NSW Labor Leader Chris Minns and his wife Anna, and federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and his wife Kirilly (Images: AAP)

Inevitably, we’ve reached the part of an election cycle when politicians’ families are dragged blinking into the spotlight in an attempt to humanise our elected officials by reminding us they know people who aren’t politicians. Over the weekend Anna Minns, wife of New South Wales Opposition Leader Chris Minns, was profiled in the Nine papers.

It is, well, precisely what you’d expect: a gentle stroll through her background, values and career, one that requires the reader to develop a high tolerance for thirsty descriptions of politicians. We get excursions into the ALP leader’s status as a “silver fox”, and that time the young Chris used his “buff, rugby player’s physique” to save Anna from being washed out to sea while windsurfing.

Anna, to her credit, is fairly transparent about what’s going on. Having said she’s not comfortable with interviews, she clarifies “I’m happy to do it because I’m sure there’s some curiosity around Chris, and there’s a campaign on”.

Indeed, there is a campaign on. And in that spirit, here’s Crikey’s list of the best attempts by family members to make politicians likeable.

Helen Perrottet

The same Nine scribe covered NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet’s wife Helen last September, in tones that make the Minns piece seem positively restrained. Of the pair’s on-again, off-again beginning, she writes: “Perrottet would remain torn between adventure and settling down with the man she loved. In her rebellious moments she resisted domesticity.” Dominic, while getting plenty of praise for being a lovely and polite young man, doesn’t fare as well as Minns, only earning the descriptor “lanky”.

The headline says being the mother of seven children is “the least interesting thing” about Helen. While the piece sketches a fairly standard biography of her upbringing and varied career, the most genuinely interesting part of her history that Crikey can spot — the sunny observation that “[in 2003] when she returned from her working holiday in Canada, Perrottet rang the ADF on the chance it had a PR job available. It did; the first Iraq War had just begun, and they needed help in head office” — is left completely unexplored.

Jenny and the girls

“If Jenny Morrison could meet 50.1% of voters, Scott Morrison would be prime minister for life” might well go down as the most fawning line in Australian political history. Possibly no spouse has been wheeled out as often as Jenny, and as a result the cynicism of the process has never been more apparent. For this, as with all political stunts, the blame has to rest with the media, always so keen to mention how “reluctant” Jenny was to enter the public debate, while noting in the next sentence that she was Morrison’s “secret weapon”, key to humanising and softening his image as a ruthless political operative.

This reached its apotheosis on the surreal 60 Minutes episode dedicated to the pair, where Jenny acted variously as a shield (it’s her fault Morrison skipped the country during the Black Summer bushfires, apparently), a weapon (see her “disappointment” at Grace Tame’s lack of civility) and a halo.

Honourable mentions

Possibly the most successful deployment of the spouse in recent years came from Malcolm Turnbull, partly because it was unobtrusive enough to not feel forced. He was constantly banging on about Lucy, but the only instance that actually stands out in the memory was when he enthusiastically agreed that he and Lucy were known to “Netflix and chill” while on commercial radio. We’ll let you be the judge of whether Bill Shorten, making sure he was photographed in a “Vote 1: Chloe Shorten’s husband” T-shirt on election day 2019, pulled that off quite so well. And for sheer weird, unvarnished “alien pretending to be human” energy, you can’t go past Kevin Rudd telling Rove McManus that the person he would turn gay for was… his own wife.

But when it comes to an attempt to humanise a subject who at their very core resists it, there is simply no topping the efforts of Kirilly Dutton, the wife of then home affairs minister Peter Dutton. In the lead-up to the 2019 election, Dutton’s seat was on a 1.7% margin, and the public generally associated him with either the chaos brought about by his unsuccessful leadership tilt or, worse still, the treatment of asylum seekers on his watch (and his own awful rhetoric on the subject). Kirilly decided she needed to speak out in his favour. And the best she could summon, which became the headline, was: “He is not a monster”.