AAP has a little more on Peter Dutton’s appearance at the West Australian newspaper campaign event he attended this morning:

Mr Dutton was courting voters at an event hosted by The West Australian on Friday when the paper’s editor-in-chief Chris Dore delivered an unconventional introduction that contrasted a “match-fit, super confident” prime minister against a “punch-drunk” opposition leader.

But Mr Dutton did not take that lying down and used the comments from the Perth gathering – which included the West’s owner billionaire businessman Kerry Stokes, 84 – to show he could handle challenges.

“You’ll deal with all the slings and arrows and the derogatory comments and editors trying to be funny and not succeeding,” he told reporters in Perth on Friday.

“That has steeled me for anything this job has thrown at me – or what could be thrown at me if I’m given the immense pleasure of being prime minister.

“I don’t need to attack the character of the prime minister to win the next election … what I want to offer the Australian people is a much more positive future.”

Mr Dutton started the year with the wind at his back, driven by Australia’s cost-of-living crisis amid a worldwide turn against incumbent governments.

But since the May 3 election was announced, the coalition has been bleeding support.

YouGov polling
Labor’s primary vote has risen to 32 per cent while support for the coalition has fallen. (Aap Image/AAP PHOTOS)

Fresh YouGov polling released to AAP reveals Labor has forged ahead, 52.5 per cent to 47.5 over the coalition in the two-party preferred vote.

The result is Labor’s best in months and slightly higher than its polling of 52.1 per cent at the 2022 election, putting the party in pole position for a majority government rather than a widely forecast minority.

By contrast, the coalition’s primary vote is now down to 33.5 per cent – lower than at the 2022 election.

Mr Dutton’s work-from-home policy had sparked the fall and taken his party from “being in the box seat to win the federal election in February to struggling to hold onto the seats they won in 2022”, YouGov director of public data Paul Smith said.

“The coalition’s support has fallen so far that they now risk losing seats,” he said.

While Mr Dutton walked back his work-from-home stance, Mr Smith said it had done “enormous damage” because voters now believed the coalition failed to understand their working lives or support people’s workplace rights.