Subjects: Lidia Thorpe; Federal Budget; the Albanese government’s lack of an economic plan to reduce cost of living pressures; the government’s broken promise on a $275 cut to your power bills; Syrian repatriation proposal; industrial relations.
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Well let’s go live now to Brisbane where I’m joined by the Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton. Mr Dutton, thanks for your time. I’ll get to the Budget in a minute, but first I wanted to ask you about the scandal involving Lidia Thorpe at the moment. You were someone as a minister who deported bikies, including someone related to her former boyfriend. What’s been your reaction to it? What action do you think should be taken now in connection with it?
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning, Andrew. Look, I think it’s a very serious issue. I’ve just seen nothing like it in my 20 years in Parliament. As the police have pointed out, as the intelligence agencies have pointed out consistently over a long period of time, the bikies are the biggest importers of illicit drugs into our country, they’re involved in all sorts of criminal activity. You see the violence from time to time, the shootings and it’s a pretty unsavoury gathering and for a member of the Australian Parliament to be consorting with somebody in the senior ranks on one of the bikie gangs, at the same time that she’s receiving classified intelligence briefings in the committee, is quite unacceptable. I think what it does do is give the Australian public a window into just the radical element, some of the culture and some of the thinking within The Greens. For many of them, the environment is just a side issue. They have a very radical social agenda and the decriminalisation of drugs is just one of those, but I think it gives people a better understanding of the weakness, also, of the leadership of Adam Bandt. I mean his office knew about this, he was protected from it, and somehow she continues on. I don’t think she’s fit to serve in the Australian Parliament.
ANDREW CLENNELL:
So, do you think she should resign, or Adam Bandt should sack her from The Greens? Do you think this should be referred to the National Anti Corruption Commission?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, all three of those, Andrew. I think The Greens are out there saying how holy they are, and the Labor Party and the Liberal Party are just as bad as each other and the rest of it. I mean, no suggestion of this nature has ever been made against somebody from the Liberal Party. Sam Dastyari is probably the closest you’d come in the Labor Party, but it’s really quite remarkable that The Greens would not refer this matter to the Corruption Commission…
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Would you refer it? I mean you could refer it.
PETER DUTTON:
…but she should be out of the Parliament by then…
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Would you refer it?
PETER DUTTON:
I’d be very happy to. Yeah, of course. I’d be very happy to…
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Ok.
PETER DUTTON:
…absolutely. I don’t have any doubt about that. I think frankly, though, Adam Bandt is the leader of his party. He’s been made aware of very serious allegations, and he should be the one that’s dealing with them.
ANDREW CLENNELL:
All right, what do you make of the sell by the Treasurer in the lead up to this Budget. Today, we have this Paid Parental Leave Scheme announcement. They take it up to $350,000 for couples – I’ll note that was in Josh Frydenberg’s Budget. What do you make of that and the sell generally around the Budget?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Andrew, as you point out, Josh Frydenberg announced this in his Budget, and it’s designed around participation and productivity and that’s a good thing because as you go across the economy at the moment, every sector in every state and territory that I’ve been to over the last few months, is desperate for staff and we need to make it to more family-friendly; we need to make sure that women in particular have a greater opportunity to participate. Apart from that, I suppose there’ll be some signature policy that’s announced on Tuesday night but there’s nothing out of the box here, except for the fact that the government’s admitted and confirmed for the first time that they really don’t have a plan to deal with inflation and unemployment. They went to the election, promising on 97 occasions that the average electricity bill would go down by $275 for families. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer, have not mentioned that figure one day since.
So, I think there is a lot of expectation from families who are really struggling at the moment and know that there’s a tough 12 months ahead with their petrol prices, their gas prices, their electricity prices, their mortgage payments, and this government, it seems, is just saying, ‘well, more of you are going to be out of work and you’re going to be paying more for all of those essential cost of living items’. I think Australians heard Anthony Albanese before the election, saying that he had a plan for all of these issues. Well, it’s clear now that they don’t.
