Subjects: Visit to Rockhampton; Beef2024; the provocative and dangerous interaction of the People’s Liberation Army – Air Force with a Royal Australian Navy (RAN) MH-60R helicopter in the Yellow Sea; the Prime Minister’s lack of leadership on national security; Jason Clare’s offensive ‘River to the Sea’ frolic; Labor’s immigration detention shambles and border security failures; Labor’s Big Australia policy; Labor’s energy policy trainwreck.
E&OE.
MICHELLE LANDRY:
It’s wonderful to be in Rockhampton at the Showgrounds today for Beef2024, and I have the Leader of the Federal Opposition here, Peter Dutton, who has been in Rockhampton all week, as well as a whole stack of my state and federal colleagues. It’s great that the Coalition has been here and seen how important that Beef is and they’re regular travelers here, like every year they’re here for Beef. I think Peter was here for a week last time in 2021. This has just brought tens of millions of dollars to the Rockhampton economy. It’s incredible that we’ve had people from far and wide, the internationals here, and also the fact that the Coalition supports this totally. Over the years, we’ve put tens of millions of dollars in, we supported the $6 million this time, and the Crisafulli team also have announced another $4.5 million for the next Beef.
So, it’s important for us to get out and about, talking to the farmers out here, the traders, the small businesses, and we’ve been talking to a lot of them. Everyone’s giving us the same message: you got to get rid of this Government. So, we’ve certainly been doing that, and having Peter here has been great, to have him here all week to listen to the concerns of those people and just to get that feedback to take back to our Shadow Cabinet so that with a federal election coming up next year, that we can continue to work on policies to help the people of Australia.
So, I’ll now hand over to Peter.
PETER DUTTON:
Michelle, thank you very much. Look, it’s been fantastic to be here at Beef Week and to support Michelle Landry. She’s an incredible local member, and the respect that she has here in the local community is obvious as you speak to residents and to people who know this community well. So, Michelle, thank you very much for being here. Thank you for the investment that you’ve championed into the local community.
This is an incredible opportunity to catch up with people from all over the country who are here, particularly important to listen to those from regional and rural and remote areas about the conditions that they’re facing, the threats to their business, the agriculture sector is an incredible opportunity for us if we support it in a way that it can grow dramatically – which I believe it can – and we can continue to export in a way that will be hugely beneficial for us economically, but also help near neighbours as those countries develop, as the demand for high-quality beef product and other agricultural products becomes even more important.
I want to say thank you very much to Bryce Camm, to Simon, to the whole Board here for what they’ve done. It’s a budget of over $20 million to run Beef. It injects about $100 million into the local economy, and the local businesses here are true beneficiaries of the investment that people make into the community when they’re here. It’s not just when they’re spending money here, it’s when they go out into town, if they’re at Yeppoon, or they move elsewhere around in the community, they’re spending money at cafes and service stations and retail shops, and it’s a big injection into the local community. So, I’ve been really proud to be here for three days again for this Beef, and we’ll be back here in 2027.
I also want to make a couple of comments today on an issue which I think is incredibly important to our country, that is in relation to the shocking circumstances that we’re seeing at the moment with the acts of aggression from China.
We shouldn’t put the lives of our Australian Defence Force members at risk, and that’s what’s happening at the moment when the Prime Minister continues his silence. China doesn’t know red lines if the Prime Minister doesn’t point out very clearly where they are. We saw our sailors, who were dramatically affected, it could have resulted in death with the sonar attacks on those sailors not too long ago, we’ve now seen another circumstance which if there is a slightest miscalculation by that fighter jet pilot or somebody who’s on the deck of a ship barking directions to an aircraft, if it goes wrong and we see one of our helicopters crash, or if we see an incident on the sea – bearing in mind that this was all in international waters – then that could result in the loss of Australian life, and Australian lives who wear our uniform are incredibly important to all Australians. I know the Prime Minister has made a throwaway comment this morning that he would now pick up the phone, but it’s come so late. It should have been the Prime Minister’s first instinct.
