Subjects: Budget Reply speech; cost of living pressures facing Australian households; the government’s broken promise on a $275 cut to your power bills; Syrian repatriation; childcare; visit to Alice Springs and Indigenous communities; Election 2025; school exams.
E&OE
LAURA JAYES:
Joining me live now is the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. Thanks so much for your time, Mr Dutton.
PETER DUTTON:
Thank you, Laura. First of all – first Budget Reply as Opposition Leader. It can be a pretty bruising experience losing government and these speeches are sometimes as much about getting the team together. So, is the team together? What is the mission for the next two years?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, Laura, every Australian remembers when John Howard lost in 2007, the Coalition went into a pretty rapid descent and five months into that time the Liberal Party was tearing itself apart. I’m really fortunate to have a great team, a tight team, very collegiate, very united and determined to win in 2025. I’m really grateful for the senior team that I’ve got around me as well. You’re right, it’s a big occasion. Normally, you have your family there on a night like last night but our kids are in exam block in year 11 and 12 back in Brisbane so they weren’t able to travel down. They’re supposed to be studying and not watching TV, as I said last night, but not sure how that’s going.
But it was a good opportunity to just talk a bit more about what we believe, our values, reasserting what the Liberal Party believes in and the direction that I want to take the Party on a pathway to victory in 2025.
LAURA JAYES:
Well, what are you all about; and how are you distinct from the Morrison Government?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I believe very strongly that firstly, the big part of the Liberal Party history has been to clean up Labor messes. If you look at what the Labor Party is doing at the moment, they have presided over a budget which was supposed to have a plan to help people with cost of living pressures. Instead, it detailed an increase in electricity prices of 56 per cent. They’re now talking about an industrial relations system where we have the potential for economy-wide strikes, which is something that will hark back to the 1980s that Paul Keating has rejected as being a nonsense policy. They’re talking about rolling out 28,000 kilometres of poles and wires through national parks and farmlands and they haven’t even approached land owners yet. So, I think my job will be, frankly, to continue the tradition of many of my predecessors, and that is that we will have to clean up a big mess in three years’ time. I don’t think people voted for this and I don’t think they thought the Prime Minister was going to break so many promises so early on in his term in government. Instead of a plan on Tuesday, there was more pain for Australians just at a time when they wanted to hear the Prime Minister say that he had a solution, and he just didn’t.
LAURA JAYES:
Yeah, this broken promise on the $275 savings on your energy bills. But if you had won the election, you too would be sitting here with a broken promise wouldn’t you? Because the Liberal Party did promise a 25 per cent reduction in energy costs.
PETER DUTTON:
Laura, I just think you need to look at our track record. I mean, energy prices went up significantly through Labor’s period in government. Over the course of the nine years when we were in government, went up on an average of 0.3 of one per cent each year. Now, there are always pressures that come to bear. There’s the pandemic that we had to deal with, there are all sorts of supply chain issues, there are economic shocks otherwise to the system and every government needs to deal with the events that are presented to them. At the moment, we should be pumping more supply of gas into the system, which would put a downward pressure on gas prices, which would help in turn bring down electricity prices. But instead, you’ve got a government, because of the policies that they’re promoting, the renewable energy targets that they’re pursuing, that are going to result in massive increases in power prices – 56 per cent is just the start of it. So, Labor’s got a difficult situation, I accept that. But it’s how you respond to it and they’re responding in a way that will make a bad situation worse. Whereas I think the policy levers that we pull, the negotiations that we conduct with the companies end up resulting in better outcomes for consumers. We demonstrated that in government and it shows that Labor can’t manage the economy or these difficult issues and they’re always full of bluster in opposition, but whenever Labor gets into government, your own finances always end up going backwards.
