Subjects: Labor’s immigration detention shambles and border security crisis; Chris Bowen’s incompetence; the Prime Minister’s backflip on his new car and ute tax; Clare O’Neil’s hypocrisy; the Prime Minister’s lack of leadership; Alice Springs crime crisis.
E&OE.
RAY HADLEY:
Every Thursday I speak with the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, and this Thursday is no different. He’s on the line right now.
Mr Dutton, good morning to you.
PETER DUTTON:
‘Morning Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, it would appear this Government – the Albanese Government – has shown itself to be incapable of protecting our national security and our borders. The last few days have been their latest attempt at scrambling to put a Band-Aid on a growing wound, and I’ve got to say that the Immigration Minister Andrew Giles, looked a bit like a startled kangaroo in the headlights yesterday as he walked down to make a media conference with Clare O’Neil. He’s completely incapable of understanding what he’s confronting here, I think.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, this is a Government that just is lurching from one disaster to the next. When people say that it resembles the Whitlam Government, there’s no question about that. The situation is of the Government’s own making, they refused to give evidence to the High Court – which meant that the High Court made a ruling on indefinite detention that required the release of one individual – the Government now has released over 150 criminals. They haven’t been directed to do that by the Court, but that’s been a decision that Minister Giles and Minister O’Neil have made, and it’s made our country less safe. We’ve got boats restarting under this Government, people are drowning at sea on their way to Australia. It’s an outrage.
I think the Government’s demonstrated this week that they just don’t know which way to jump, but they don’t know how to deal with the problem they’ve created, and I fear that they’re creating a potential pull factor in getting people back onto boats in terms of the legislation they tried to ram through this week.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, the Prime Minister said, with the deaths of so many people – dozens and dozens of women and children – lost off Aceh, that he didn’t know whether the boat that was coming here. Where did he think it was going? To Hawaiian Islands or something?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, presumably Chris Bowen would have told him in the National Security Committee, Ray, as to why the boat was coming because you don’t have the Director-General of ASIO, or the head of ASIS in there. If you don’t have the experts in there, well how would the Prime Minister get the advice about what’s happening and what is on the horizon?
Honestly, I just don’t think this Government has any idea when it comes to the economy or national security, and they’re bumbling from one disaster to the next, and unfortunately, there’s a big human cost associated with that, when the Government gets it so wrong.
RAY HADLEY:
Now we go to the next step. We are told today, 73 out of the 152 released detainees, the ones – I’m not talking about what might happen in the future – the ones that have been out there already, are actually not wearing any form of ankle bracelet. They’re just in the community.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I just find this unbelievable because Minister Giles has given assurance after assurance that these criminals that he’s released from immigration detention are being continually monitored. That’s what he said repeatedly. People have taken some reassurance of that, particularly the original victims of crime, who were violated against by some of these individuals, the family members of those people who were murdered had listened to the Minister and said, ‘everything’s under control’, and now it turns out that, as you say, people aren’t being monitored. They’re not wearing ankle bracelets.
The Government has legislation to apply to the court to bring some of these people back into detention. They’ve not made a single application to the court to get somebody back in, off the streets and to stop offending against Australian citizens. I find just really upsetting in a sense, because I know that there will be further victims of crime, and Mr Albanese seems not to have a clue as to what he’s doing.
RAY HADLEY:
Just in relation to this rushed legislation that went through the Lower House – I guess tactically, so it could get to the Senate, they could knock it back and you’d have a Senate Inquiry – how much notice did you or your Party get with the documents that obviously were, I guess, quite substantial, before you were expected to make a decision on whether you would support it and not support it?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, this is a really interesting point Ray, because when we went in there, the Government said, ‘look, this needs to be introduced tomorrow’, they called up the night before to say, ‘so, we’ll give you 20 minutes for a briefing tomorrow morning, you won’t have access to the Government Solicitor, you won’t have access to the Australian Border Force Commissioner to understand about the pull factors, etc., it’ll just be the Minister and her staff and the Secretary of the Department’. And when we got in there – or when the Shadow Ministers got in there to receive the briefing, the document had been printed out a number of days earlier – so they’d been sitting on it – but now we find out that the drafting instructions for the Bill were actually issued by the Government at the beginning of March.
