THE HON PETER DUTTON MP
LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR DICKSON
TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEW WITH BEN FORDHAM,
RADIO 2GB, SYDNEY
19 February 2024
Subjects: Operation Sovereign Borders; Labor’s border security crisis.
E&OE…………………………………………………………………………………………
BEN FORDHAM:
The Opposition Leader joins us live. Peter Dutton, good morning to you.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning Ben.
BEN FORDHAM:
Sounds like that message is directed to you?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I think the message that should be directed at the moment is to the people smugglers, to tell them that the Government’s going to reinstate temporary protection visas, because that was a key element of Operation Sovereign Borders when we were in government. Mr Albanese scrapped that, and he can’t say that Operation Sovereign Borders operates now, as it did under the Coalition Government.
People smugglers aren’t stupid, they know that this Prime Minister’s weak, that he never keeps his word, and out there telling Australians that there’s ‘nothing to see here’, when we’ve just had a boat arrive onto the mainland without detection. The Prime Minister first knew about it when he was asked by the media. That is a catastrophic failure of our border policy.
BEN FORDHAM:
Would TPVs have made any difference in this latest case?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I think the thing to understand – and I obviously ran Operation Sovereign Borders for a number of years Ben – but the thing to understand here is that the people smugglers, even if they’re coming from a fishing village or they’re an impoverished part of South East Asia, they are sophisticated crime syndicates, and they move people around, they move drugs around, they run prostitution rackets, weapons, whatever it might be – they just see human beings as another commodity – and they’re business people. They look at every word the Prime Minister says, they look for a little chink in the armour, and then they package that up in social media messages or a text message out to potential clients who are sitting in a village somewhere waiting to hop on a boat. If they can successfully tell people that they’re going to land in Australia and stay here permanently, then people will pay money.
For a boat, obviously a fairly well sized boat to arrive, with over 40 passengers on, for that not to be detected, it tells you that the surveillance flights or the surveillance that was in place under Operation Sovereign Borders, is not there at the moment. The Government’s taken $600 million out of border protection. So there will be a price to pay for that, and unfortunately, that’s what we’re seeing at the moment.
BEN FORDHAM:
We’ve now had 12 boats arrive since Anthony Albanese became Prime Minister, and more than 300 illegal arrivals. This latest one, it was only detected by a remote Indigenous community, and apparently when Border Force turned up, according to David Speers on the ABC, a Border Force official actually handed a business card to one of the Indigenous leaders and said, ‘hey, give us a buzz if you spot any more’.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I can assure you that’s not how Operation Sovereign Borders operated when we were in Government. I mean that’s a wing and a prayer stuff.
The trouble is that the Prime Minister wants Australians to believe that there was no difference between what we were doing in Government, which kept the boats stopped and that got kids out of detention that Labor had put into detention and stop the drownings at sea, he wants you to believe that there’s no difference in the two policies, but he’s not telling the truth.
This Prime Minister has a problem with the truth, it seems. If you’re taking money out of Operation Sovereign Borders, if you’re stopping the temporary protection visa side and turning it into a permanent protection visa, these are all messages that the people smugglers will push.
It also comes on top of course of the Government releasing 149 hardened criminals from immigration detention: murderers and sex offenders and the like. Again, people smugglers will be saying to those people who are willing to pay money from Pakistan or wherever it might be, they’ll send a link to that story of the 149 criminals getting out, and they’ll say, ‘look, I’ve told you, if you pay your money – even if you’re a criminal – you’ll eventually get out under Labor and become an Australian citizen’. It’s a catastrophic message, and that’s the problem with the way that – I just don’t think the Prime Minister believes in it. He spent his adult life on the left of the Labor Party, arguing at Labor conferences that Operation Sovereign Borders was an abomination, and now he wants people to believe that he’s fully signed up to it, and ‘there’s nothing to see here’.
BEN FORDHAM:
You calculate that $600 million has been ripped from Border Force and Operation Sovereign Borders. Have you got any feedback from anyone in those organisations who are saying, ‘look, our job is made more difficult because we don’t have the funding we used to have’?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, yes. If you’re looking for messages from Border Force officials, the Commissioner at the Senate estimates said last week that ‘they’re stretched’, and of course they are. This is exactly what happened in the Rudd-Gillard years when Anthony Albanese was Deputy Prime Minister. The money was ripped out of ASIO, the money was ripped out of the Australian Federal Police, the money was taken from Border Force, and there’s a consequence that you pay for that.
Defence is a debacle at the moment because Richard Marles is probably one of the weakest Ministers in the Government, he can’t get any new money and there’s essentially a boycott at Defence. They can always find another area except for national security to invest in, when you have a Labor Government – and that’s the problem.
They’ve spent $209 billion extra over the course of the last 18 months – which I might say is why inflation has stayed so high for so long, and the Reserve Bank Governor has pointed this out – it’s why people are paying more for their mortgages, and it’s always in an area that is a favourite of the Labor Party. It’s on the unions, it’s in other areas – everything else but national security, defence and border protection – and you reap what you sow in this business.
I think the Prime Minister has a lot of repair work to do here, and if he doesn’t start to get his act together, the boats will restart, which nobody wants to see because we’ll see that the chaos that we saw under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
BEN FORDHAM:
Based on the photographs of the latest arrivals, they seem to be middle-aged men and they’re seen in these photographs giving the thumbs up because they’d arrived in Australia. They’re now in Nauru, as we pointed out, but there’s a lot of money being made here by those people smugglers.
PETER DUTTON:
Well there is, and whilst that’s the case, and whilst they have a market to sell a product to, people will pile onto those boats. There are millions, millions and millions of people, understandably, who would want to come to a country like ours, but you need to have an orderly migration program, and as you say Ben, this is not the first boat. There was a boat in November. It’s number 12 or 13 – we don’t know the true numbers – but for a boat this size to get through undetected tells you that those surveillance flights aren’t being conducted, and I think the Government is making a huge error here.
BEN FORDHAM:
Yeah. We can’t afford to go back to what we had last time around when more than 1000 people drowned at sea. We appreciate you jumping on the line.
PETER DUTTON:
Pleasure Ben. Take care mate.
[ends]