Subjects: Visit to Wagin Woolorama; live sheep export industry; cost of living pressures; Labor’s abolition of the Cashless Debit Card; Indigenous Voice to Parliament; AUKUS.
E&OE.
OLIVER PETERSON:
Joining me in the studio today is the Federal Liberal Leader Peter Dutton. Welcome back to Perth.
PETER DUTTON:
Great to be here Oli. Thank you very much.
OLIVER PETERSON:
It’s what, two visits in about three weeks?
PETER DUTTON:
It certainly is. We had a great visit today up with Rick Wilson and Melissa Price and just up at Woolorama and just talking to the farmers up there about their issues. It’s a tough life for many of those families and they’re under the pump at the moment with the proposal to close down the live sheep export and not just the farmers, but it’s the people who are producing the pellets, and the livestock carriers and the wool graders and the rest. It really sends a shudder through a community like that because it’s such a big part of their local economy.
OLIVER PETERSON:
It’s also an attack on Western Australia, shutting down the live sheep export trade. This is obviously going to be a decision made by the Albanese Government. If roles were reversed, would you reinstate it?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, certainly we will and that’s the commitment that I gave today and I think that continuity is important. You’ve got the Prime Minister out saying to these farmers at the moment, ‘we’ll give you certainty up until 2025 or 2026, and then after that we’re going to close it down’. The problem is, of course Oli, that people can’t make investment decisions on that basis. If you’re talking about buying a new tank or a new shed or a new piece of machinery, the banks won’t lend on that basis if there’s only two or three years left in your business before you need to find a new market and it’s not apparent where the new market would come from. It’s not easy to ship those sheep from the West Coast to the East Coast. There’s a huge market in the Middle East and the potential to grow.
Speaking to some of the younger farmers out there from the ag college, they’re worried about their future because they’ve watched their parents, and their grandparents work hard on the property, and they want to be the next generation to carry that flame and they’re understandably under a lot of pressure and very upset at what the Labor Government is proposing at the moment.
OLIVER PETERSON:
This is a claytons inquiry as well because the outcomes are already being determined. Even though there’s going to be a panel put in place, talking to WA Farmers, the Pastoralists and Graziers Association, they were not consulted. When Murray Watt came to Perth these last couple of weeks, he didn’t even pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m in town, come and have a chat’. He didn’t even go and meet them face-to-face.
PETER DUTTON:
There’s a lot of anger and resentment over that as well, that he sort of flew into town, did a half hour press conference, wouldn’t take any questions, just closed it down to say, ‘look, I’ve made the decision, so I’m not going to answer that question’. For a lot of the farmers, including some that we spoke to who signed this letter, there were 25 farming groups in total who wrote the letter to the Prime Minister just expressing their dismay, their disgust at the lack of consultation, the lack of engagement.
When you think of what the industry has been through in the last couple of years, talking to a vet out there today, she’s been on the ship, has been part of the process of improving the conditions for the sheep on board and they’ve had no reportable incidents in the last couple of years because of the increased standards that are there.
As I say, if you close the industry down, it has a knock-on effect to other commodities as well, because that Middle East market is a very important one for wheat and for barley and for other commodities. If they see a risk, a sovereign risk in Australia, as they did when Labor last were in government and they closed down the live cattle export industry, it really sends a shudder through those markets and they think, ‘well, we’ll just start buying from somewhere else’, which is exactly what they’ll do and probably a market that doesn’t treat their sheep as well as we do.
OLIVER PETERSON:
Do you think that the federal government is starting to take Western Australia for granted? Because without WA, Anthony Albanese wouldn’t be the Prime Minister today.
PETER DUTTON:
There’s certainly a real hint of that and I suppose just the commanding numbers that Mark McGowan’s got in WA, not the arrogance, but the confidence that comes with that is present in their Labor federal MPs as well. None of them are standing up on this issue and a lot of them are really toeing the line put out by the Prime Minister in Canberra and I don’t think it’s in the best interests of WA.
I think we completely and utterly take for granted the resources sector and you’ve got Madeleine King who’s sort of empowered on behalf of the Prime Minister to go out there and say that, you know, ‘Labor supports gas and coal’. Then you’ve got Chris Bowen and Tanya Plibersek on the East Coast who are telling people in inner city Sydney and Melbourne, ‘we want to close coal down, we want to close gas down’ and they’re speaking out of both sides of their mouth. I think eventually people realise that that’s not sustainable and they get marked down, but they’re still in their honeymoon and that’ll continue on for a little while yet.
OLIVER PETERSON:
Your visit to WA a few weeks ago was also into the Goldfields to see the impact on Leonora and Laverton in particular, and the cancellation of the cashless welfare card. Are you seeing a path back to – hopefully for your sake – government in a few years by re-engaging with regional Western Australia?
PETER DUTTON:
Very much so. I think this is a case, not just in WA, but in my own state of Queensland as well, in New South Wales and elsewhere, because there is a large part of the community that really feels left behind and also I suppose just really puzzled by some of the decisions that are being made out of Canberra at the moment. A lot of decisions that are increasing inflation which ultimately increases interest rates, so people are paying more for their mortgages than they would need to.
But in Leonora, for example, we went there and spoke with Indigenous women. They were very clear, absolutely adamant that they wanted the Cashless Debit Card reinstated. They couldn’t understand why it was abolished because as soon as it was, the violence recommenced, the kids were back out on the streets causing dramas and damage, and they want, like all of us, to live in a peaceful community. When you question the Prime Minister about this in Question Time, ‘why would you abolish the Cashless Debit Card that was working and really helping mums and dads spend money on their kids, buy food instead of alcohol, make sure that they were providing the necessities of life instead of drugs and money being spent on everything but the kids’, you can’t get a straight answer.
