Subjects: The Attorney-General’s outrageous outburst; Labor’s immigration detention shambles; the Prime Minister’s weak leadership; Private Richard Norden DCM (dec.).
E&OE.
RAY HADLEY:
The Opposition Leader is in Canberra. Mr Dutton, good morning.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning, Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
Late night, last night?
PETER DUTTON:
It was a late night, and I think it was a pretty bad finish for the Government in an exercise where they tried to rush through bills that we tried to amend to make them stronger and to make it harder for these criminals to be out in the community, but the Government wasn’t interested in that and they used their numbers to drive it through. So, here we are.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay. Let me just go back to something you’ve been talking about for a long time. Finally, an admission from the Immigration Minister, Andrew Giles.
[excerpt]
ANDREW GILES:
The intent of this scheme is to capture those individuals who pose an unacceptable risk of harming the community through committing a serious violent or sexual offence. The preventative detention regime would allow for the court to detain the worst of the worst offenders. To be clear, it would not capture all the detainees released since the High Court decision.
[end excerpt]
RAY HADLEY:
Well, you’ve been saying that for quite some time and being shouted down by a whole range of people in government.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I just think when people start the personal attacks and they continue to talk about everything but the issue, you know that they’re in trouble.
You saw this week, I mean, Mark Dreyfus was unhinged. Andrew Giles doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And you’ve got Clare O’Neil, who’s trying to mop it up but is pretty ineffective as well. But they’ve created an enormous mess, but the most frustrating part of all of this is that – particularly the sex offenders who’ve been released – the likelihood of them re-offending is close to 100 per cent, and I’m really concerned for a lot of people over the Christmas break who may come into contact with some of these people and they are serious criminals and the Government has completely botched this.
There was no reason for the Minister to release these people. The courts did not instruct them to release those people, as you point out, and I think the truth is now dawning upon a lot of Australians that the Labor Government can never ever manage the migration program or our borders. That’s just the fact now, and it’s very upsetting that Australians pay the price for that incompetence.
RAY HADLEY:
You see, one of the things you’ve got because the Supreme Court now makes a decision on who goes back, if any goes back, but a local court in Sydney, so you’ve got three blokes: one allegedly a rapist, one allegedly a child sex offender, and one bloke who simply doesn’t obey curfews or other things, but then the fourth bloke was detected at Merrylands in Western Sydney with drugs. So he goes, well, I’ll rephrase that: he doesn’t go to court. A legal representative turns up and he’s fined $300, he’s not even in court.
Now, given that we’re paying for his accommodation, he’s on a Centrelink payment – where he gets the 300 bucks, I’ll never know. But what sort of warning does that send to other people who wish to break the law to a certain extent, that they’ll be dealt with by a court without making an appearance and told to pay some money that they haven’t got, and if they have got it, we gave it to them?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, what do you reckon the people smugglers are saying in Indonesia or in Sri Lanka or in the Middle East at the moment? They’re saying you’ve got the softest, weakest Government in years in Australia. You’ve got a weak Prime Minister, and here’s evidence of how bad they are: it doesn’t matter when you get to Australia, and one of these individuals came or probably many more, came to Australia by boat, and you can get to Australia, it doesn’t matter whether you commit crimes or not, they’ll pay for your accommodation, they’ll pay for your flights and for your incidentals and you’re released back out into the community. It’s no wonder we’ve seen a boat arrive already, and I suspect they’re dealing with boats now but haven’t publicly disclosed it.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, 400 people from Myanmar, and of course the same type of people – and I’m not talking about the criminality – as the child rapist, they have arrived, 400 of them, in Indonesia. Now, where do you think they’re headed for? They won’t be going to California. They’ll be coming here.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, Ray, again, Anthony Albanese’s been the head of the left, the hard-left of the Labor Party for his entire adult life. He went from university into the union movement and into the labour movement, never done anything else other than work in politics, effectively, and you’ve got a situation where, like Andrew Giles, I just don’t think they believe in the strong border protection policies that most Australians do, and it’s why they watered down the s.501 laws which were the visa cancellation laws. The number of people being deported has dropped under this Government – including the number of sex offenders. Those people will go on, in many of those cases, to commit crimes again, and this is the price you pay for inaction or because you don’t believe in the policies that keep our country safe, and I think the Prime Minister’s failed that first test.