LAURA JAYES:
All right. Let’s look at some of the other themes you touched on last night. You are now supporting Labor’s childcare policy if I’m not mistaken. What has changed there for you?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Laura, we’ve supported an increase in funding in childcare since the Howard days. I mean, money has grown and grown each and every year in childcare expenditure. The government expense – $4.7 billion here without creating an extra space which causes us concern because that will likely see upward pressure on those childcare fees, which parents just can’t afford. But look, I view it very much as a reality for families. If you’re a family with three young kids going into childcare so that, you know, the mother, which is generally the case, wanting to return to work, you know, they have to earn about $120,000 a year of gross income to break even. So, we have to recognise that reality. We have to support families where, you know, mums decide to stay at home and all sorts of other variations with grandparents and the rest. But we have to accept that that is a reality of increasing participation. When we were in government, we talked a lot and delivered on increasing the participation of women in the workforce. I think it’s a very important policy for many reasons to pursue and you can have an argument about the limits and if people on very high incomes should pay for their own childcare, etcetera – they’re all reasonable debates. I think as a general principle though, it is a blocker for women returning to work and we have to provide assistance where we can.
LAURA JAYES:
Yeah. I mean, is it the conundrum for you that there’s a significant proportion of Liberal Party voters have quite conservative views about mothers working and who raises children and who should be there to pay for childcare? Is that a fair assessment and what do you say to them?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, it’s not a quandary for me. At the heart of the Liberal Party is choice and the legitimate choice of somebody deciding to go back to work when their children are young is as legitimate a choice for a parent who decides that she wants to stay at home with their children for as long as they want. I mean that’s the decision that each family makes based on their own circumstances. There are also a lot of care needs that need to be addressed that will influence people’s decisions but that’s the modern reality. So, I don’t think it’s an ‘either or’ option. In the Labor Party’s mind it is because they want to punish those families who decide to stay at home or to make different choices. Many families now decide that one spouse, and it’s more possible since COVID, for them to work from home so that they can balance it. In other countries around the world there would be help that in a country like Singapore or London or the United States or Canada, families are able to get workers to come into the home. That’s not a reality in our country. So, we’ve got to provide assistance in a different way.
LAURA JAYES:
I’ve just had confirmed here at Sky News that 17 children and four women have been rescued from those Syrian camps in Iraq and they’ll soon be repatriated to Australia or brought back here to Australia. Do you have any concerns about this? This is an area that you know very well – intimately. What should be done next?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Laura, I don’t believe that this is in our country’s best interests. I obviously wish the families well, and I hope that the transition is successful. But I do worry about people coming back from a theatre of war, particularly where they’ve been in a circumstance where they’ve been mixing with people who hate our country, hate our way of life; terrorists who have either committed terrorist offences or intend to commit those offences. So, the government needs to explain and the Prime Minister needs to stand up today to explain to the Australian public what measures they’ve got in place. As the Australian Federal Police Commissioner pointed out to Senate estimates not too long ago, it takes about 300 police officers during the course of a year and almost $4 million to monitor one individual they have a significant concern about.
As Minister for Defence and Home Affairs we received some pretty blunt security assessments and advice in relation to some individuals and as the Leader of the Opposition, I received a briefing from the Director-General of Security only a couple of weeks ago. I’m not going into what advice he provided me, but on my collective experience and what I know, I don’t think it’s in our country’s best interests. I think sometimes because we haven’t seen – on our television screens – an attack in Paris or London or in Melbourne or Sydney for some time, we think the threat has passed. It hasn’t passed. The agencies are fighting against terrorism every day and thwarting attacks. As a parent or as a grandparent, I mean, you would desperately want that little boy or girl to be repatriated back to our country, you’d want your daughter to come back. But the fact is that parents have made a decision – a terrible decision – to take their children into that theatre of war or to give birth to children in that theatre of war and that’s a terrible circumstance for those children, for those women but that’s a decision that the parents have made.
In our positions, you’ve got to make decisions that are in our country’s best interests and the Prime Minister needs to stand up today and to explain to the Australian people why it’s in our country’s best interests and why we’re not compromising security here in our own country. Because there are lots of boys and girls and women and families and older Australians that we need to take care of and preventing terrorist attacks in our country is an ongoing daily fight that we need to be realistic about.
