Dutton hits the right notes in budget reply

It's often claimed the Coalition has a "women problem."

The opposition leader had some policies with that in mind, supporting extra spending on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, $50 million for research on endometriosis, as well as promising higher bulk-billing rates.

There was also extra spending and legislation for domestic violence, knife crime, age verification on the Internet, as well as penalties for using electronic systems to threaten intimate partners and family.

Defence and borders were his last significant pitch.

He brings credibility to this, having been the minister for border security with a much better record than his Labor predecessors and successors.

It is also an area of quiet concern, particularly for the generation whose parents were involved in WWII and who know from family accounts what being unprepared can mean. Things are much worse now in defence than the 1930s.

Mr. Dutton's speech was solid, and in the tradition of the strategies that have won the Coalition victories in the past. Former Prime Minister Robert Menzies campaigned on the suburbs and regions, as did Fraser, Howard, and Abbott.

The nattering aunts on the ABC's 7.30 Report hated it and mocked it - Mr. Dutton would be relishing that.

Labor has always been prone to concentrate on issues, like The Voice, which are of peripheral, or no, concern to most electors, and it has thought, since Gough Whitlam, that elite opinion is more important than public opinion.

Mr. Dutton is setting out to demonstrate that they are wrong again. That Australians will ultimately prefer a dour doer, to a flamboyant flake.