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Should the government use the ACCC to crack down on gas prices or legislate to ensure domestic gas prices are lower?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, the ACCC’s always performed that function, both in terms of gas prices, other market manipulations across the economy and that will continue, there won’t be any difference in the approach. They’re an agency that serves government and if they find cartels or practices that are driving up prices, then they have the power to intervene. This is more fundamental than that. It’s about the policy settings that the government needs to put in place, accepting that the likely reality, the very real reality, is that the United States is going to go into a deep recession and the United Kingdom into a recession and perhaps broader Europe. We don’t know what’s going to happen in terms of a broader war within Europe. We don’t know what’s going to happen within the Indo-Pacific and governments always have to deal with events, but it just seems that this government doesn’t have a plan to deal with cost of living pressures.
Small businesses, who are being smashed at the moment, I think are worried about rising costs of their inputs, not just energy and wages, but their input costs otherwise and that’s going to be passed on to consumers, which is why you’re seeing Labor position now to talk about a much higher inflation rate than what was predicted even a few months ago.
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Jim Chalmers talks about, well he’s indicated really, they’re going to bank a lot of extra revenue, but then the deficits get larger. From what you’re saying about what you think is going to happen globally, does that sound fair enough to you? That’s the situation the budget will be in and probably should forecast it’s in?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, we can’t have a spending spree at the moment – that’s clear – because we don’t want to fuel those inflationary pressures. The reality is that Jim Chalmers does talk a lot, but he doesn’t say much. For a lot of families, I think they are very worried about where they’re going to be this time in 12 months or two years. So, we can’t fuel inflation in this Budget and at least Jim Chalmers should have the decency when you speak to him shortly to recognise that in the last final update of the budget before the election, we had a reduction in a deficit of about $48 billion, and the economy had turned around by $100 billion. That is all due to nine years of economic management where we did take tough decisions. We locked in recurrent saves and we’re in a position quite contrary to whether UK and the US is at the moment. That’s what Labor has inherited. Now if they muck that up, they will put the economy into recession and that will be the test over the course of the next 12 or 18 months. I don’t think our economy should, and I certainly don’t want it to go into recession. The fundamentals are very strong – unemployment at a low rate, the debt relatively low. I think if you look at what we did with JobKeeper –which contributed to debt – it helped a million businesses and kept four million Australians in work. So overall, the fundamentals that have been inherited by Labor are incredibly strong, and it will put us in a good position to weather the storm of the next 12 to 18 months. But, as you know, Labor likes to tax and spend, and we’ll see what surprises they might be in store for Tuesday night.
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Alright, I wanted to ask about this operation the Australian government has confirmed – bringing back women and children from Syrian refugee camps. You had a security briefing on this, after which you said you oppose bringing these people home. What are your chief concerns there?
PETER DUTTON:
Look, everybody feels for any family, any grandparent here in Australia who sees their daughter or grandchild sitting at a camp in Syria. I mean, that’s just a natural human reaction and we would all feel that. As Minister, we were able to bring back some of the orphans who were quite young children and put a package of support around them, which has been quite successful by all accounts. But we’re now moving into a stage where the government’s talking about bringing – or some parts of the government are, the Prime Minister still hasn’t made any comment in relation to this – but there obviously is some operation underway or they’ve given a green light to bringing back women and children. Now in a family unit where you’ve got a mother with a child – four and five, and then two older children – 10 and 12. Do you separate the family, do you leave the 10 and 12 year old there because they’ve been really living a life for the last 10 years where they’ve been indoctrinated with hatred for our country and they pose a potential risk later on? As the ASIO chief has pointed out, terrorists are becoming younger and younger and that’s the tragic reality of the situation that their parents have taken them into. In some scenarios, the women themselves are as bad as any male terrorist and would seek to do harm to our country. So, we have to make a decision which is going to protect Australian children here as well. The parents have taken a tragic course of action in dragging their children or having their children born into that environment. So, we don’t want to increase the likelihood of an attack in our country and that means you do have to take tough decisions and I don’t believe that it’s in our country’s best interests, in our national security interests, for those women to be repatriated back to Australia.
