Subjects: Labor’s Palestinian visa bungle; Labor’s border security crisis; the Coalition’s plan to crack down on youth crime and online notoriety; Labor’s energy policy shambles; nuclear energy.
E&OE.
RAY HADLEY:
The Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s on the line. G’day, Mr Dutton.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
Andrew Giles, he’s shown himself to be completely incompetent, although incompetence is a difficult word to use in relation to a Minister, but he of course was a lawyer representing people in relation to MV Tampa. He has botched everything he’s touched, and I would say that in racing parlance, in the old days, when I was calling racers before they had computers and the like, if something was very close to the finish, they had what they call a developed print. I’m now calling for developed print in relation to the stupidity of Andrew Giles and Casanova Bowen, I think they’ve hit the line locked together as perhaps the poorest performing Ministers since federation.
PETER DUTTON:
I just can’t believe these guys are still in the Ministry. I think the Prime Minister’s Government now, the Albanese Government, everything they touch turns to dust and it’s starting to look a lot more like the Whitlam years, than it is the Hawke years, and I know the Prime Minister wants people to believe that he’s Bob Hawke reincarnated, but when they keep making these decisions that ultimately hurt our nation’s security or our economy, making it harder and harder for families with their budgets [inaudible] economic decisions their making, I think people are starting to get sick of it, and understandably so.
I really find it very difficult to believe that the Government has made a decision to bring people into Australia from a war zone at the moment when we can’t be certain about their identity, we can’t be certain about their travel documents, their intention.
For Home Affairs to be cancelling the visas when people are mid-air, that tells you, almost without precedent, to be honest, but it tells you that there are serious failures in the urgency and the way in which the Government’s pushing the Department to get these people here. Once people get here, they’ll claim protection, and they won’t leave. That’s the reality. The court system [inaudible] High Court being represented by people like Andrew Giles – he was a human rights lawyer – has been [inaudible], his whole adult life fighting against Operation Sovereign Borders…
RAY HADLEY:
Look, we’ll have to leave Peter Dutton there and we’ll get a clearer line because it keeps dropping out, and I don’t want to, in any way, edit what he’s saying, but it’s dropped out on two separate occasions there, and we’ll come back to him, and give him the opportunity to continue on with what he was just talking about.
I hope the line has cleared up. Sorry Peter, the line was pretty ordinary, but hopefully it’s been rectified now.
You were in the middle of talking about Andrew Giles.
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah Ray, look, I just think there’s all sorts of problems the Government’s got. They’ve got 149 criminals that they’ve released out onto the streets – it turns out that it was the wrong visa that had been issued, it means that some of the offences they’ve committed now can’t be prosecuted. I mean this is ham-fisted stuff. If you’re bringing people in from the Middle East at the moment without having certainty about who they are, that’s not in our country’s best interests.
RAY HADLEY:
You see, you mention the 149 and these visas – they say ‘technical mistake’. The inference yesterday and the day before was this was a fault of a previous Government, meaning your previous Government, but it now turns out that it’s been there since 2013 under Julia Gillard, and when Brendan O’Connor was Immigration Minister. Now, yes, it survived I guess your term in Government, but it was invented – the mistake – back under Julia Gillard and more importantly under her Minister. So, they own it, they’re captain, coach and sole selector of the blue.
PETER DUTTON:
Of course they do. What they tried to do was feed a line to Mark Riley, who’s one of the most experienced journalists in the gallery, and I mean, he ran the line that it was an Abbott era decision, and it wasn’t. It was a Gillard Government decision, and the Labor Party was out there pushing it, although they were happy for Mark Riley to say it, but noticeably, none of the Ministers actually repeated the line. So, it was tricky, it would have been a media stunt that they pulled, but in the end they’ve been caught out.
I think if you’ve got a Government that’s releasing 149 criminals, the Government’s responsible for what happens there. These people didn’t go out into the community when we were in government. We made sure that they stayed behind bars because they’re serious criminals, and the Government now is repeating its mistakes time after time, and unfortunately, tragically, there will be further Australian victims. I just think it’s unconscionable, and they’ll have to answer to those crimes, and to the families, to the victims, but they just brush it off as ‘oh, well we’ve got no choice’, but that’s a nonsense.
