Subjects: Trump Presidency; the Coalition’s plan to get Australia back on track; the Prime Minister’s divisive Voice referendum; Labor’s energy policy shambles; government waste.
E&OE.
DAVID ‘PENBO’ PENBERTHY:
Well, joining us now for the first time in 2025 is the Leader of the Federal Opposition, Peter Dutton.
Mr Dutton, good morning. Happy New Year and thanks for your return to the FIVEaa Breakfast Show in 2025.
PETER DUTTON:
Pleasure, Penbo. Thank you very much. Happy New Year to you and Will and to all the listeners. It seems like a long time ago, actually, since the Christmas break. So, everyone’s back into it.
DAVID ‘PENBO’ PENBERTHY:
Well, it seems like a long time ago, and they say weeks a long time in politics – well, a few days has been an extraordinarily long time in politics in the US. As a conservative politician, can I ask you, Mr Dutton, when you look at not just the fact that Donald Trump has returned, but the manner in which he’s returned, does it change your thinking? Does it change your tactics as you approach the looming federal election here in Australia?
PETER DUTTON:
I think what it says is that people, ultimately, have an instinct to provide for their families, they want a safe environment where they can raise their kids, they want to be able to pay the bills and educate their children and provide for a better future for their grandchildren. I think those sort of primal instincts are what’s come to the fore in the United States.
People are happy to treat everyone equally but got sick of the woke agenda and being told they’re racist or told that they’re discriminating because they look sideways or whatever it might be. In the end, they just wanted a strong economy, particularly in the US, where they haven’t got a welfare system that we do here and they just want to do a hard day’s work and get as much back from the tax man as possible. They just felt that the government was getting in a different direction to them. I think that’s where the parallel is here in Australia as well. People are really struggling.
DAVID ‘PENBO’ PENBERTHY:
But on the political correctness front where you sort of alluded to the ‘woke agenda’, has your thinking changed in so far as things like saying, ‘okay, I’m only going to stand in front of the Australian flag, not three flags’? Or some of your commentary around barring councils from not holding citizenship ceremonies. Does that reflect a conviction on the conservative side of politics that you can actually now be a lot more emboldened in going after some of these more PC strictures that govern the way we’re meant to behave and act and think?
PETER DUTTON:
To be honest, Penbo, I think the Voice was the turning point in our country. There are lots of similarities between Australia and the United States, but we’re a separate country, obviously, where we’re a different culture in many ways. But I think the Voice said to people, you know, actually I thought I was the only person thinking that this was ridiculous, but as it turns out, there are six or seven out of ten in my workplace who think exactly the same as me. And I think that allowed a sort of a dark cloud to be lifted and they were able to say, ‘well, look, I’m not discriminating against anyone. I’m a good person, but I’m sick of being told that I’m not’. I think that has allowed, like last year, the conversation about Australia Day that we had in relation to Woolworths. I think it was important and we’ve been plugging away for the last couple of years to ‘say, look, we’re not going to be united as a country if we’ve got people living under different flags and in different tribes’. We’re all equal Australians – whenever you came here, whatever the heritage. We’ve got a proud Indigenous heritage but we never talk about our migrant history. We never celebrate the Italians and the Greeks and the Chinese and the Indians and others who have come from the four corners of the earth to make us the greatest country in the world. I think people just, frankly, had gutful of it. They do want to celebrate who we are as a country. Don’t overlook the blemishes of our history, like any country, but we won’t be united and we won’t be a truly great country if we continue down this pathway that I think the Prime Minister’s had us on, which is to divide the country, which is exactly what the Voice attempted to do.
WILL GOODINGS:
Peter Dutton, we’re obviously a programme that listens to the people of South Australia, they inform so much of what we have to say. There’s been a couple of things over the Trump agenda that it’s quite clear that a large number of our listeners would like to see future Australian governments adopt. I want to ask you about both of those; one of them you’ve already ruled out in the Fin Review this morning. You’ve said Australia won’t be withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, like Donald Trump has done with the United States. Why is that a bad idea?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, a couple of points, Will. As a net exporter, that is a small country of 27 million people and what, a tenth the size, say, of some of the bigger markets and much smaller than say a China market, obviously. But we produce more than we can consume and we operate in that global environment. Now, I think the settings around this debate are changing quickly and I think they’re changing obviously in the United States and I think they’ll be a contagion effect around the world that people are having a sensible conversation again about energy. If you look at the story in Whyalla, we’re paying three times the cost for electricity in this country, compared to say, Tennessee or Ontario, who have nuclear power, and we’re pretending or we have pretended for the last few years that a battery that can last four hours, can somehow keep the lights on in the emergency department at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. It just doesn’t add up. China is setting up two coal fired power stations a week. So we abide by the rules and we live up to the international agreements that we’ve signed up to, but I think there is an air of reality.
