Subjects: Flowerdale grass fire; Aston by-election; Labor’s infrastructure funding cuts in Aston; cost of living pressures; the government’s broken promise on a $275 cut to your power bills; Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022; Indigenous Voice to Parliament; superannuation.
E&OE
PETER DUTTON:
Thank you very much for being here. It’s great to be here with Roshena Campbell in Wantirna South. I want to say thank you very much to the local residents who have come out to greet us this morning. I wanted to start, though, this morning just by acknowledging a very difficult circumstance, obviously unfolding in Flowerdale. The emergency service workers there will be working very diligently with local communities and there’ll be a lot of angst, obviously, within the local community so our thoughts are with all of those who are affected today and everybody anxiously is watching the situation as it unfolds there and no doubt that the professionalism of all of those involved will come to the fore, as it always does when Australians are in an hour of need. We will watch that during the course of the day and obviously support the government in any assistance that they would want to provide.
Well, last night the Liberal Party preselected our candidate for the Aston by-election. I’m incredibly excited to say that Roshena was the successful candidate. We had three very strong candidates there. I voted for Roshena, as others did there, because she’s got a compelling story to tell about wanting to fight very hard on behalf of the local community, to get the things that they need in terms of the infrastructure requirements, helping families, small businesses and she has a history of being able to really buckle down and work hard. The community wants a fighter and in Roshena they’ll get that – somebody who will stand with them and fight for them on local issues and the issues that are important to the local community here in Aston. So, Roshena, congratulations. You’ve got a lot of respect across the Party and a lot of respect across the community.
As this period unfolds, over the course of the next few weeks, up to the beginning of April for the by-election, I think Australians and people here in Aston will see somebody who has a great story to tell, incredible attributes and will be a great local member and a very fierce advocate for Aston in the federal Parliament. So Roshena, I’ll hand over to you and then I’m happy make a few comments.
ROSHENA CAMPBELL:
Thank you so much, Peter. Well, it’s my job every minute over the coming weeks to earn the trust of every voter in Aston. We are not taking this seat for granted. I do want to make the point that cost of living is hitting hard in this seat with 41 per cent of the people here having mortgages, a number of young families and a number of people coming off fixed interest rates. As a mother of three kids, I know all of our grocery bills are going up, energy prices are going up in Aston by $890 to $990 a year. That’s far off the $275 cut the Albanese government promised us. So, I’m going to make the case for the people of Aston to have a plan to ease that cost of living pressure.
I know that they’re very aware at his first opportunity Anthony Albanese, in his first budget, he scrapped five critical infrastructure projects, including Wellington Road, Dorset Road and Napoleon Road. Anyone who’s travelled these roads will tell you these aren’t ‘nice to haves’, these are necessities. So, I’ll be fighting for those infrastructure projects and I’ll be taking the time to listen to voters across this seat. I want them to be heard and I want to be their champion.
PETER DUTTON:
Well said. Happy to take any questions.
QUESTION:
Just on what Roshena just mentioned there with, you know, the issues that are at play here in Aston. In 2001, that by-election was viewed by people in Canberra, that that by-election was a contest on the GST and superannuation issues. But locals really said that it was down to local issues such as the Scoresby Freeway. So, will you be campaigning particularly on the cost of living superannuation factor or on local issues here in Aston?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Simon, the fact is that we will be campaigning on both because I think both are incredibly important to Australians and to residents here in Aston. It’s no coincidence that the government has decided to hold this by-election early before the May budget – let’s be honest about that. In the May budget, clearly Labor is going to walk away from their tax cuts, which is going to make it harder for Aston families and clearly there is an attack on superannuation. So, the government, when they run out of money and Labor’s always been this way, when they run out of money, they come after yours. If you have worked hard and you’ve put money into your superannuation fund, you want to maximise the returns so that you and your family can enjoy a retirement which reflects the hard work that you’ve undertaken during your working life. If Labor is proposing to tax that more and more and more, then it is going to make it harder for self-funded retirees, for part pensioners here in Aston and across the country.
It’s clear that Mr Albanese doesn’t have a plan to address the cost of living pressures. He promised on 97 occasions before the general election that he would reduce power prices by $275. I’ll be very interested to hear during the course of the Aston by-election how many times Mr Albanese will promise to reduce power prices by $275. I suspect it’s a big fat zero and people in Aston will hear that message very clearly. If they’re being tricky in holding the by-election early so that the cuts and the attacks on Australian families and small businesses aren’t obvious to them and it’s not known to them, you can safely assume that the way that Labor’s governing at the moment, there are going to be big tax increases in the May budget.
