Peter Dutton opens up about divorce, broken engagement
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has spoken of his relationships before meeting with his wife Kirilly, discussing his divorce and a broken engagement to a pregnant fiancée as he reveals more about his background in the lead up to the election.
Dutton, who typically gives little away about his personal life, said on Thursday he was briefly married in his early 20s.
Peter Dutton with his family (left to right) son Tom, daughter Rebecca, wife Kirilly and son Harry in Brisbane.Credit: Dan Peled
“Well it was a tough issue at the time because I’d been married when I was about 23 for about six months and picked up my then wife from a night shift [as a police officer] and she said, ‘I don’t love you anymore’,” Dutton told Sky News’ Peta Credlin, a former senior Liberal staffer who is still close to the opposition leader.
“It was … pretty shocking at the time but we just got married too young, I was working too hard and didn’t have enough time for the relationship and it was just one of those things.”
That relationship would have been in the early 1990s. Later, Dutton said he was engaged to another woman who was pregnant with his first daughter Rebecca, who was born in 2002.
“I was engaged to … my daughter’s mum and Rebecca was conceived in that relationship and that relationship broke up. Kirrily and I met after that” through friends, he said.
The insight from Dutton’s personal life comes as he opens up more in the lead up to the election due by May, appearing on long form podcast interviews and soft focus social media posts. Dutton said that his children were very close and Kirilly had been a loving stepmother to Rebecca as well as the Duttons’ two sons, Harry and Tom.
“In terms of how Kirilly responded to that, again, all in a stride and … [the kids] have never seen each other as stepbrother and sister, that has never been language in our household,” Dutton said. “The kids have always been treated equally by me, by Kirilly and I think that’s been an important thing as well.”
The opposition leader told Credlin he and his himself and received death threats throughout his political career, requiring him to have personal security for years that meant he and Kirilly often decided to stay home.