RAY HADLEY:
Just in relation to a story today, you’re announcing a plan to make it illegal to post social media material that glamorises violence or criminal activity. It’s all about youth crime, of course. You’d be aware that the same sort of thing – and I say the same sort of thing, not the same thing – is being done in New South Wales with a very narrow band. They’re talking about break and enter and stealing cars, but the legislation – I’ve been advised by Alister Henskens, the Shadow Attorney-General in New South Wales, relates to the person actually committing the crime, but also posting the stuff him or herself. So, if it were to be taken by one of his associates or her associates and posted online, the person that would be charged with either breaking and entering or stealing the car would not be charged because they didn’t actually post it, someone else did.
I mean, they haven’t thought about it. Obviously, you’ve given some thought to what you’re trying to do here. Will that mean it’s all encompassing? The legislation you’d hope to achieve?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, we want to introduce a Private Member’s Bill next week. What we want to do is take away the incentive for a lot of these kids to be stealing cars and breaking into businesses and homes.
Part of the reason that you’ll see the posting of the videos, or the picture of themselves with an elderly lady in the background sleeping, whilst their taking her car keys or a photo of a designer label handbag, whatever it might be; that’s the modern currency, if you like, the modern incentive for these kids to act, and they post these photos because it gives them notoriety.
We want to give these eSafety Commissioner the ability to pull the photos down, we want to make sure that there is a penalty there that can be imposed, and the technology exists to stop these kids from being involved in social media, because that’s really what matters most to them.
It might have been a car license back in the day, if you suspended somebody’s car license that was a pretty big penalty and an incentive to do the right thing, but now these kids live on their phones. They’re posting photos to their groups and to their gangs, and I think we should starve them of that opportunity and remove one of the big incentives that’s in the system for them to commit crimes.
RAY HADLEY:
These offshore wind farms that Casanova Bowen keeps promoting off Port Stephens, which you’ve taken an interest in, and off Wollongong. Funny how now, the one that was going to be off the Victorian border, has been reduced to a fifth of its original size because they’re concerned about migrating whales. They mustn’t think the whales, they just travel down the southern part of the continent, they don’t come up the east coast at all – those migrating whales, apparently. So, they must go further out to sea than where they are, or they must come inland, or they do something that doesn’t interfere with their migrating, because they will still do that off Port Stephens and Wollongong, but not off the coast of Victoria.
PETER DUTTON:
Maybe they know where the marginal Labor seats are…they’re smart whales, and maybe they understand that Labor is really concerned about losing seats to the Greens, and that’s why they’re pushing all this nonsense.
Two hundred and sixty metres out of the sea, the devastation to the tourism industry and the whale watching industry, the commercial fishermen etc., on the Hunter Coast, I mean all of that is well documented, but Chris Bowen wants to live in a community where his constituents won’t tolerate the thought of a 260 metre turbine going up in a local park, or [inaudible] close by. Why do we treat Australians differently? And why do we treat people in regional areas as second class citizens? All to try and assuage the guilt of trendy inner city living people, who might vote for the Greens, or vote for the Labor Party.
I think the Government has a real problem on its hands here, and I think there’s a lot of community resentment growing to these proposals.
RAY HADLEY:
Just finally, you laid out your case for a nuclear power future in Australia. Will you take that plan to the next election as a key issue? That you’ll obviously have a combination of coal fired power stations replaced by nuclear pods, and also, I guess to some extent, the renewables that will be there will play some role in it, but not as big of a role perhaps the Labor Party would have you believe?
PETER DUTTON:
Ray, we will. I believe it’s in the best interest of our country. I just don’t believe that Anthony Albanese has got the strength or the vision to lead our country. We need to deal with the uncertainties around supply – so we need to make sure that we can keep the lights on. We need to make sure that we can reduce power prices, because they’re going to continue to go up with the Government’s 28,000km of poles and wires being rolled out across the country, including through national parks and pristine farmlands. All of that cost is going to be passed on in the form of higher bills, and the situation, obviously, is important to consider because it’s the same technology that we’re using on the submarines.
So, if the Prime Minister makes a decision that it’s safe enough to put the submariners onto a submarine with a nuclear reactor that powers the submarine, why is it not safe to have these located in areas where we’ve got a coal fired generator coming to an end of life? And the beauty about those sites is that you’ve already got the poles and wires, so you can distribute the energy. You don’t need the 28,000km of poles and wires to connect up the wind turbines and the big solar panel farms out in regional areas. It’s zero emissions, so you can meet your international obligations.
I think Chris Bowen here is completely out of control, and they’re more interested in winning votes in inner city Melbourne and Sydney, than they are about bringing power prices down, and I want to bring electricity prices down, not see them go up.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay. We’ll talk next week, thanks for your time as always.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks Ray. See you mate.
[ends]