly participated in. It was posted as a bit of commentary, like a lot of memes are, by all political parties.”

He did not say whether the post would be withdrawn.

Much like Anthony Albanese’s partner, Jodie Haydon, Kirilly Dutton rarely grants interviews and rarely appears alongside her husband at public events. The couple have also jealously guarded the privacy of their three children.

As a leading conservative, Dutton has long been seen as a drag on the Coalition’s vote in Victoria, Australia’s most progressive state, and he was roundly criticised in 2018 for his claims that people in Melbourne were “scared to go out to restaurants of a nighttime because they are followed home by these gangs”.

The loss of the Melbourne seat of Aston in a 2023 byelection and the failure to win Dunkley in the 2024 byelection exacerbated fears within the Coalition about Dutton’s ability to win over voters in Melbourne, where the party holds just a handful of metropolitan seats.

But as federal Labor’s standing has fallen across the country, the Coalition has become more confident about claiming four metropolitan and outer suburban seats in Melbourne, including Aston, Chisholm, McEwen and Goldstein, in next year’s election.

A quarterly analysis of the Resolve Political Monitor shows that Labor’s primary vote has fallen from 33 to 29 per cent in Victoria, while voters in the state gave the Coalition its biggest boost in support since the 2022 election among the mainland states, lifting its primary vote from 33 to 38 per cent.

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