Peter Dutton - border protector, banisher of bikies, former Queensland cop and the enemy of African gangs - is about as cuddly as a pine cone, or a hardy steel brush.

It’s not his fault - he has spent his parliamentary career, all 17 years of it, doing the kinds of jobs that are difficult to leverage into popularity, in the traditional, getting-people-to-like-you sense.

As health minister he tried to introduce the loathed $7 Medicare co-payment. As immigration minister, he has presided over unrest on Manus Island, reportedly depressed asylum seeker children, and asylum seeker deaths.

Former home affairs minister Peter Dutton says he is looking forward to smiling more. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

There are also the gangs - the African ones in Victoria, the ones which make the bourgeois business of dining out so dangerous, in his view. And there is the fact that Dutton boycotted the apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008, a move which didn’t so much place him on the wrong side of history as in a totally different time stamp.