According to Geoff Wilson, chairman of investment firm Wilson Asset Management, the dinner was an important opportunity to present his view that the Albanese government has unfairly cracked down on franking credits.

Wilson, whose company has more than $5.9 billion under management, was surprised by how open and engaged Peter Dutton was.

“It wasn’t as if Peter was holding court. It was a really good discussion about what needs to be done by the federal government,” he told The Saturday Paper . “And when we questioned him about what his exact policies would be, he said we would have to wait like everyone else.”

The dinner was held on February 27 at the Towers Road mansion of billionaire investor Alex Waislitz, in Melbourne’s Toorak. Invited guests were asked to contribute about $20,000 each to attend.

Waislitz’s friend, Steve Ciobo, a former minister for defence industry, who was first elected to federal parliament alongside Dutton in 2001, helped facilitate the event and reached out to Dutton personally to organise it.

The guest list included Wilson; Silviu Itescu, chief executive of proprietary medical technology platform Mesoblast; former Godfreys chief executive Tom Krulis; the chief executive of the Australian arm of Canadian investment bank ​Canaccord Genuity, Marcus Freeman; the chief executive of biotechnology incubator Proto Axiom, Anthony Liveris; the managing director of Australian wealth management platform HUB24, Andrew Alcock; and Antony Catalano, executive chairman of Australian Community Media, which employs more than 400 journalists across some 60 media titles nationwide.

Dutton opened the dinner, which stretched over three hours, with an informal speech laying out his plans for the upcoming election campaign. He also detailed what he sees as Australia’s place in the world and how to deal with other issues such as rising anti-Semitism.

“From my perspective, it was really important for me to try and understand the political issues at stake,” says Catalano, a close friend and business partner of Waislitz, who describes himself as having no allegiances to any politician or political party.

“I think there’s a lot of loss of understanding political issues and the political agenda, because so much of it is dispersed through social media in less than a soundbite, whereas it’s my strong view that traditional media remains critically important, especially in election periods, so it was important for me to attend for that reason.”

Geoff Wilson said he was impressed by the opposition leader and by conversations he has had with shadow treasurer Angus Taylor.

“From my perspective, Peter Dutton is a highly intelligent individual who gets it,” he says. “I’ve spoken to Dutton and I’ve spoken to Taylor, and not only do they understand what’s required, I think they’re perfectly positioned to successfully manage Australia.

“We have productivity problems, the tax system is a mess, there is the housing crisis affecting young people, and there is the cost-of-living crisis affecting everyone,” Wilson adds. “So there is a lot of work to be done and I think they’re up to the challenge.”

Admitting to being surprised by some of the positions Dutton has taken as leader, which include a threat to break up major companies, Wilson says his estimation of the opposition leader has grown in the past three years.

“In terms of his comments about supermarkets, his comments about insurance companies, I don’t necessarily agree with those comments,” Wilson says, “but what they tell me is that he’s not scared to stand up for what he believes in if he thinks it’s in the interests of all Australians, and that it doesn’t matter which end of town you’re from.”

The dinner was so successful that Waislitz arranged a follow-up meeting the next week at his Collins Street office in Melbourne. The meeting, which was attended by some of those present at the dinner, featured presentations by the Liberal Party’s federal director, Andrew Hirst, and Dutton’s chief-of-staff, Alex Dalgleish.

Waislitz later told The Australian Financial Review that the original dinner was for “a few like-minded friends and business colleagues” and he would happily host a similar event for other political leaders, including Anthony Albanese, if it could be arranged.

After becoming the first Queenslander to lead the Liberal Party, Dutton wasted no time putting a torch to his party’s traditional ties with corporate elites in Sydney and Melbourne.

He has spent the past three years carefully positioning himself as a defender of mainstream voters against out-of-touch boardrooms, railing against corporate Australia’s support for the Voice and condemning supermarkets for not stocking Australia Day merchandise. At the same time, Dutton has closely aligned himself with billionaire supporters including Western Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart, Queensland beef baron Trevor Lee and Sydney hospitality tycoon Justin Hemmes.

“I was very proud to be at Gina Rinehart’s 70th birthday,” Dutton said in March last year, after flying to Perth to attend the event.

“I consider her to be a dear friend, a great Australian and Australia’s most successful businesswoman.”

Dutton’s links to billionaire donors have been a double-edged sword. He has managed to secure vital financial backing and strategic advice but has also been accused of hypocrisy. With billionaires such as Elon Musk playing a key role in shaping Donald Trump’s White House, Labor strategists see an opportunity to brand Dutton as vulnerable to similar influences here – out of touch with ordinary voters and beholden to the very powerbrokers he claims to oppose.