Now, in relation to local projects, in many areas across the country Labor has committed to additional funding and they met the commitments that we made at the last election. In Aston, the first act of Prime Minister Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers was to cut funding for Aston. So, I think the Prime Minister has to explain why in their first budget, when they had the first opportunity to demonstrate commitment to Aston, did they cut these projects and spend the money elsewhere in electorates that they thought were more important? So, I think there are local factors here, and I think local residents are rightly and understandably angry about the fact that the first act of an Albanese Government was to cut funding for this local community.
QUESTION:
On Friday, you said that the Liberal Party has a democratic process to choose a candidate and that’s what sets you apart from Labor. Yet, last night’s preselection was done by the administrative committee rather than the Liberal members out here in Aston. Is that a broken promise that you made on Friday?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, it’s not. I’ve been a member of a Liberal Party since I was 18 years of age, so as you can tell, a very long time ago. I have always been in favour of the democratic processes in our Party. That includes, in extremis, the ability for the administrative committee to make a decision in consultation with as many of the local members as possible. We did that and we have come up with an amazing candidate who I think is already highly respected by the membership here. I don’t think you’ll see a pushback from the local membership here because they know Roshena and they know her ability to fight for their local community.
Our timelines were set by the government when they made an announcement to hold the by-election before the May budget. Now, my working assumption was that the government would hold the by-election after the May budget because there would be announcements in the May budget that would be popular here in Aston. But it’s clear, the fact that they’ve rushed the by-election, they want to get it over and done with before the May budget, which is going to contain a walk away from the tax cuts, a hit on your superannuation and further taxes that we’re not yet fully aware of, but that I have no doubt are coming in the May budget.
QUESTION:
With this talk of local issues, are you concerned that voters may view Roshena as an outsider considering she doesn’t live in Aston?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, the Labor candidate doesn’t live in Aston and the Labor candidate ran at the last election and has had all of that time to move into Aston and made a decision not to. Roshena’s given a commitment that she’ll move into Aston straight away. So, on election day there will be a choice between the Liberal candidate who will live in this electorate and the Labor candidate who does not live in this electorate. I think coupled with the fact that Roshena is an established advocate for people within this electorate, small businesses and others that she’s represented over her years in the law, I think will stand her in good stead in terms of somebody who has the capacity to take the fight up on behalf of locals and that’s what she commits to.
QUESTION:
Roshena, can you talk us through that local link that you have? Is it through your practice as a lawyer?
ROSHENA CAMPBELL:
Yes. So, as a barrister I’ve acted for small businesses in Aston. So, when the stakes were high, they wanted me to be their champion. It’s my job now to be a champion for every voter in Aston, every family, every small business. I’m going to take the time to listen to them because they deserve a strong voice for the communities in Aston. So, that’s going to be my first job. I’m going to earn their trust and I want them to know that I will be a champion for them in Canberra. As Peter said, Anthony Albanese has made it very clear what he thinks of the voters in Aston. In that first budget he scrapped that funding. He’s going to make a lot of promises over the coming weeks, but the voters of Aston need to remember what he did when he didn’t think this seat was in play.
QUESTION:
Roshena, do you view yourself as an outsider given that you don’t live in this electorate?
ROSHENA CAMPBELL:
The Labor candidate doesn’t live in this seat. I’m going to be moving into this seat. That’s a commitment that she’s not making. But I don’t pretend to have all of the answers on day one. What I do commit to doing is listening to everybody across this seat, and we need to understand that the needs of Bayswater and Boronia are very different to the needs of voters in Ferntree Gully. I’m going to take the time to visit every inch of this seat. I’m going to be doorknocking this seat and I’m going to make sure that I’m a champion. I’m going to listen to those issues and I’m going to fight for them.
QUESTION:
Why do you suspect there was a 11.6 per cent primary vote swing in what was previously the safest metropolitan Liberal seat, and what do you think needs to be done to reverse it? Are there demographic changes that we’re not picking up, or was there just a violent swing against the sitting member? What do you think it was?
ROSHENA CAMPBELL:
There’s no doubt we’ve got a lot of hard work to do in Bayswater. There are a number of people who bought their first home in Bayswater recently due to the development in that area and they’re going to be hurting hard as they come off fixed interest rates or lower interest rates. There are a number of renters who need some hope about a plan to buy their first home, and there are a number of key infrastructure projects there. Boronia Road, in particular has been neglected for far too long. Anyone who travels it, it’s very uncommon not to have a pothole. I think these are the sorts of local issues that need to be championed. We need to do the hard work and I’m really looking forward to speaking to voters in Bayswater, in Boronia, and being a person who can fight for them.