LAURA JAYES:
Just finally, you have called for any Indigenous sexual abuse inquiry to be held, a royal commission. You spoke a lot about your time as a police officer last night and your really harrowing experiences. Just give me an idea as to what has coloured this decision and why you’re calling for this now?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Laura, look, there’s nothing worse than as a police officer, as you know, I mean, people will know family members and work colleagues who have been sexually abused or physically abused in a relationship and it’s confronting. I’ve been to many scenes where they’re just horrific scenes, kids screaming, bloodied faces, and it’s not something that we should ever tolerate for a moment in our country. We commemorated the fourth anniversary of the Royal Commission into sexual abuse in institutions – in churches and schools and community groups – in Parliament yesterday and I believe very strongly that on this very day in our country, in Alice Springs, in particular, there is a similar episode unfolding. I couldn’t come back from there – being told what I’d been told by Indigenous women and other leaders within the community: the prevalence, the very significant numbers that we’re talking about in that community where children are being sexually assaulted – and not do anything about it. I understand people’s sensitivities around the Stolen Generation where kids were taken away from good parents, but that is not what we’re talking about here.
It’s unconscionable in my mind that we would have a young eight or nine year old girl or little boy who doesn’t feel safe going into a home because where they sleep is not a safe place for them. So, in Alice Springs, at the moment you’re seeing crime rampant because young kids are out committing crime of a night time. The police are exhausted and have given up and they’re doing that because they don’t want to go back home and they’re sleeping during the day, which means that they’re missing school, and it’s happening at an alarming rate and the government needs to respond urgently.
The Prime Minister was good enough to meet with me yesterday. I’d raised it with him on an occasion before that, but I’ve been to Alice Springs before. As a police officer, I’ve seen a lot in life and I’d been to the town camps before in Alice Springs: the squalor and the overcrowding and all the rest of it is confronting. But I didn’t take a city set of eyes and shock by what I’d seen, it was pretty much what I’d seen there before in terms of housing and the circumstances in which people are living. But what really did shock me is that you’ve got social welfare people, the community services officers, who are mentally broken because they’re taking kids back to these homes, the kids are clinging on their legs not wanting to go back into that environment and they’ve resigned. The turnover of staff is significant, and the government needs to act now and I hope that we can provide bipartisan support to the government to spend what needs to be spent. But we cannot tolerate the knowledge that this is happening and not respond to it.
LAURA JAYES:
Yeah. Well, thank you for putting it more firmly on our radar. This is something that our reporter Matt Cunningham covers a lot. Before I let you go, Anthony Albanese didn’t think much of your speech last night, perhaps not all that surprising. Do you think he underestimates you?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, that’s up to the Prime Minister. I have a great deal of respect for him. He occupies a very important high office in our country, and I’ve had the great honour of working under four Liberal leaders. I’ve learnt a lot over my 20 years in Parliament. I think we mature naturally in these jobs, and I’ve had a number of portfolios where I’ve had to make tough decisions. I’ve got an opportunity now, as I did in my speech last night, to talk a bit more about my background and upbringing and experiences and influences and the values that I believe that we need to adhere to as a country. I hope that I can display that to people and by the time of the next election, I intend it to be a very tight race with the Prime Minister. He might not consider that to be a reality. He might write me off and believe that he’s got the next election in the bag, but I’m going to fight every day between now and then, because I believe that there is going to be a big mess to clean up and I believe that Australians will vote us back in, in 2025, to try and provide a better situation for families than what they’re going to experience under this government over the next couple of years.
LAURA JAYES:
Are you a tough dad? Is it Harry and Tom doing their exams?
PETER DUTTON:
Harry and Tom are doing their exams and Bec’s 20, she’s 21 in March. So, I mean, I joke about it, they’re three great kids and I’m very fortunate. I love them so much and very proud of them. They are studying but Kirilly’s prodding them along the path as good mums do.
LAURA JAYES:
Yeah, I reckon you’re the softie in all of this. But anyway, we’ll see. Good luck to Harry and Tom with their exams…
PETER DUTTON:
Don’t wreck that image! Thanks, Laura.
LAURA JAYES:
Alright, thanks.
PETER DUTTON:
Thank you very much.
[ends]