RAY HADLEY:
Now, where is the Prime Minister? In witness protection? We had O’Neil, Dreyfus and Giles turning up yesterday. He was at the cricket somewhere. But I mean, really? Isn’t this an issue that he has to address and not let these people address it in the inadequate way they did yesterday?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, of course he does, and I just think he’s got to show the strength of leadership. Stop being so woke on all of these issues and get out in front of the issue. If the Minister’s not up to it, then the job of the Prime Minister is either to sack the Minister, which he should do in relation to Ministers Giles and O’Neil, and the conduct of Mark Dreyfus yesterday, geez, I tell you what, if it had have been a Liberal or National politician, the ABC would have been all over it as ‘misogynistic’ and ‘mansplaining’ and ‘talking over a female journalist’. Mark Dreyfus goes on 7.30 last night with Laura Tingle. Guess how many questions he got about his conduct at the press conference and for shouting down a female journalist? Not one, of course. It’s a complete double standard and the Prime Minister is hiding in the background, just cowering in the background, either because he doesn’t know what to do, he’s afraid to answer the questions and he should be asked the question whether he apologises to the lady who has been assaulted in South Australia? Or will he apologise to other Australians who become victims of these criminals who are out in the community at a cost of $250 million a year to monitor them, when it turns out they don’t actually have to be out in the community at all, they should never have been released?
RAY HADLEY:
Okay, now let’s just hear the two sides of Mark Dreyfus, the split personality of the Attorney-General. Firstly, yesterday with a Sky News reporter, Olivia Caisley.
[excerpt]
MARK DREYFUS KC MP:
I want to suggest to you that that question is an absurd question. You are asking a Cabinet Minister, three Ministers of the Crown, to apologise for upholding the law of Australia, for acting in accordance with the law of Australia, for following the instructions of the High Court of Australia. I will not be apologising for upholding the law. I will not be apologising for pursuing the rule of law and I will not be apologising for acting…Do not interrupt! I will not be apologising for acting. I will not be apologising for acting in accordance with a High Court decision! Your question is an absurd one!
[end excerpt]
RAY HADLEY:
He’s just a rude bastard! I mean, a couple of people have written to me with rather coarser expressions, and I used one of them yesterday, but I mean, he sounds like he’s hectoring and lecturing an intelligent young woman who offered an intelligent question.
I mean, as you say, had it been you, Abbott, any conservative politician, they would have climbed all over you from a great height, and before I get back to you, you talked about Laura Tingle not asking one question about his behaviour, here she was tickling his tummy:
[excerpt]
LAURA TINGLE:
Do you regret that the Government has allowed itself to be panicked into its response to a really complex legal question by populist politics from the Opposition, that you’ve essentially sort of fanned the hysteria about this?
MARK DREYFUS KC MP:
I regret the – to use your phrase, Laura – I regret the populous politics from the Opposition. It’s a real concern to us that the Opposition Leader appears to have suggested from time to time in this debate that we should break the law, the Opposition Leader has suggested that we should direct public servants and border force officers to break the law. We’re not going to do that. We’re not going to expose the Commonwealth to large compensation claims, and most of all, as I’ve said repeatedly over the last few years, unconstitutional laws that are subject to being struck down by the High Court don’t make Australia safe at all.
[end excerpt]
RAY HADLEY:
Well, there you go. By last night, he put a…
PETER DUTTON:
Notice all those interruptions Ray?!
RAY HADLEY:
Yeah, he put a tablet under his tongue…
PETER DUTTON:
See every time she interrupted him?
RAY HADLEY:
He calmed down, he put the tablet under the tongue and he was very measured and he’d probably gone to some ashram or something in the afternoon and crossed his legs and decided that he needed to calm down.
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah, he got a jab in the arm before he went in, but I mean you can’t…
RAY HADLEY:
A jab in the what!?
PETER DUTTON:
A jab in the arm before he went in.
RAY HADLEY:
Oh, the arm. Sorry, sorry.
PETER DUTTON:
Just to calm him down. But, you know, you go onto Insiders or on 7.30, you can’t get four words out before they jump into you and start interrupting, you get a Labor politician on there and it’s all, you know, nice and dandy. But anyway, that’s the way the ABC is.
RAY HADLEY:
You know what’s laughable, I’ve heard the Prime Minister rip into you in Question Time about these interviews you do with me. I mean, he’s got the audacity, you know, to say, ‘oh the hard-hitting interview by Hadley you do on a Thursday’, and the rest of it. On the ABC and other places, that’s what happens every day of the week. He goes on – Dreyfus or the Prime Minister – and it’s tickle your tummy time and ‘don’t ask any hard questions’ and ‘don’t get me angry’. I mean, you and I have had a few blues over the years, but in the main, it’s been fairly civil. But the ABC, how dare the Prime Minister accuse me of soft interviews. I’ll tell you when I won’t do a soft interview if he ever comes on here – he won’t present himself!