QUESTION:
The Liberal Party likes to call itself a broad church. I guess, where do you fit in that church in terms of social issues like climate change, gender equality and the like?
ROSHENA CAMPBELL:
I’m really proud to be on the conservative side of politics. I think as a Party, we’ve always been a champion of women. I wouldn’t be standing here today if that wasn’t the case. But it’s my job as a mum of three, as a professional woman, to make the case for other women to see what the Liberal Party has to offer them and that’s a key priority of mine.
QUESTION:
And just climate change. What are your views on that?
ROSHENA CAMPBELL:
We’ve got to be very careful in this country. Labor’s Safeguard Mechanism creates a real risk that business is going to leave our shores. That means jobs that are going to leave and investment that is not going to come to Australia. I don’t want to see my kids or any of our kids struggling to find jobs, dealing with worsening economic conditions when Labor doesn’t have its priority right.
QUESTION:
Would you like to see, there’s a debate over whether the Coalition, well the Liberal Party will allow a free kind of situation where shadow ministers can campaign for the Voice if they choose to? Would you like to see it being a kind of conscience vote situation or do you think there should be a ‘no’ position on the Voice.
ROSHENA CAMPBELL:
My first priority – when it comes to the Voice – is getting the answers that we need. Peter has written to Anthony Albanese asking some key questions and to date we don’t have those answers. I think it is incredibly misleading to ask the Australian people to vote on one of the most important decisions they will ever make about our Constitution until Anthony Albanese comes clear on what that actually means.
QUESTION:
Professor Megan Davis today said ‘people won’t be voting on a model of the Voice, just the principle of it. Why is the Coalition asking for details when the details, will not be part of the Referendum?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, millions of Australians are asking for the detail. I think everyone has in their hearts – certainly I do, that we want to see a better outcome for Indigenous Australians. We’ve just been up to Leonora and Laverton. We’re heading up to Gove this afternoon to have further engagement with Indigenous leaders there and in Leonora for example, people there want a return of the Cashless Debit Card because the return of alcohol has meant that the violence has spiked and kids aren’t getting the basic necessities.
So, I think there’s a lot of reason for the detail, to explain how practically we would improve the lives of Indigenous Australians, how we would help for a better future for those young kids in those communities, and I think that’s why people right across the spectrum – I’d refer you to the comments that Frank Brennan made yesterday on 2GB with Ben Fordham. Very instructive about why the Voice detail is required.
There are models that people will vote for because they believe it will help those outcomes in Indigenous communities, and there are other models that people will believe is just another layer of bureaucracy and not going to improve the living standards of Indigenous Australians. So, we want to support a situation where we can see a brighter future for those young kids, and I know Megan and others want that as well, and that’s why literally millions of Australians are asking for the detail. As you know, in a recent Fairfax poll, 13 per cent of Australians understood what the Voice was about. So, 87 per cent of people are waiting for the detail.
QUESTION:
Do you suspect you’ll have a position, a Party position on the Voice by the time of the by-election? And just to your line in recent weeks that you think it will fail because of the way the government’s handled it, despite that, you think their strategy is wrong, clearly. Do you want it to win? Would you like to see them change tack so it does win?
PETER DUTTON:
We went to the last election with a policy to have a local and regional Voice. We’ve been working on this – as Tom Calma and Marcia Langton point out – for a number of years, and we’ve frankly been puzzled by the Prime Minister’s walking away from that local and regional element in the last 24 hours. The Special Envoy to the Prime Minister in this space – Professor Dodson, said that the Voice should have a seat at the National Cabinet. So, having a say on every policy. The Prime Minister’s walked away from that.
So, I think the difficulty is that a lot of the detail is either a moving feast or they just haven’t settled it. I’ve asked for the detail so that we can make an informed choice, and I think millions of Australians are in that position. I think it’s perfectly reasonable, and I think it reflects the fact that we do want Indigenous voices to have a stronger say so that we can address the practical needs in those communities, and our timeline in part is dictated by when the Prime Minister’s prepared to release the detail. As I’ve said before, if it becomes obvious that the Prime Minister is not going to release the detail, then we’ll have to make a call at that stage on the known information.
QUESTION:
Is there a timeline for you to make that call?
PETER DUTTON:
No, there’s not. We’ve worked constructively with the government. I’ve met with the Prime Minister. I’ve expressed our concerns. But when you have Frank Brennan yesterday, who’s in favour of the Voice saying that the Prime Minister has really presided over this in a disastrous way. One day the Prime Minister says this is a huge issue for our country, of course it is. The next day he says, ‘well, this is not our issue, we’re just the vehicle for the model that’s been proposed by others’. It’s a bizarre way to explain it to the Australian public.