I will always stand up for the men and women of the Australian Defence Force, and in this circumstance, the Prime Minister should have from day one as well. Because if China doesn’t understand what it means, then they will continue these acts of aggression. It’s completely unacceptable and the Prime Minister should pick up the phone immediately to the Chinese President to make sure that he understands that it will not be tolerated. We need a good trading relationship with China, I accept that. But we shouldn’t compromise our national interest because we’ve got a weak Prime Minister who refuses to pick up the phone to the Chinese President to tell him that putting the lives of Australian Defence Force men and women at risk is somehow something that can be tolerated. So, we’ve got a lot of work to do because we live in a precarious period, as the Prime Minister points out, but you then have to stand up and do something about it.
The final issue that I wanted to address today was in relation to the completely unacceptable comments made by Jason Clare as the Education Minister, about ‘River to the Sea’. River to the sea means one thing: that is the annihilation of the Jewish people, of 8 million people – driving them into the sea is about how they can be exterminated.
Now, this is the sort of rhetoric or the language that we heard from Adolf Hitler and the extermination of 6 million Jews when they lost their lives during the course of the Holocaust, and somehow the Education Minister in Australia is trying to justify or explain away these words being used, and try and conjure up some different context where that form of words is acceptable. It’s not acceptable. And it’s not acceptable on university campuses to see people of Jewish faith who are being discriminated against and the level of anti-Semitism we’re seeing. We wouldn’t tolerate it against any other segment of our society. Not against people of any religious faith, not of people of any different heritage, not Indigenous Australians, not anybody. In our country we treat everybody fairly and we don’t discriminate on any basis.
Unfortunately, Jason Clare has proven himself to be unfit for his job, and the Prime Minister not only needs to pull him into line, but he needs to make sure that he apologises and that he says that this will never happen again because it’s unconscionable and it really is against our national interest. We don’t want division and uncertainty in our country, and when you get a senior minister like Jason Clare, making such an ill-informed, dangerous comment, I don’t think it should be tolerated by the Prime Minister, and I think the Education Minister should apologise immediately.
QUESTION:
Mr Dutton, do you think that the Prime Minister is letting down the Defence Force by not stepping up and not speaking with China, either through the Ambassador or directly with Beijing? And do you accept China saying that Australia was impeding, approaching their borders?
PETER DUTTON:
No. I think we need to be very clear about this – there are a few points to make here. One is that the Prime Minister’s first job is to take care of our country, to make sure Australians are safe, and we do that by making sure that we’ve got a strong Australian Defence Force and our security and intelligence and policing agencies are well-resourced and are defending us 24/7.
I think there are many men and women of the Australian Defence Force at the moment who see the Prime Minister as very weak, and that his first instinct wasn’t to stand up for the Australian men and women of the Australian Defence Force is quite unforgivable. I don’t know what game he’s playing at, but he’s finally come around to a position that he should have adopted when we first learnt of his circumstance.
As for the propaganda that China continuously puts out, we need to make sure that we call it out and that the Prime Minister says that what is being said here is completely incorrect. Our chopper was in international waters, and the rule of law needs to apply equally to Australia as it does to China, as it does to the United States, or Canada, or any other country. This propaganda that’s put out needs to be rebuffed, and the Prime Minister needs to stand up and show the leadership the Australian public would expect and demand from their leader.
QUESTION:
Just one more: are you concerned by the illegal boats that have arrived in the Torres Strait?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I just think when the Australian Government says that they’re in favour of Operation Sovereign Borders, it’s not the Coalition’s version of Operation Sovereign Borders supported by the Prime Minister. So, he’s removed the Temporary Protection leg, which is a pull factor.
We now know with the migration issue that’s before us at the moment where 151 people have been released from prison, people know that if you’re a non-citizen and you come to our country under a Labor Government, even if you’ve committed serious crimes against Australian citizens – as we saw with Ninette in WA – you’ve got the chance to stay here in our country. So, that is a pull factor as well.
I think if you look at the money that the Government’s withdrawn from the Australian Border Force and from the Australian Defence Force, you’ve got money that’s been taken away from aerial surveillance and on-water days that Australian Border Force have there in detecting these threats. It shows that Operation Sovereign Borders is light at best under Anthony Albanese.