So the games being played here to try and just give you 20 minutes to quickly read through the legislation, or the Bill that’s there, not ask questions, or ask questions and the questions get taken on notice. It’s an absurd process.
So, what we said was, ‘okay, we’ll allow it through the Lower House because you’re telling us it relates to this court case that’s coming up and it’s an urgent matter, but we want to get it up to the Senate so that there can be a reference to a Senate Inquiry’ – and that’s where the public officials come and they can be questioned about what’s in the Bill, but when we got to that process, we find out that it doesn’t actually relate to the court case now before the High Court, and the Government’s been sitting on it for a number of weeks.
So, I think the longer inquiry now will answer some of the questions that the officials and the Ministers refused to answer initially, and we’ll be in a better position to know whether this is going to start boats again or not.
RAY HADLEY:
I had to have a chuckle yesterday. I saw a report about Casanova Bowen appearing on Radio National, where he was waxing lyrical about a whole range of things involving his portfolio, which he’s completely stuffed up with these vehicle fuel requirements, and obviously, after Joe Biden decided to pull the pin in the U.S., Anthony Albanese had to intervene and say to him, ‘look you’d better go and talk to the car manufacturers and pull back on this’.
But then he started – someone asked him a question about the legislation rushed through – and he started talking about his time as Immigration Minister. I would have thought any sensible person who failed so miserably in immigration would try and distance himself, but he was like some sort of authority that he actually did a good job during his time in immigration. It was just unbelievable and typical of a bloke suffering delusions of adequacy, which he suffers on a regular basis, apparently.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, I always say that there are good and bad people on both sides of politics, but Chris Bowen, I mean obviously has no self-awareness, but the damage that he’s done in the portfolios that he’s been in, in the Rudd and Gillard years and now in the Albanese years, it’s quite startling.
The policy that they’ve got here drives up the price of cars. Now, they’ve done a deal with the big car companies, but the car companies have done that because, for some of them, they think that their competitors are going to go out of business and they’ll pick up market share. They also think, ‘okay, well, the HiLux is going to go up by $8,000, not $14,500. The motor dealers can just wear that and the consumers can just pay a bit more, and we’ll sign up to the deal because we don’t want the more draconian approach’.
I think they’ve sold consumers out, and we’ve taken a very strong position to say that we’ll stand on the side of consumers. We’re not going to support the dirty deal that’s been done between big car companies and Mr Bowen and Mr Albanese. We’re going to go to the election with a clear policy that the HiLux and the LandCruiser and the Ranger and the BT-50 and others, will be literally thousands and thousands of dollars more expensive under Mr Albanese, than they will be under a Coalition Government.
RAY HADLEY:
I must admit that the boss of Toyota, who looked like he’d been, I mean dragged kicking and screaming to that media conference, then stood up and said, ‘well, it’s not really that good, but it’s all we’ve got’. I’m paraphrasing here, but that was basically what he said. He said, ‘well, you know, what else are we going to do? It’s the best of a bad lot’.
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah, it was like they were holding his family captive until he made the comments and then they’d release them. It was ridiculous, really. I don’t think Toyota or anyone else believes in this, but I think they realise that if it gets into the hands of Labor and the Greens that it’ll be a disaster.
I just don’t think the Prime Minister gets what families are going through at the moment. If you’re a young tradie and you want to put on a couple of extra plumbers, and as part of that, you’re providing a new Isuzu ute or something like that, it means that your capital expenditure is going up by maybe $20, $30,000, across a couple of vehicles. I just don’t think people can afford that, because in the end it just gets passed on – building costs are through the roof now – and the Government keeps adding to inflation, which is why interest rates stay so high.
