Peter Dutton spent Saturday around Brisbane, starting with a tour of the XXXX brewery before addressing a morning tea for the party faithful and visiting a Chinese yum cha.
A protester from Rising Tide interrupted the brewery tour and a second one crashed a Chinese community announcement to chastise Mr Dutton over his gas and nuclear energy policies.
Mr Dutton tried to focus the day on rising cost of living and increasing energy bills, centring his pitch on a pledge to lower power bills if elected.
It comes off the back of his gas strategy, under which a coalition government would set up an east coast domestic reserve and ramp up supply to bring down power costs.
"Every day's a good day for a schooner," he told the media pack while entering the brewery before his beer was soured by climate action group Rising Tide.
Speaking later at a news conference, Mr Dutton said climate change was important to the coalition and it remained committed to net-zero emissions by 2050.
But the country needed to have a mature debate about nuclear power in the long term and gas would be an interim measure to bring down energy bills, Mr Dutton said.
Increasing energy costs had drained businesses dry, he said.
"Prices will be lower under us, there is no question about that," he said.
But he has refused to outline how much an average Australian would save under this plan.
Quizzed about the basis of his projection, Mr Dutton said modelling had been done for the coalition and would be released before the election.
Labor and experts argue renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, with Australia having an abundance of solar and wind resources.
The opposition leader campaigned in the neighbouring seats of Brisbane and Ryan, both of which the Liberals lost to the Greens in 2022.
The Greens hold Brisbane on a less than four per cent margin and Ryan on 2.6 per cent.
Mr Dutton used a lunch with Chinese community leaders at the Golden Lane restaurant in the electorate of Moreton to announce a coalition government would give the Chinese Museum of Queensland $225,000.
Local Labor MP Graham Perrett is retiring and its 9.1 per cent margin is being targeted by the coalition and Greens.
The funding would allow it to improve its website and move towards its goal of building a physical museum in Brisbane.
"One of the things in our country that we don't do enough is celebrate the wonderful migrant story, we don't concentrate enough on the stories of migration, people who have come to our country," Mr Dutton said.
The coalition is trying to regain the trust of the Chinese community after the demographic largely abandoned it at the 2022 federal election following hardline rhetoric by then-coalition ministers against Beijing.
But the coalition has pledged to slash permanent migration by 25 per cent, blaming housing stress on a spike in immigration after the lull of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Responding to questions about how his policy would be received by migrant communities, Mr Dutton said Australia's migrant story was "an amazing one" but migration had to be sustainable.
"We have to make sure that we can get Australians into housing first," he said.
Voters go to the polls on May 3.
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