» Peter Dutton kicks football into TV cameraman

“If the prime minister kicked it, he would have told you that it didn’t hit anyone, and you’re imagining something, that it just didn’t happen,” Dutton said.

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His comments allude to Albanese’s response to tripping off a stage on Thursday. While video footage showed the prime minister missing the stage and being helped back up, Albanese played it down in an ABC radio interview.

“No, I stepped back one step … I didn’t fall off the stage,” he said later that day. Only by Friday had Albanese decided the better strategy was to joke about it.

Albanese spent much of his press conference on Saturday evading questions on another topic after he dialled in to ABC Radio to pre-empt Dutton’s announcement that the Coalition would take the Port of Darwin out of the control of a Chinese company called Landbridge.

In response to repeated questions on the matter, Albanese failed to say why his government had not acted during its past three years in office, despite his insistence he had been concerned about Chinese ownership for a decade. The government has previously said a review by security services that it commissioned had found Landbridge’s ownership was manageable.

“We have a political decision that [is] consistent with the position that we’ve had since 2015,” Albanese said on Saturday. “Ever since, we have supported Australian ownership of the port of Darwin, and every single time I have been asked, including during the last election campaign, I have said that.”

Albanese also did not say if he would match Dutton’s pledge to compulsorily acquire the port if a private buyer could not be found within six months.

Landbridge non-executive director Terry O’Connor told The Australian Financial Review that neither Dutton nor Albanese had contacted the company about their plans, and that its billionaire owner Ye Cheng did not want to sell.

Albanese said the government had engaged with Landbridge but didn’t say how much the government would consider spending on acquiring the port, or confirm if security advice had changed about the Chinese ownership of the facility.

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Dutton insisted that a change in security circumstances was behind his determination to change control of the port after the previous Coalition government did not wrest the asset from Landbridge.

Asked how he would make up the injury to Nadir, Dutton said: “I can do two things. One, I thought that I can buy him a beer this afternoon. And the second, I can teach him how to mark.

“But it was great to be out there with the kids, and I’ve apologised to [Nadir], and I hope that it’s all repaired soon. But he’s got a war story now from the campaign, and he’ll be on the news tonight.”

Unscripted moments often become the most memorable images of a campaign. Morrison’s foray onto the soccer pitch in 2022 was a defining image of that federal election. He had joined children in a game at the Devonport Strikers soccer club, shedding his suit jacket within moments of his arrival.

Children cheered and one declared him “better than Ronaldo” before the then-prime minister accidentally tackled seven-year-old Luca Fauvette and both crashed to the ground.