PETER DUTTON:
No well, he should turn up and he should have the guts to put his argument and to explain what it is they’ve done, because nobody’s suggesting the Government should act outside of the law, but the Minister’s made decisions that weren’t in accordance with the High Court direction, but that much is clear and they now concede that, and these people have been released erroneously and the Australian public’s paying the price for it. They’re the facts and the Government can throw all the personal abuse they want. It doesn’t matter.
RAY HADLEY:
Now, on a separate matter, I need your help. I know you have a reasonable relationship in normal circumstances with Richard Marles, I got a letter from Australia’s oldest living Victoria Cross recipient, the most decorated veteran, Keith Payne VC. And it was rather surprising to see a note passed to me with ‘Dear Ray’ from Keith Payne.
He wrote to me about one of his colleagues and the awarding of the Victoria Cross to Vietnam veteran no longer with us, Richard Norden, and he wrote to me about a disgraceful delay from the Defence Minister. He went and it’s all been approved apparently, and it hasn’t gone to, of course the Governor-General, but the Deputy Prime Minister, Defence Minister Richard Marles, his staff admitted that the note that had come to him on behalf of Keith Payne from representatives, had sat on his desk for seven months, that it got mislaid, and then they promised that Mr Norden – known as commonly Dick Norden – would be receiving it on Anzac Day and then Vietnam Vets’ Day and then when they spoke to the Governor-General, Keith spoke to him at a function he went to in Canberra. Keith Payne, the Governor-General’s attaché, said, ‘no, he doesn’t know anything about it’. So, I mean, even when, I think at the time, someone mentioned earlier Sir Roden Cutler, but it wasn’t Sir Roden Cutler, it was Peter Cosgrove in awarding I think a DCM, or a DCM came to Richard Norden, and when we gave it to him at the time and it may have been Peter Cosgrove, it could have been before him, could have been Roden Cutler. But he said, ‘I don’t know what you’ve got to do these days to get a VC’, and I’ve read what he did in Vietnam.
Can someone push this along a bit? It’s decided, but for some reason the family are not being treated the way they should be for this man who gave great service to this country.
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah, I’m more than happy to raise it with him. I think Richard Marles is overseas this week, or he’s not in the Parliament this week, so I’ll undertake to do that, Ray. Because it’s, I mean, there’s obviously something wrong in the decision-making process, but he’s a well and truly deserving recipient. I saw Keith Payne at a function with his lovely wife only a few weeks ago in Canberra, so I’ll definitely undertake to do that, because it’s something that should have happened by now.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, he says that in July last year – this is the letter from Keith – the Defence Honours and Awards Tribunal set aside a recommendation that Private Richard Norden DCM receive the Victoria Cross. The recommendation be passed to the Governor-General, David Hurley.
He made representations, Keith, to the Minister’s office through his chairman, Rick Meehan of the Keith Payne Veterans Benefit Group on the 14th of February this year, inquiring why there was a delay in the announcement. He was informed that the administrative error – it was left sitting on the Minister’s desk for seven months at Richard Marles. They were very apologetic and said, ‘look, we’ll make it by Anzac Day this year’, then ‘we’ll make it by the 14th of May’ – the anniversary of Private Norden’s VC action, or ‘we’ll make it by the 18th of August this year’ – Vietnam Veterans’ Day, and he was a guest for the 50th anniversary of our involvement in Vietnam, and again, they approached the Governor-General about it and they don’t know anything about it.
It appears to me that somewhere in the bureaucracy between the recommendation and the acceptance of the recommendation and the actual awarding to VC, it’s been lost.
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah, no, I mean, clearly not good enough. So, I’ll chase it up and we’ll see what we can get done.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay. Well, I’m going to give you some respite from these hard-hitting interviews because I’m off tomorrow and you’ll have to just batten down the hatches until I come back the week starting the 15th of January. So, you’ll get some respite from these terrier-like interviews I conduct with you, okay?
PETER DUTTON:
Well mate, I hope your golf game improves over the break. I hope your punting skills pick up. I hope you can pick a winner. General all-round improvement, but seriously, I hope you have a great break, a well-deserved one, and thank you for all the help you’ve given to a lot of people and philanthropic support that you give to a lot of people. I remember seeing you at an event during the year where you gave a lot of help to a bloke who was really very much in need, and there are many cases like that. So, thank you.
To all of your listeners, thank you very much for the messages you send through to me and people who stop me and say that they’re a listener of The Ray Hadley Show. Thank you very much. I hope everyone has a very happy, safe, and holy Christmas and good time with their family and friends, and I’ll be back on air next year.
RAY HADLEY:
And same to you and Kirilly, and the kids. All the best. Thanks very much.
PETER DUTTON:
Thank you, mate. See you, mate.
[ends]