LATIKA M BOURKE: The defining moments of Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton

The battle for the Lodge has been headed by two frontmen who don’t claim to be revolutionaries. Both have indulged in political timidity but an up-close observation of the the pair during the five-week contest has exposed key differences in the way they see themselves and have auditioned for the job.

Peter Dutton, a former cop, primarily views his task, should he win government, as a fixer, the man to clean up a mess he inherited.

Calm and steady, the frequent meditator has zero razzmatazz.

“He’s the most zen leader I’ve ever dealt with,” says one Opposition frontbencher.

But he is hoping voters see a virtue in being methodical.

Anthony Albanese, a lifetime politician, brings a more showman quality to the job.

If he had a choice, he’d opt to be called a builder prime minister. Other than when he is talking raw politics — a topic that makes his eyes light up and demeanour glow — few things bring him alive than discussing infrastructure.

A Northern Territory reporter discovered this when he asked the Prime Minister a question during a campaign stop in Palmerston in the seat of Solomon about local infrastructure.

“When I was the minister, the railway line didn’t go to the Port — we delivered that,” Mr Albanese said confidently.

“And on the way here I went along this little road called Tiger Brennan Drive, you know what Tiger Brennan Drive was before I was the Minister?

“It was a goat track, what I did was convert it into the road that everyone here at this press conference has just driven on.”

It was peak Albo. The can-do, road-building, high-speed rail-loving infrastructure boss across the most obscure details of his old, and clearly favoured, portfolio.

In his quieter moments, he will reflect that he never thought he could be prime minister, something he confirmed out loud on Friday at a campaign stop in the Brisbane seat of Longman.

“Certainly not. I wanted to play half back for Souths. I wasn’t good enough,” he said when asked if he ever thought he’d make it to The Lodge on Friday.

While many of Mr Albanese’s colleagues fear he remains unqualified for both jobs if the Prime Minister once thought he might not have what it takes, he no longer holds any doubt.

He has shown two new qualities these past few weeks — tenacity and new ambition, telling me in a podcast interview that he’d serve out a second term and seek a third if victorious on Saturday.

The determination met resolve in the new year, when the fun-loving prime minister ditched the booze, indulging only in the occasional beer since January.

Mr Albanese is a good-times guy. He loves people, he loves socialising, he adores his sport and he likes a drink.

But more than anything, he loves being prime minister and isn’t shy about saying so in private.

Which is why he shelved going to football games and has filled the ends of his brutally long days with party fundraisers all year.

And it has paid off. He has looked sharper on the campaign trail and match fit.

Only once has he looked like he was losing altitude — at a press conference in Gosford on the New South Wales Central Coast on Monday. But even then, at his most tired he was still fighting like a junkyard dog, grabbing head on a question from The Nightly about his resorting to scare campaigns to win, versus focusing solely on his own record and future agenda.

He was ready for a scrap.

“Peter Dutton yesterday, his rally, there were no policy announcements, nothing positive going forward,” he said.

“And then he went to Channel Seven last night and belled the cat. He went there and said that he needed to abolish bulk billing in order to make primary care sustainable.

“He belled the cat last night. He can’t say where his $600 billion for the nuclear plant is coming from. There will be cuts.”

What Mr Albanese has shown these past weeks is not that he is not so much a political animal but a mongrel.

This has been concealed in the past by his desire, perhaps even desperation, to be liked if not loved. But being a people pleaser can be a self-sabotaging quality in a politician when it acts as a brake on taking painful but necessary decisions.

This is why Mr Albanese would prefer to hide behind the knockabout, DJ Albo image he has carefully cultivated, rather than be a “revolutionary” leader, aimed at transforming the country and leaving behind a Whitlameseuqe, Hawkian or Keating-like legacy.

It is also why most expected him to revive in 2025 the terrible 2019 election campaign and his meek performance during the failed Voice referendum.

During the first week of the campaign, one of the Prime Minister’s closest allies inquired how he was performing.

When the report card was given — a positive but surprised review — they observed wryly: “He wants to win.”

Electoral politics, ultimately is a law of the jungle, and no-one has been more surprised by Mr Albanese’s new-found inner predator than his critics.

After years of gleefully and not unreasonably painting the Prime Minister as “weak”, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton appeared completely unprepared for his rejuvenated opponent.

As the Labor machine unleashed its artillery on the Coalition leader, a former a defence, immigration and home affairs minister, it cleverly used those strongman positions to reframe the would-be prime minister as mean, unkind, dark and Trumpian.

Mr Dutton’s years of dividing and conquering, wedge politics that made sense and worked in security and anxiety-driven portfolios, became leaden weights he seemed incapable of shedding.

It is ironic that Mr Dutton’s record in those portfolios serves both as his greatest perceived strengths but were successfully turned against him by Labor as they made him out to be a hard strongman.

While Mr Dutton’s years baiting journalists he doesn’t like, deploring the “hate media”, targeting Sudanese gangs and teasing lefties left the door wide open to Labor’s foreseeable bombardment, the resulting caricature at the end of the 2025 campaign is not even an outline of what constitutes the Member for Dickson.

Unlike Mr Albanese, Mr Dutton is shy, and it shows. His downtime is meditation, spending time with Ralph, his six-year-old spoodle and boss of the Dutton family, Kirrily and an evening meal or beer with his family.

They have been a constant presence on the trail — his son Harry even fronting a press conference to talk about his housing troubles.

The performative vaudeville of campaigns is not his natural habitat.

When he was at a winery in Tasmania in the seat of Lyons, he was swilling a glass of red wine uncomfortably with his son and daughter, Tom and Bec, the most senior travelling journalist, the Seven Network’s Mark Riley was filming a report for the evening news with Mr Dutton in the background.

When the opposition leader finished sipping from the glass before Riley could record his piece, the cameraman asked Mr Dutton if he’d perform the stunt again so it could make the cut. Mr Dutton declined.

If that was Mr Albanese, he not only would have re-enacted the stunt, he would have carried it over to Riley and bagged himself a spot on primetime news — the Prime Minister keeps count of how many live crosses he’s photobombed on the trail, and is up to around half a dozen.

But it’s only half an act. When the cameras go down, Mr Albanese eagerly mingles and tries to enlarge any group he is in, inviting anyone nearby into whatever conversation he is having.

Mr Dutton prefers quieter forums. At the RSL in his seat of Dickson after Anzac Day he held court with a small group of people including his family. While you are always aware when the Prime Minister is in the room, it’s sometimes possible to miss that Mr Dutton is present.

But people, along with his family, are his motivators too.

When cameras were down at the Townsville RSL, Mr Dutton pulled me into a conversation he was having with a woman who was telling him that she could not get a rental, despite earning $91,000 per year.

Mr Dutton hasn’t stopped talking about her story since.

“I was talking to a lady yesterday, and I think some of you were part of this conversation,” he said.

“She’s on $91,000 a year, not an insignificant wage, she cannot, for love nor money, find a house, right?

“That’s the crisis that this Government’s created.

“I’m going to fix that and we are going to get our country back on track, and we do that by managing the economy well and making sure that we clean up Labor’s mess.”

Later he told me of the woman’s plight: “Some of those things just trigger a reminder of why you’re doing what you’re doing and that all of the crap that goes with the job.”

“Sometimes it puts all of that into perspective because the bigger picture is worth it,” he said.

Builder or fixer, take your pick. It’s undeniable that both men love their families, their dogs, and see politics, a profession they’ve both inhabited for the best part of two decades, as both a love and a service.

Asked what defined the difference between them, Mr Albanese said on Friday: “We’re very different people.”

“I’ve never sought to gain political advantage through what are vulnerable people.”