Subjects: The Coalition’s commitment to real action to address the anti-Semitism and extremism crisis; the Prime Minister’s lack of leadership; Labor’s Big Australia policy; home ownership – restoring the Australian dream; Labor energy policy shambles; gas; the Australian flag.
E&OE.
PETA CREDLIN:
Joining me now is the Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton.
Peter, welcome to the programme, thank you for your time. I want to start with the Newspoll today. Voters regard the Prime Minister as the weakest Prime Minister in decades. Now, are they right? And given the synagogue attack has now been declared a terrorism event, what would you have done differently?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, Peta, it’s great to be on the show, thank you.
I think it’s obvious to all Australians over the course of the last two and a half years that they ended up with something very different than what they voted for in 2022. Our national security is weaker, our economy is weaker, and Australian families are saying to themselves that they just couldn’t afford another two-and-a-half, another three years, ahead of this bad Government.
So, I think in relation to this specific issue, it’s clear the Prime Minister should have stood up a multi-agency arrangement to start with – a task force, to deal with anti-Semitism. We’ve had a 700 per cent rise in anti-Semitic conduct over the course of the last 13, 14 months and the Prime Minister’s been trying to please a domestic political audience. The problem there is that you just can’t walk both sides of the street, which is what the Prime Minister’s tried to do.
PETA CREDLIN:
And it’s not just offensive to Jewish Australians, Peter Dutton, it’s offensive to all Australians. I understand you sought a briefing from the Australian Federal Police on Friday in the aftermath of this attack, but that briefing request was refused. Now, you’ve called for an urgent national security meeting – you called for that over the weekend. It didn’t happen until today. I made the point at the top of the show: during Sydney’s Lindt siege, I remember NSC meeting multiple times during that day and well into the night. That’s not what’s happened here. What’s going wrong in Canberra?
PETER DUTTON:
I just don’t think the Prime Minister, given that he’s never worked in the national security space, he’s never held a portfolio that would give him that experience – and it shows. He must be shunning the advice of the national security advisers around him. As we know, people from the National Security Committee were excluded from the National Security Committee composition, which means that you’re not hearing on a regular basis, or forming relationships, with those closest advisers.
I just don’t think the Prime Minister has any instinct when it comes to national security or these matters, and you’re right, this morning James Paterson and I announced that we believe very strongly that there should be an anti-Semitism task force established with the AFP, with AUSTRAC, with the ACIC (the Intelligence Commission), as well as other agencies, including Border Force, because we should strengthen the 501 cancellation provisions under the Migration Act, so that people who are non-citizens involved in anti-Semitic conduct should be kicked out of the country. The Prime Minister’s picked that up this afternoon – but it’s all too little, too late.
I requested a meeting, as you say, with the AFP Commissioner immediately and that was denied to us. I ended up speaking with him earlier today because we’d written again to the Prime Minister, that we’re still refused a meeting with the Director-General of ASIO, because I wanted to speak to the Commissioner and speak to the Director-General to understand why this hadn’t been declared a terrorist incident straight up. When you’ve got a firebombing of a religious place of worship, well, you’re starting to get a very clear picture very quickly. But the Prime Minister just seemed to resist that.
I honestly think it really comes down to him trying to win Green votes in Western Sydney and in inner city Melbourne as well, and that’s that seems to be what drives him at the moment, but he’s ostracising a whole part of the community.
PETA CREDLIN:
And not just the community. I mean, we’ve seen this picked up internationally, we’ve seen a rebuke from the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of Israel. I think many of our allies – the United States in particular – they feel abandoned by Australia on recent votes at the United Nations. I mean, is it as simple as this being seen through the prism of the Muslim vote in Labor electorates in Western Sydney in particular? Is it that simple?
PETER DUTTON:
I think it’s that simple. I think it’s about trying to save Tony Burke and save Chris Bowen. I think it’s about Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Albanese being paranoid about losing their inner-city seats to the Greens.
Why would you bring in people from a terrorist-controlled zone in Gaza, in the thousands, without doing the proper security checks? Why would you compromise our national security? I think it’s deplorable. It’s best to call him out – he doesn’t like it because he’s got a glass jaw – but that’s the reality of what we’ve got. I just can’t imagine any of his predecessors who would have conducted themselves in this way.
PETA CREDLIN:
Nor can I.
I want to move on to some other issues now – some general issues, but before I do that, there seems to be some ambiguity with comments you made to my colleague Andrew Clennell that claimed somehow that you were walking away from your previous commitments about reducing the migration intake. Now I know previously you’ve said you’d cut the permanent intake to around 140/160,000 people per year? Do you stand by this?
PETER DUTTON:
Yes, of course we do. I saw some of the reporting, I think it first came off an ABC headline, so there’s a misrepresentation of what was said. There’s no change to our policy.
We’ve said that we would cut by about 25 per cent the permanent intake, that would reduce it down to 140,000 in year one, and again in year two it ramps up to 150, and then 160,000, in year four. It opens up housing, rental accommodation for Australians, and in the end I want Australians to achieve home ownership. I want there to be accommodation for people who at the moment are sleeping rough or in cars or couch-surfing, and the Government’s bringing in a person every 44 seconds, which is unsustainable, particularly given the supply constraints in relation to housing.
PETA CREDLIN:
I know you’ve got your nuclear costings coming out this week, I won’t waste a question on nuclear, but will you have a response, a policy, on gas, this side of Christmas or before the election?
PETER DUTTON:
We’ll have a lot to say about gas and the way in which that is integrated into a nuclear baseload system.
There’s a lot of gas required in the system, Peta, and as we’ve said before, it needs to come into the mechanism as well – the capacity mechanism. If we don’t do that, then the lights are going out. If we don’t have baseload 24/7 power, this fantasy of being able to pretend that the batteries can last for 40 hours or four days or whatever it might be, it’s a nonsense. They can last for four hours, and we’re deindustrialising, Labor is smashing our economy at the moment, in large part, because of their renewables only policy.
Not only are prices going up, but obviously, as we saw in New South Wales last week, you’ve got a Premier telling people to turn off their appliances because the network can’t carry that load. It’s just completely and utterly absurd.
PETA CREDLIN:
I want to ask you one question before we go, and it might seem small in the scheme of things, but honestly, I am constantly having people raise this issue with me. When I look at you in a press conference, I see there’s only one flag behind you, it’s our national flag. If you are elected Prime Minister, will that remain the same?
PETER DUTTON:
Yes, it will. I’m very strongly of the belief, Peta, that we’re a country united under one flag. If we’re asking people to identify with different flags, no other country does that, and we are dividing our country unnecessarily.
Now, we should have respect for the Indigenous flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag, but they are not our national flags. I think the Prime Minister sends a very confusing message.
The Prime Minister’s not out there calling out Woolworths and not out there calling the pubs who don’t want to celebrate Australia Day, etc., because he wants to be all things to all people, which is why people rightly perceive him as being the weakest Prime Minister that we’ve had in our country’s history.
I think the fact is that we should stand up for who we are, for our values, what we believe in. We are united as a country when we gather under one flag, which is what we should do on Australia Day. We should value and respect our heritage, and we should also speak a lot more about our migrant story – the incredible story of people who came here, particularly in the post Second World War period with nothing, and have worked hard as tradies, as farmers, and they’ve educated their children, the next generation’s done incredibly well, they’ve done well themselves. We’re a great country today because of that. We don’t talk anything of that part of our history, and so that’s the view that I’ve taken.
PETA CREDLIN:
I can hear my audience cheering. Peter Dutton. Thank you for your time.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks, Peta. Appreciate it. Thank you.
[ends]