Liberal loyalists are adamant that Peter Dutton has been visiting teal seats in the run-up to the election to reclaim the prized territory that helped their party hold power for decades. But the opposition leader’s flightpath over the past few weeks tells a very different story, because there is no doubt he is avoiding the leafy seats where voters put the Liberals in the doghouse three years ago.

The independent MPs who won these seats – let’s call them the teals, even though they have different colours and characters – are being targeted by vigorous Liberal campaigns to paint them as proxies for Labor or the Greens. But there is a missing element in these local campaigns: the man who aspires to be prime minister.

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Dutton is absent for good reason. Liberals admit that he will drag down the vote for a Liberal candidate in a teal seat if he turns up at a polling station. “It would not be doing them any favours to be seen campaigning with him,” says one. The Liberal campaign admits this every day by sending the leader to regional and outer-suburban Australia, well away from those blue-ribbon seats.

On Tuesday, for instance, he was in the NSW town of Orange to help the Nationals win the regional seat of Calare. Ten days ago, he was in the Macedon Ranges in Victoria to try to win the seat of McEwen. But he has not held an event in the Melbourne seats of Kooyong or Goldstein since the campaign began, nor held one in the Sydney seats of Mackellar, Warringah or Wentworth.

It is not that he has never been to a teal seat: he clearly has, and he has had a full term of parliament to do so. But he is keeping his distance during the campaign, when voters are paying more attention.

This is helping the teal candidates because 45 per cent of voters name Dutton as........

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