Q: Under your leadership the Liberal Party has shifted away from its traditional base at the big end of town and towards lower and middle income earners. Polls suggest this strategy is paying off with big potentially in Werriwa, Whitlam and Melton. Has the Liberal Party now become the true party of working Australians and is this a permanent realignment do you think, or is it just a reaction to the cost of living crisis?

Peter Dutton:

I made this point when I first became Liberal leader that we weren’t the party of the big end of town. That is for the Labor Party, that is the relationship between the big unions and big business. We are the party of small and medium enterprise.

We are the champion of a local small micro business that wants to become a medium size business and list one day or sell out to a bigger company.

We are the party of not just small businesses but also battling Australians and for the millions of forgotten Australians living in the suburbs and regions, they see a Prime Minister who is obsessed with pleasing green voters in inner city Sydney and Melbourne.

This Prime Minister hasn’t blinked when that claim has been made against him. He has deliberately sided with green voters in inner city Sydney and Melbourne to hang these people out to dry in regional areas. He didn’t introduce the cut to fuel tax.

We are proposing that because it will help families who are driving long distances to work or to school and running kids around on the weekend.

We are the party giving $1200 back by way of tax rebate to help those families in outer metropolitan areas. I don’t know how many years it would have been since a Liberal leader has been to Melton? Quite a few, I would have thought.

For us and if you look at the work Laurence has done here, these regions are naturally swinging to the Liberal Party because people know that the Labor Party is for inner city green trendies, not for outer suburb hard workers. That is what the Liberal Party is about and that is the choice people have at this election.