ANDREW CELNNELL:
Because on that – back in 2019, as I think you alluded to, you were Home Affairs Minister. Scott Morrison as Prime Minister announced Australia had rescued the children and grandchildren of two dead Islamic State fighters, including Khaled Sharrouf and will be settling them here. Why is that case different to this one?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, because they were orphans and because they were quite a young age and because we’re able to put the support around them and frankly, we did it without leaking as well, which is part of a security operation. This government leaks, Tanya Plibersek was out there calling this a great thing and I don’t think it’s been properly considered to be honest. I think there’s an emotional reaction by some of the ministers and I don’t think they’ve thought it through properly…
ANDREW CLENNELL:
But Mr Dutton, are you saying that you’re worried as opposed to bringing those children back, that these people could come here and be terrorists that they are of a different level of security threat? Is that what you’re saying? Because otherwise, it doesn’t seem logical the difference in position on this one, both times Australian citizens?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, Andrew, for example, are you going to separate the children from their mother? No, the government’s not proposing to do that, they’re talking about bringing a family unit out…
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Why would you have to?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, because they won’t separate the children from the mother, and they want to bring the family unit…
ANDREW CLENNELL:
But why would you have to separate the children?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, in the circumstance where we bought the children, the children were orphaned as you point out and they were quite young. We’re now three years down the track, these kids have been in camps living with terrorists, talking about their hatred of the West. As I say, it’s a horrible, horrible situation, there are no easy decisions or choices to make here but overall, you’ve got to make decisions that don’t increase the national security risk. We’ve got a number of criminals who are coming out of jail, who haven’t reformed, who have attempted terrorist attacks on our own soil. The police are already having to deal with that, and they’ve pointed out the resource requirements for that – as the Australian Federal Police Commissioner has said to Senate Estimates, you’re talking about for one individual to provide 24/7 monitoring, about 300 police officers at a cost of millions of dollars each year – for one individual. That money could be better spent on the work that the Australian Federal Police are doing stopping drugs being brought into our country by bikie bosses who are liaising with Greens’ Senators. So, I think, frankly, we should be very honest about the security threat that is there. We can be complacent in our country. We haven’t seen a significant terrorist attack but that’s not to say we’re immune from it and I think we should be very, very careful about this decision. There can be long term consequences and if you’re a 12 or 14 year old, that for the last 10 years has known no different than listening to these people and this ideology within a camp in Syria, then I think we should be very worried about that individual, even at a relatively young age but having spent all his or her formative years there coming back into our country. I think that’s the reality of the threat.
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Okay, just finally, what do you make of what you’ve read about the government’s planned industrial relations changes to be introduced this week. Will you be opposing them tooth and nail in the Parliament?
PETER DUTTON:
We will be opposing them, Andrew, because the reality is that this is about ticking off on the shopping list for the union movement. As you know, the CFMEU and others are very influential within this government – they donate millions and millions of dollars to the Australian Labor Party. We can’t have economy-wide strikes. It would be crippling for businesses, particularly when we’re going into an uncertain period. What I said before – the fundamentals of our economy are strong and will see us avoid recession where comparable countries will go into recession. If Labor starts tinkering with these sorts of policies, making it more difficult for businesses to operate when their electricity bills are going up and up under Labor, when every input cost is going up, and if they’ve got workers who are on strike, then that will make our economy weaker and it will put upward pressure on inflation and interest rates.
Labor governments in the past have always taxed heavily so that they can spend heavily. You heard Bill Shorten there before, he’s obviously been mugged by the reality of the rising costs on the NDIS and his language has changed dramatically. But there are cost pressures within and across the economy, and we don’t need Labor making a bad situation worse. They’ve been elected to make a bad situation better and governments have to deal, as I say, with events that come along and they can’t make a situation worse, which is what they would do with this wish-list from the union movement. If you’re in a small business, you’re paying your staff well, the staff are happy to turn up to work, they could be in a position where they’re captured by this economy-wide situation that Labor’s proposing when there’s no problem with the workplace for that small business, the workers aren’t being ripped off, but they end up going out on strike because of the situation that Labor’s legislated. That’s completely unacceptable. It’s a throwback to the `70s and `80s and it would be job destroying, and it would be very bad for our economy because, as I say, it puts upward pressure on inflation and therefore interest rates which families will be paying in their mortgages.
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Peter Dutton, thanks so much for your time.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks, Andrew. Thank you.
[ends]