Dutton wanted to show his soft side, and let slip a property humblebrag
By Lucy Macken
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when well-established homeowners reminisce about their first home they will slip into a humblebrag about their property prowess.
New Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was a police academy graduate when he bought his first home at 20.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Incoming Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton did just that on Tuesday when, during a press conference to try out his new, softer image, he instead talked about his first foray into the property market as a teenager.
“I started part-time work at a butcher shop after school until I started university,” he said. “I saved and bought a house at 19 and built a business from nothing to ultimately employ 40 people.”
In fact, property records show Dutton was a recent police academy graduate when he bought his first home, paying $93,000 for an apartment in Brisbane’s riverside suburb of Yeronga.
At the time, the median house price in Brisbane was $113,000, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Two years later, Dutton made a 25 per cent gain on that apartment when he sold it for $116,500, despite Brisbane’s median only rising 14 per cent in that time.
Peter Dutton sold his beachfront getaway on the Gold Coast a year ago for $6 million.
Like so many of his generation since then, Dutton has done well from Australia’s soaring property values of the past three decades, in some cases making multimillion-dollar capital gains as Brisbane’s median house price has steadily risen to its current median of $831,000.
The Dutton home is now a farm north of Brisbane in Dayboro, in his Dickson electorate, that was previously known as Juffs Farm before it was sold off as a deceased estate in 2020.
Dutton and his wife Kirilly bought a 68-hectare portion of Juffs Farm for $2.165 million, but soon afterwards drew the ire of locals.
The riverfront property was best known in Dayboro for its popular swimming hole, but in 2021 The Courier Mail reported the family-friendly spot had been wrecked by close personal protection officers chasing people off.
Peter and Kirilly bought a $2.7 million pad in Brisbane’s Riparian Plaza last year.Credit:
Dutton later claimed that “liability issues” prevented locals from returning to their favourite swimming hole.
The Duttons also own a three-bedroom apartment in Brisbane’s Riparian Plaza tower, purchased a year ago for $2.7 million from Toowoomba millionaire John Wagner.
Dutton has bought and sold a dozen houses and apartments since he was 20, of which his second was a 1970s brick house in Murrumba Downs. Purchased with his dad Bruce Dutton in 1993 for $60,000, it was sold two years later for $175,000.
Mount Cotton, south of Brisbane, followed in 1995 with a $45,700 property that was sold in 2002 for $202,000, after he was obliged to move to his Dickson electorate where he had been elected a year earlier.
His next home was a four-bedroom house with a pool in Albany Creek purchased in 2002 for $280,000, and sold two years later for $445,000 following his marriage to Kirilly and their move to $710,000 acreage in Camp Mountain.
The Camp Mountain family home on the outskirts of Brisbane was sold in early 2020 for $1.8 million.
Last year a beachfront house in Palm Beach on the Gold Coast, that the Duttons bought in 2014 for $2.325 million, was sold for $6 million – making the couple their most handsome return yet.
Even better for the Duttons is the fact that most of these properties were his home, so there was likely no capital gains tax on the sale results.
correction
This article has been updated since first published to correct an earlier version that stated that Peter Dutton was 20 when he bought his first home.