It just seems this sort of ideological position, that as Mark McGowan’s pointed out, that you know, it’s racist. Well, it’s just a complete nonsense. In Alice Springs, you’ve seen some alcohol restrictions there in the last couple of weeks, it makes a big difference overnight and local residents realise that. I hope that by re-engaging with regional areas we can really have a very strong message on their behalf at the next election.
OLIVER PETERSON:
On three other matters quickly, the Voice; we are expecting some movement and drafting of questions. Where does the Liberal Party sit at the moment in regards to whether you’ll be supporting a Voice to Parliament or whether or not you’ll be joining the ‘No’ campaign?
PETER DUTTON:
Oli, to be honest, I think our position is pretty similar to millions of Australians, that is that we want a better outcome for Indigenous Australians. I don’t want to see kids living in squalor. I don’t want to see children being sexually abused or physically abused at much higher rates than our kids are in the cities or in the metropolitan areas. I want to see infant mortality rates improve. I want to see life expectancy improve. But I want the detail on what the Prime Minister’s proposing because many of us over a long period of time have watched governments, both Liberal and Labor, at both the state and federal level, give a lot of money into Indigenous communities, and we’re probably further behind than we were even 20 years ago.
We’ve seen ATSIC which has been a huge bureaucracy, failed, lots of corruption, money wasn’t getting to people on the ground and if you enshrine this in the Constitution, that is a very big deal in our country. The legislation in the Parliament can’t overrule the enshrinement of something in the Constitution.
That’s why we’ve been respectful, we’ve asked the Prime Minister for detail, that hasn’t yet been forthcoming, but I hope that he’s able to provide that because otherwise I think even if people have got an instinct to support a proposal like the Voice, I think ultimately they vote against it because they just don’t understand how it would work or if it’s going to be another bureaucracy and not the panacea or the silver bullet that they’re after.
OLIVER PETERSON:
So there’s work for the government to do to explain this to Australians?
PETER DUTTON:
Very much so. And they’re basic questions. How it will work? How many people? How they’ll be elected? I was up in East Arnhem Land only 10 days ago and up in that community, they’ve got work programs, they’ve got schooling programs that are seeing kids go to school with a 90 per cent attendance rate, they have housing programs. They’ve really got a very impressive operation up there and whilst they would be supportive of the Voice, I don’t think they want a situation that’s going to disrupt the success that they’ve got. So, what would a Voice out of Canberra mean for those communities?
I think it’s true in WA as well. If you get a Voice that says we’re against new mines, for example, in regional WA because of emissions and environmental reasons, well that Voice is enshrined in the Constitution and what influence would that have on policymaking in Canberra? They’re reasonable questions and the PM so far hasn’t, been able to answer them.
OLIVER PETERSON:
On two other matters you’re wrestling with in Canberra. China’s obviously hit out at Australia and our planned acquisition of these nuclear submarines. Does that worry you as the Opposition Leader, China’s commentary on this?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, when I was Defence Minister I was proud to work with Scott Morrison and the rest of our national security team. We negotiated with the Brits and with the Americans. We struck the AUKUS deal and we did that because the intelligence to us was very clear, and that is that we live in a very uncertain time.
The current Defence Minister Richard Marles and the Prime Minister have used the same language we did when we were in government. That is, that all of the intelligence points to this being the most unstable period since World War II. Now, you can just say that flippantly, but if you slow it down and think about what that means, not just now, but over the next decade or two, Australia does have to be in a strong position because bullies, whoever it might be, don’t respect weakness.
Australia is in an alliance with the United States, the United Kingdom, our Five Eyes partners otherwise, including Canada, New Zealand and the UK, the US. We’re in this Quad arrangement now with India and with Japan. They are incredibly important to make us stronger so that you’ve got a deterrent value.
The submarine deal will be good for WA because there’ll be jobs and in government as the Defence Minister, I mean we approved a lot of spending on Henderson, for example, and other defence establishments here.
So, I worry about the rhetoric. I worry about where things are headed in our region and I want us to be in the best position possible to keep our country safe and we do that through the acquisition of those submarines.
OLIVER PETERSON:
So bipartisan support really with government here, but there was some inflammatory rhetoric this week, we could be at war within three years with China. Do you see that eventuating?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Oli, that’s the advice from the experts and that’s the advice from the current Minister, that they are very worried about the intelligence that they’re reading. You don’t have to just rely on the intelligence. If you look at even the words of the Chinese Foreign Minister out of Beijing over the course of the last 72 hours or so, really ramping up that rhetoric. It’s not just Australia or America or the United Kingdom that is drawing that conclusion. You’re now getting very significant engagement from Europe, from NATO and they are worried about the alliance between China and Russia.
I think we should do everything we can to provide a deterrence to maintain the status quo in relation to Taiwan because they’re an incredibly important trading partner, but ultimately the first task of any Prime Minister, of any government, is to keep their people safe and we will support the government in whatever step they take to bolster our security and give us the best chance of peace.
OLIVER PETERSON:
Peter Dutton, we appreciate you coming into the studio today and we look forward to seeing you back in WA.
PETER DUTTON:
Looking forward to it. Thanks very much.
[ends]