Peter Dutton’s decision to deploy his son Harry to front press conferences on housing this week shocked the opposition leader’s supporters, who have observed him guard his family’s privacy so closely there are no photos of his mother or father accessible online.

But the junior Dutton appeared at a press conference in Brisbane on Monday to testify to the difficulty of affording a house, where his father was unprepared for a question on whether he would help his children break into the market, and Harry turned up again a day later at a town outside Melbourne.

The decision to have Harry take centre stage on the campaign trail shows how eager the Dutton campaign is to soften the opposition leader’s image from that of a hard man politician to a dedicated father.

On Tuesday, Dutton conceded that he would one day give Harry financial assistance to buy a home.

“The prime minister and I might be able to help our kids, but it’s not about us, it’s about how we can help millions of Australians across generations realise the dream of home ownership like we did, like our parents and grandparents,” Dutton said.

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A day earlier he stonewalled the same question, leaving strategists perplexed. One veteran political adviser from the Coalition side said that Dutton was always going to be asked if he would help kids buy their first home, especially because of his real estate dealings totalling about $30 million in transactions across 26 pieces of property.

“[The question was] totally foreseeable and he had no good answer [and it] reminds people Dutton is actually rich,” the adviser said. Bringing Harry to the press conference, the adviser said, “looks desperate”.

But another Coalition campaign adviser disagreed, arguing Harry was an asset in his father’s campaign because “people can see that he is an ordinary suburban dad”.