In a fundraising email sent out this week by Labor’s national president, Wayne Swan, titled “Billionaires are coming for Labor”, the former federal treasurer asked recipients to “join the dots” and see who is running Dutton’s campaign.

“This week, we learnt that Rinehart is ramping up her funding and demands on Dutton. With the election too close to call, this is a real risk of becoming reality,” Swan wrote.

“The truth is bosses like Rinehart don’t like that we’ve made it easier for their workers to earn a fair day’s pay. They want weaker wage laws, fewer rights for workers, and tax breaks for the ultra-rich. Peter Dutton is all too happy to deliver. But unlike Dutton, we are not beholden to billionaires.”

On March 4, as then Tropical Cyclone Alfred was bearing down on Brisbane, the Gold Coast and northern NSW, Dutton flew to Sydney to attend a $25,000-a-head evening fundraiser at Justin Hemmes’ Vaucluse mansion, The Hermitage, which was attended by about 20 guests and raised about $500,000.

Dutton defended his attendance at the event as being no different from fundraisers attended by his political opponents.

“It wasn’t a party. It was a fundraising dinner, and the prime minister and I are doing them around the country at the moment,” Dutton said last week. “The trip was no different to the fundraisers Mr Albanese would also be attending around Australia.”

Labor strategists, however, believe Dutton’s appearance at the Hemmes event has damaged his standing with voters.

“We’ve been surprised at how many voters immediately connected Peter Dutton leaving his community as a cyclone approached, for a fundraising dinner hosted by a Sydney billionaire, with Scott Morrison leaving for Hawaii when half of the country was burning,” one senior Labor adviser told The Saturday Paper . “He’s stuffed up and it’s hard to see what he can do to repair the self-inflicted damage.”

At another intimate dinner organised by Victorian Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson on January 14, attended by Dutton and eight business figures, guests were asked to each make a $10,000 donation.

Held at Flower Drum, the menu included Peking duck, baked crab, quail sang choi bao and banana fritters with ice-cream. Dutton used the occasion to mainly listen to the issue of most concern to the people sitting around the table.

“He was very, very impressive. He picked up on what I was saying really quickly, identified the issue that needed fixing, and then he followed up with me afterwards one on one,” one attendee tells The Saturday Paper. “Yes, this was in part a fundraiser, but it was also, in part, a kind of information gathering exercise for him, too, which involved him listening and hearing what people think. The most surprising thing he told us was that he is at the gym, every day, at 4am. Not getting up at 4am – he’s at the gym by 4am.”

As the election gets nearer, both Dutton and Anthony Albanese are relying on high-end fundraisers to boost their efforts, underscoring the broader reality that political parties, regardless of ideology, depend on wealthy backers to fund their campaigns.

While Labor attempts to frame Dutton’s billionaire ties as a liability, its own engagement with corporate donors suggests the line between grassroots campaigning and elite fundraising is blurrier than either side might care to admit.

After Dutton faced sustained attacks for leaving Queensland before Cyclone Alfred was expected to make landfall, it later emerged that Albanese had also participated in a fundraiser in Sydney on March 4, the same day Dutton attended the event at Hemmes’ mansion.

“So what happened on that day: Peter Dutton flew out of Queensland, and I flew in,” Albanese said last week. “I flew up to Sydney in the morning, we did a big announcement … I did have a fundraiser during that day, but then flew up, had a meeting with Premier Crisafulli that night, and then attended the meeting of the disaster coordination authority that took place the next morning.”

Asked again on Thursday about attending that fundraiser, Albanese said: “I travelled to Queensland on the same day that Peter Dutton travelled away from Queensland.”

On March 16, Albanese attended a $10,000 a head dinner at Sydney’s Aria restaurant, which reportedly raised $100,000 for the Labor Party. That event has sparked criticism that the government was prioritising elite donors over struggling Australians.

With the election fast approaching, the contest over political fundraising is shaping up as a proxy for more targeted ideological battles – over power, influence and who truly represents the interests of ordinary Australians.

For Dutton, the risk lies in being painted as a politician who claims to stand against corporate elites while maintaining deep ties with some of the country’s wealthiest figures. For Albanese, the challenge is to defend his government’s own high-end donor events while presenting Labor as the party of working Australians.

Ultimately, as voters head to the polls, they will not only be choosing between two leaders but also weighing up whose financial backers – and whose vision for the country – align more closely with their own interests.