I think most people are worried about what they’re hearing from the Prime Minister. Frankly, there are a lot of families, including here in Aston, who at the moment are struggling to pay their power bills. They heard the Prime Minister say he’d reduce the power bills by $275, they’ve gone up by at least that much. They heard him say that they would have cheaper mortgages, eight out of eight meetings of the Reserve Bank under Labor have resulted in mortgage rates going up. And the government’s now proposing a carbon tax, which is three times what Julia Gillard proposed, which is going to be inflationary, is going to drive interest rates further and higher than what they need to be, and families are going to have to pay for all of that. As we know, you always pay more under Labor. That’s how they operate the economy. They don’t understand the budget. They don’t understand the import of and the impact of decisions that they make which adversely affect families, including here in Aston.
QUESTION:
Can I just ask you about the Liberals in Victoria, Greg Mirabella told members in a – apparently it was just a one pager, essentially not quite a state election review, that Matthew Guy was a net negative, not helped by various minor scandals. Do you believe Matthew Guy was the cause of the Liberals not winning the state election in November?
PETER DUTTON:
I mean, I’m frankly looking forward to the 1st of April now, which is the by-election date in Aston, and residents here in Aston have a huge decision to make. This is an opportunity to send a message to Anthony Albanese and the Labor government that they haven’t got a plan and that families are angry about the fact that they don’t have a plan to help Aston families with the cost of living pressures.
If you’re struggling to pay your bill at the moment and you’re struggling to fill your car up at $2 a litre and your insurance premiums going up, and every time you go to the checkout, the prices have gone up in your grocery basket, Anthony Albanese promised before the general election last May that he had a plan to fix that, to help families, and every day since then he’s made it harder for families. I think really that’s where all of us are concentrated at the moment.
QUESTION:
That doesn’t answer my question, though. So, the problem with the Liberal brand in Victoria, does it stem back to someone like Matthew Guy and the state election result?
PETER DUTTON:
I just think we look forward now, and the fact is that the by-election here is a crucial decision for Victorians, for those who live in the seat of Aston. We’ve got an amazing candidate in Roshena, and Roshena is a mum of young kids, she balances her parenting responsibilities, the work that she’s undertaken for a long period of time, the community work that she fits in as well. She’s going to knock on doors, and I think the locals here will see in Roshena Campbell, a great local advocate, a great MP into the future who will fight every day on their behalf and who will be part of a Party that will go to the next election, helping families, not hindering them.
QUESTION:
Last night you said you went out for dinner in Melbourne last night, where’d you go? How’d you find it?
PETER DUTTON:
I went to Chinatown with a couple of friends and had a good meal, actually. I was joking, actually, because I think my chopstick skills are pretty renowned and my mum recalls that I learnt to use chopsticks before I learnt to use a knife and fork with Chinese neighbours as we were growing up, and I love Asian food. So, I had a good conversation actually, and it wasn’t a late night. I got to the gym this morning as well, which I was able to burn off a few of the calories.
QUESTION:
Do you think there’s any scope to reform superannuation or is it working as it should?
PETER DUTTON:
Look, a couple of points on superannuation. If you’ve worked hard and you’ve put your own money aside into superannuation, you don’t want the government changing the rules and taxing it effectively retrospectively. People might have had a windfall from a house sale, they might have inherited some money, they might have sold their small business and rolled that money into superannuation. In that scenario, if they’ve invested in shares or in a portfolio which has gone up significantly in value, they’ve done it according to the rules and they’ve done it because they want to support their retirement.
If the Labor Party is changing the rules and taxing and taxing and taxing your superannuation, why will people invest in super? So, it’s not just the people who have superannuation funds that will face higher taxes under Labor. It also creates the uncertainty as an investment class for younger people who will be talking to their parents and grandparents and saying, ‘well, why would I put extra money into super if the government’s just going to tax it when I get into retirement?’
The Labor Party always view people’s superannuation money, not as the worker’s money, but as their own money, as the Labor Party’s money. As we know with Labor, when they run out of money, they come after yours. The changes that they’re proposing to superannuation, I think, are going to be detrimental to people’s retirement plans and I think self-funded retirees and part pensioners and those who are looking forward to retirement maybe in ten or 20 years will see great uncertainty that previous generations have seen in the Labor Party. The Labor Party can’t manage the budget and the changes that they’re proposing on superannuation at the moment will just make it harder for people in retirement.
Thank you very much.
[ends]