Again, it just shows that you can’t have weakness as Prime Minister when it comes to national security matters. I just don’t think the Prime Minister’s got the backbone to stand up to people smugglers or to our adversaries or others who would seek to do us harm. That’s why we’re seeing crime epidemics in our country at the moment, because the Prime Minister should be showing leadership, and he’s not.
QUESTION:
The Government has announced more than $90 million in funding to boost the number of skilled workers in the construction and housing sector. Is this something that you welcome?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, we want to see more workers in the construction sector, and we support measures that will get houses built more quickly, because we know that the Government’s brought in about a million people over the course of the last two years – the highest intake in our history – because the Government has a policy which is a Big Australia policy, which Mr Albanese never told the public about before the election.
The trouble with bringing a million people in in two years is that, at the same time, we’ve only built just over 200,000 homes. That’s why we’ve got a rental crisis. It’s why people can’t buy a house at the moment. I think Australians, yes, want to see more houses built. We all do. But, the Prime Minister is making terrible economic decisions, which is driving up inflation, which is why people’s interest rates are higher, and also making it harder because they’re supporting the CFMMEU tactics, which are driving up the costs of building and construction, not just in the residential sector, but obviously the industrial and commercial sectors as well.
QUESTION:
Do you think the Government can meet the goal of building 1.2 million homes by 2029?
PETER DUTTON:
Not a chance. I mean, if this Government builds 1.2 million homes by 2059, I will be amazed. There’s no way in the world they’re going to build these homes that they promise. Again, it’s another broken promise from a Prime Minister who said on 97 occasions before the last election that electricity bills would go down by $275. They’ve only gone up. He said interest rates would go down, they’ve gone up on 12 occasions.
QUESTION:
And just lastly, aid agencies are warning of a humanitarian catastrophe after Israel forces seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing. Does that concern you?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, obviously there was peace in the Middle East on the 6th of October before Israelis were slaughtered by the listed terrorist organisation Hamas. Hamas still holds hostages. Could you imagine if eight months on or five months on, Australians were still being held hostage by a terrorist group? The Australian public would demand their release, and rightly so.
I think the Prime Minister, again, needs to show leadership here for the sake of the Jewish community because at the moment, here in Australia, the Jewish community is feeling very unsafe. We all want to see the circumstances resolved in the Middle East, but at the moment, we’ve got a situation where Hamas, which is a listed a terrorist organisation in our country, like ISIL, and they’ve slaughtered people and they don’t have the interests of Palestinians, or anybody else in mind, it’s in their own self-interest and hopefully they can surrender those hostages as quickly as possible and bring this horrible circumstance to an end.
QUESTION:
Leading on from the housing construction, what does this show for the Government’s promise to build 1.2 million houses?
PETER DUTTON:
Look, I just think it shows that the Government’s had two budgets to make the right decisions to help families. Whether it’s in relation to housing, whether it’s in relation to keeping us safe, whether it’s in relation to energy policy, and every decision Anthony Albanese has made in the last two budgets has driven up inflation. That’s why the Reserve Bank Governor talks about ‘homegrown’ inflation. Inflation is higher than all of our other comparable economies. It’s because of the decisions that the Government’s made in two budgets.
If you drive inflation up, then you increase interest rates and you keep them higher for longer. The average family in Australia at the moment is paying $24,000 more each year for their mortgage. That’s after-tax dollars. That’s a lot of money on top of the increases in electricity prices, what you’re seeing at the supermarket when you go to the checkout, your insurance premiums – everything continues to go up and up under this Government.
Their ‘renewables-only’ policy has driven up the price of gas and electricity and made our market less certainty. We know that by 2034, 90 per cent of that firming power goes from the market, but they don’t have any solution to how they can keep the lights on. The energy regulator’s predicting that lights will go out, that our power will be disrupted, and that electricity prices will continue to go through the roof under Mr Albanese. I just don’t think the Australian public can afford three more years of an Albanese Government.
Alright? Thank you very much. Thank you.
[ends]