Meanwhile, Peter Dutton has signalled that he wants to live in Kirribilli House, not the Lodge. ‘I think you’d take Sydney any day over Canberra’ he said in an interview for Sydney’s KIIS FM radio.

It is all highly on brand for the opposition leader, who has made an obvious strategy of wooing Sydneysiders and indulging in Canberra-bashing already. Some have called NSW ‘the state to watch’ in this election.

Promising via a Sydney radio interview that he will live in Sydney rather than Canberra is an easy and zero-cost way of showing preferment. This signalling matters especially for Dutton as a Queenslander, but previous prime ministers, particularly John Howard, have made a point of staying at Kirribilli House instead of The Lodge where possible. Malcolm Turnbull preferred his own harbourside home in Point Piper, though he attracted plenty of criticism for this.

It’s not all about politics. Australian politicians have long complained that the Lodge is an international embarrassment. Paul Keating complained that neither The Lodge nor Kirribilli were appropriate for his young family. The Lodge was thoroughly renovated in 2015, but this did little for its reputation. In 2018 the University of Canberra and the Gallery of Australian Design ran an architecture competition to see if members of the public had better visions for a lakeside residence fit for Australia’s head of government. Polling from the Australia Institute has previously shown that more than half of Australians expect their leader to live in The Lodge. When Anthony Albanese chose to establish himself there, it sent a clear signal about the value of the national capital for the country as a whole.