Meanwhile, the Australian’s Ben Packham is reporting that Andrew Hastie, the shadow defence minister “has refused to walk away from past comments in which he said women should not serve in combat roles in the Australian Defence Force”.

As we reported earlier, in 2018 Hastie, a former SAS officer, said that his personal view was that women should not be in the ADF as “the fighting DNA of a close combat unit is best preserved when it’s exclusively male”.

The Liberals dumped their Whitlam candidate Ben Britton after the Guardian’s Sarah Basford Canales exposed similar comments Britton had made in a podcast interview. Dutton told media today that Hastie had the same view as himself – that women should be allowed to serve in the ADF, but the Australia is reporting that’s not exactly the case.

It’s all going fine.