There’s also, Will, I think, a big debate in the energy space around the disparity between people who live in regional areas and people who live in the cities, in terms of the way that they’re treated. Living closer to the city, if you’re in an outer metropolitan area, you don’t want wind turbines or big cables running across your backyard, whereas in regional areas, there’s an expectation that people will have – on the Prime Minister’s plan – 28,000 kilometres of new poles and wires, so I do think the debate is maturing and changing, and we need to do our thing globally, but we also need to not destroy our economy and jobs and price ourselves out of industry in the interim.
WILL GOODINGS:
Speaking of the economy, the other measure that was proved particularly popular among our listeners, was the concept of a more aggressive and robust department, like a Department Of Government Efficiency, to cut waste and spending in Australia. Is there any argument for something like that?
PETER DUTTON:
I think it’s a very strong argument for it. If you go back to the Howard Government when they got elected after the Hawke and Keating years, there was a hell of a mess to clean up, as there was after the Whitlam years for the Fraser Government. When Anthony Albanese leaves office, we will have a huge mess to clean up. Now, I hope that he can leave office this year because if they get back in, they can only do it with the Greens and that will be a disaster for, not just the South Australian economy, but for the national economy.
When you look at Victoria at the moment, the Labor Party’s almost bankrupted that state. In Queensland, they’ve racked up hundreds of billions of dollars worth of debt. It’s a real problem. Labor at a federal level can’t manage money, and you can’t keep employing public servants because it pleases the unions and pretend that there’s no cost to it. This Government has put on 36,000 new public servants in Canberra and I’d just say to your listeners: is your life any better off over the last two and a half years because of 36,000 more public servants being employed in Canberra? It comes at a cost of $6 billion a year and growing exponentially.
So think of what we could do with $6 billion a year in terms of infrastructure, of roads, of hospital and health upgrades, more services in the community, and you have to make decisions. In the end, the federal budget – whilst the numbers are much bigger – it’s just very similar to your small business budget, or to your household budget, you can’t spend more than what you earn, and I think we should be driving efficiency…
DAVID ‘PENBO’ PENBERTHY:
Well, talking though – sorry to jump in – talking though, Peter Dutton, in that context, and saying that you do broadly embrace the idea of some sort of DOGE-style approach. Does that mean that if a Dutton Government is elected, as per what happened in your home state in Queensland with Campbell Newman, are you running on a platform of saying there’s going to be significant or indeed major cuts to public servant jobs in Canberra?
PETER DUTTON:
We are going to cut public servant jobs in Canberra because I think there’s a higher priority for that spend. We’ve got an enormous amount of debt – almost $1 trillion worth of debt in this country. If there’s another COVID or there’s another avian bird flu or there’s a war in Europe or there’s a stock market crash, our country will need to deal with that in a sensible way. We’re in a much weaker position if we’ve got enormous debt and government waste. We should have an efficient public service, people are working harder than ever for every dollar they make, and they want to know that when they’re writing the cheque out to the tax man, that somehow it’s going to be spent efficiently, and at the moment, I just don’t think the Government can give that assurance. So, I think we reward efficiency, but we’re not going to tolerate inefficiency and waste, and I don’t think that’s controversial.
DAVID ‘PENBO’ PENBERTHY:
Just finally, Mr Dutton, we always do ‘Meat Tray Friday’ here on a Friday with our listeners, and we’re asking people today if they could govern by executive order, you know, just hold up a piece of white paper with a little sharpie, what would they do? Have you been taken by that idea? Are you going to head down to Officeworks and buy some A3 card and a couple of black Textas?
PETER DUTTON:
You’ve got to get that signature right. There’s a lot of, sort of, up and down in that signature. It’s not how our system works, unfortunately!
DAVID ‘PENBO’ PENBERTHY:
If you could write anything on it, what would it be? Maybe, I don’t know, Brisbane Broncos premiership or something like that?
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen, is it?! Unfortunately. But we’ll see how we go.
DAVID ‘PENBO’ PENBERTHY:
Well, no doubt we’ll see you here with Boothby and Sturt being pivotal to the federal result. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens there, but we’ll catch up again later in the year.
For now, Mr Dutton, thanks for joining us this morning on FIVEaa.
PETER DUTTON:
Terrific guys. Thanks, take care. Bye, bye.
[ends]