Subjects: Dr Jim Chalmers’ inaccurate migration numbers, yet again; Labor’s housing crisis and Big Australia migration policy; the Prime Minister’s cost of living crisis and home-grown inflation; Australia’s Ambassador for First Nations People; Labor’s energy policy shambles; nuclear energy; AFL Grand Final.
E&OE.
BEN FORDHAM:
Now, is anyone surprised by this? The Treasurer has conceded Australia’s net overseas migration intake will be higher than originally forecast. Net overseas migration measures the difference between migrants staying longer than 12 months, and the number of departures. The Federal Government has put its miscalculation down to the fact that departures had been lower than expected. Well, shock, horror, people want to stay longer!
Jim Chalmers says when it comes to arrivals, we’re more or less tracking as we expected, but when it comes to departures, that’s been the big difference. And the blow out is a threat to inflation because when migrants delay leaving, they crowd out the rental market, which drives up prices in the middle of a housing shortage. Higher rents means higher inflation, and that reduces the chances of the Reserve Bank cutting interest rates.
The Federal Opposition Leader is Peter Dutton. He’s on the line right now.
Mr Dutton, good morning to you.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning, Ben.
BEN FORDHAM:
Jim Chalmers got his numbers wrong?
PETER DUTTON:
Yet again. Who would have thought? And each time that they put out a forecast to say migration’s going to come down, it actually goes up.
The problem is that they brought in almost a million people over the last two years, only 300,000 homes have been built, and over a five year period they’re planning to bring in 1.6 million people, which is the size of Adelaide, and there’s been no planning done, Ben. There’s been no extra infrastructure, in fact, they’ve cut money from roads and infrastructure that we need – medical services, etc – and the impact on housing is obvious. If you’ve got more people bidding for houses and you’ve got rental prices going up, then it’s no wonder we’ve got the housing crisis that Mr Albanese has created now as well.
BEN FORDHAM:
Shouldn’t this be obvious to the Treasurer that there are a lot of people who are going to stay in Australia longer because who wants to leave the joint?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, have a look at what they’re doing with the migration programme, Ben. I mean they’re stopping criminals being deported – so more people are staying, which has a feed into these numbers. They’ve taken money away from the Department of Home Affairs – so they’re not enforcing the program as it once was – and effectively, they’ve lost control of our borders in a different way; boats are still getting through, but not in the numbers, thank goodness, that we saw under Rudd-Gillard. But it just seems to me the Prime Minister’s thrown his hands up in the air, he doesn’t know what to do and we’ve got at the same time, building approvals down to record lows. You’ve got a situation where the CFMEU has been running riot across the economy because the Labor Party take donations from them at election time. So that’s forced up housing prices and honestly, it’s just a mess of their own making, and the Treasurer should know better than this.
As you rightly point out, it has an inflationary impact, which is what is keeping interest rates high for longer, when we’ve already seen them go down in the US, in the UK and New Zealand and Canada, and they should already have been on the way down here.
BEN FORDHAM:
We’ve got the Reserve Bank meeting tomorrow. What are you expecting out of that?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ben, I really hope for Australians with a mortgage, that rates go down, but the Reserve Bank can only respond to the economic settings. As the Reserve Bank Governor has pointed out, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer have got their foot on the accelerator and the Reserve Bank Governor’s got her foot on the brake. So the extra money that’s being pumped into the economy, by the migration programme, through government spending, all of that is working to keep inflation higher for longer.
Every month that goes by where interest rates haven’t come down, people are paying more and more for their mortgages. I think at the moment they just can’t afford it, and they certainly can’t afford another couple of years of this.
BEN FORDHAM:
We know that money is tight at the moment, but it’s not when you are Justin Mohamed, who is the First Nations Peoples Ambassador – this was a role created by the Labor Party – and Justin Mohamed, the First Nations Peoples Ambassador, has spent more than a quarter of $1 million on overseas trips. He’s taken nine overseas trips, including to the US, Switzerland, Vanuatu and Dubai. Business class flights alone cost more than $100,000, and all up, according to The Daily Telegraph, the costs add up to $350,000 for our First Nations Peoples Ambassador. What do you make of that spending?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ben, if it is the case that we win the next election, that position will be abolished on day one, and that money will be spent to help Australians who are struggling at the moment to keep a roof over their head, or to pay their electricity bill. We’ve got higher priorities at the moment and the cost of living crisis that Labor’s created means that a lot of families over this winter have gone without electricity to power their air conditioning, their heating, and they just can’t afford to eat at the same time – they can do one or the other.
I’m not going to tolerate a situation where we’re wasting taxpayers money. People are working harder. We know out of the employment figures last week that many Australians are now taking up second and third jobs just to make their family household budget balance.
I think this is a waste of money. Nobody can point to what it’s achieved. It’s the only position of its nature in the world and it was all about talking to the Voice and the Makarrata Commission and truth telling. Now, the Prime Minister’s got another $20 or $30 million, I think it is, on a Makarrata Commission, which he some day says he’s going to do, and other days he says he’s not. But again, complete waste of money.
It’ll be a very different way of governing if we win the next election. But at the moment, the waste, I think, is just frustrating and annoying people because they haven’t got enough money in their own budget, but they’ve got the Prime Minister flying this guy around the world business class, doing I don’t know what.
BEN FORDHAM:
Alright, that role will go if you win the election.
Peter Dutton is with us and I want to ask you about a speech you’re giving today on nuclear energy. I don’t know whether you’ve caught up with the news that Microsoft is reopening a nuclear power plant in the US to power its AI operations, and Vietnam and Indonesia have both just announced that they’re considering going nuclear too.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ben, they just don’t have any choice. I just think the juvenile discussion that the Prime Minister and the Treasurer and Chris Bowen have been carrying on with, they’re treating Australians like mugs. They put out the photos of the three eyed fish and the rest of it, but that fell flat because people knew it was a nonsense.
Of the top 20 economies in the world, Australia is the only one that hasn’t embraced, or signed up to nuclear. In Ontario, people are paying one third the cost of electricity that they are here in Australia because they’ve got nuclear in their system. I just think we need to have a sensible debate because if we don’t, the wind turbines and the solar panels out in these solar farms, they just aren’t going to keep the lights on of a night time, or when the winds not blowing. We can’t run a modern economy without stable electricity.
The Prime Minister says he doesn’t like coal, he doesn’t like gas, green hydrogen is not commercially viable, he doesn’t like nuclear. Well, what’s going to be his 24/7 baseload power for when the solar panels aren’t working? So there’s going to be a massive gap and massive blackouts as the energy regulator is warning if this renewables only policy of the Labor Party continues.
Manufacturing here, in the last two years, we’ve already seen a threefold increase in the number of manufacturing businesses that have closed, and those jobs have just gone offshore and we just make it harder for Australian jobs to be created. I think that’s part of the reason that the economy’s in such a mess at the moment.
BEN FORDHAM:
We appreciate your time. Before I let you go, briefly, who wins the AFL Grand Final – Sydney or Brisbane?
PETER DUTTON:
Would you be surprised to hear me say, I think the Brisbane Lions will run away this year. [inaudible] Ben, I’m a little worried, not as confident as I first sounded, but Sydney’s playing very well and the Lions just got there on the weekend. So, fingers are crossed for this year, but Sydney’s playing very well.
BEN FORDHAM:
Good luck and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for your time.
PETER DUTTON:
Thank you mate.
[ends]