After 20 years in parliament and several attempts at claiming the leadership, Peter Dutton has become the new Liberal leader after former prime minister Scott Morrison's election defeat.
Mr Dutton was assumed to be the next leader after the other most-likely challenger, former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, lost his seat in the election night "teal bath" of independents who claimed inner-city Liberal seats.
Despite no real contest for the leadership from the Liberal Party's moderate flank, Mr Dutton has a challenge ahead of him to convince some within his party that he is the right man to lead them forward as the coalition takes its first steps as opposition.
Officer, businessman, politician
The 51-year-old Queensland MP entered parliament in 2001 after a decade as a police officer and working in his father's construction business.
Mr Dutton left the police force soon after being injured in a car accident while pursuing an escaped prisoner.
In his maiden speech, Mr Dutton touched on several issues that would hint at the direction his political career would take in the years to come, making observations on a sometimes "over-tolerant society", on unacceptable crime rates "causing older Australians to barricade themselves in their homes", and on the risk of the "boisterous minority and politically correct" to democracy.
And foreshadowing changes he would ultimately make himself later as a minister, Mr Dutton warned that modern crime and terrorism demanded a strengthening of national security laws and a rebalancing of the right to privacy with security.
Mr Dutton has been a lightning rod for progressive anger since he first came to parliament because of his staunchly conservative views.
His sometimes blunt way of speaking has more than once put his leaders in a tight spot, and a joke caught on an open microphone in 2015 about "water lapping at [the] door" of Pacific Island nations is still used by Labor to accuse the Coalition of damaging relationships in the region.
Mr Dutton was also the only opposition frontbencher in 2008 to boycott then-prime minister Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations, a decision he now regrets, and he personally voted no "and encouraged people to do the same" to same-sex marriage in the 2017 postal vote.
But colleague Simon Birmingham, now the most senior moderate figure within the Liberal Party, has said Mr Dutton's character is different to how it is sometimes perceived.
"I have worked closely with Peter for a number of years and whilst we haven't always agreed, I suspect it would be a surprise to many that we have agreed more often than people might expect," Mr Birmingham said on Sunday.
"Peter's public perception is not always an accurate reflection of Peter's true stance."
In the last government, he helped to secure the "AUKUS" agreement, the most significant development in Australia's national security since the post-World War II treaty with the United States and New Zealand.
He also oversaw the Australian withdrawal from Afghanistan and was the Morrison government's most prominent critic of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party as it has become more aggressive in the region.
Dutton's winding pathway to the top
The new Liberal leader was first a minister under John Howard, serving as workforce participation minister, assistant treasurer and minister for revenue.
He entered cabinet under Tony Abbott as sport and health minister, introducing then-controversial reforms to Medicare to establish co-payments for GP visits that were ultimately abandoned, as well as setting up a $20-billion fund for medical research.
But it was his appointment to the immigration ministry and later a specially created super portfolio, home affairs minister, that the now-leader first became a serious contender for the top job.
During that time, Mr Dutton was responsible for, in his words, "stopping the boats, getting every child out of detention, closing the Manus Regional Processing Centre and overseeing the special intake of 12,000 refugees from the Syria and Iraq conflicts".
Mr Dutton was repeatedly thrown up as an alternative leader during the prime ministership of Malcolm Turnbull, and after months of instability in 2018, Mr Dutton attempted to wrest the leadership from Mr Turnbull to become prime minister.
That attempt failed, as Mr Morrison managed to sneak through the middle to claim the leadership.
Dutton says he 'won't change', but wants to show a different side of himself
Now, Mr Dutton has claimed the title, he takes over a Liberal Party that is finding its feet out of government for the first time in almost a decade.
In his first press conference as leader, Mr Dutton said he would work with the new Labor government where it had good policy.
"We will support good policy, we will oppose Labor's bad policy," he said.
"I want to give you this assurance, we've heard loud and clear from the Australian public."
The new leader also said he was "not going to change", but he wanted people to see the "entire person" he was.
"I was ultimately able to cancel the visas of about just over 6,000 criminals, people who had committed sexual offences against women and children, committed murder, serious criminal act and to deport them from our country.
"It's pretty hard to break into a smile when you are making that announcement.
"Hopefully, you can tell a different story that I'm not as bad as the ABC might sometimes report."
His deputy, the newly appointed Sussan Ley, is unaligned with the party's moderate or conservative wings.
Party members strongly felt it needed a woman as deputy leader after it was punished in the election for a perceived ignorance of women and issues of safety and equality that dominated Mr Morrison's term in government.
Speaking after being appointed deputy, Ms Ley said the Liberal Party had "heard" women at the election.
"We're listening. We're talking. And we are determined to earn back your trust and your faith," Ms Ley said.
The Liberal Party, often described as a "broad church" of progressive and conservative political views, is smarting from a result that decimated its moderate ranks and almost locked it out of the country's urban centres.
Mr Dutton's first challenge will be to unite the party's wounded moderate flank with a conservative flank that is pushing the Liberal Party to head further right and reclaim its base.