RAY HADLEY:
Now, former and current LNP male Members of Parliament – including the former Prime Minister Tony Abbott – accused of being misogynistic and treating women shabbily. Why don’t the same rules apply to women in Parliament treating women shabbily, as we’ve found out through the Sydney Morning Herald of Clare O’Neil hectoring and lecturing Stephanie Foster with a dressing down, causing Ms Foster to leave apparently distressed and apparently in tears. And yet, when your side of government or your side of Opposition questions the Government yesterday, we get this bland response from Clare O’Neil – who by all accounts tried to bully Stephanie Foster into submitting to her – but yet, you know, it’s okay because she’s a woman bullying another woman, apparently.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, the only thing worse, I think Ray, than an incompetent Minister, is an incompetent Minister who’s a hypocrite, and that’s Clare O’Neil. She’s hopeless at her portfolio, and her colleagues are talking behind her back at the moment – the journalists are writing that story up. She can’t answer a question in a straight fashion. She was asked seven times yesterday whether this story was accurate, she refused to deny it, and there are multiple sources that James Massola and other excellent journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald have got in relation to this matter, where the Secretary left the office in tears.
You’re right, had it been in the Abbott era, or the Morrison era, or the Howard era, Anthony Albanese and Tony Burke and Chris Bowen and Penny Wong and Kristina Keneally and other Ministers would have been outraged by it, but of course, they apply a double standard.
Clare O’Neil herself was – Sussan Ley had a great quote from Clare O’Neil about the toxic culture in Parliament and all the rest of it – and as it turns out, she’s a perpetrator. She didn’t have the decency to put her hands up and say, ‘yes, I did. I made a mistake or this is the reason I did it’. She didn’t have the guts to come out and defend her own position.
RAY HADLEY:
Look, there’s a lot of things I want to get to, including Anthony Albanese, and we’ll have to do it some time later. These billion dollars worth of subsidies and grants for solar panels, I mean…but anyway, look, the other important issue is Alice Springs.
It’s hard to believe this could be happening in our own country. The situation there’s like a warzone. Jacinta Price, sensibly – a resident of that town – has called for the riot squad, or the Army to get in there. The best thing Government could do was say, ‘oh, we’re going to have a curfew for a period of time’. Curfews won’t work because there’s no controlling the youngsters who do what they do through the course of the night in Alice Springs. When’s Anthony Albanese going to actually say, ‘oh, jeez, we have a problem out there. The Voice wasn’t going to solve it, and I can’t solve it’?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, I just think this is a shocking situation because we all live with the law and order and youth crime reality in Sydney, in Brisbane, in Mount Isa and in many other parts of the country, and in Alice Springs it’s more acute than anywhere. They’ve now imposed this curfew, which is obviously a response to a situation that’s getting out of control. It was interesting to hear Jacinta speak on this because, as you say, she’s a local resident, but also Matt Paterson, who’s the Alice Springs Mayor, and he said for the first time in his lifetime, he just felt unsafe, very uncomfortable.
When you’ve got 100 or 200 kids rioting through the local streets, they don’t have any respect for the rule of law, and in that circumstance, people get injured or killed. People have died already in Alice Springs, and I don’t know why the Prime Minister can’t turn his attention to it. He’s on every FM radio station, he’s got time to go to Taylor Swift, and time to be the celebrity and time to go to the tennis, but he’s only spent four hours on the ground in Alice Springs – probably to refuel the plane on his way overseas somewhere…The people of Alice Springs are crying out for their Prime Minister to stand up and show leadership, and the weakness of the Prime Minister’s leadership is on full display.
I think it’s a crisis that needs to be urgently addressed. I think it’s beyond the capacity of the Northern Territory Government, who is clueless. The police are exhausted, the community service workers are overworked. This is a problem that’s been in the making for a long time. Jacinta Price, many of us have been calling it out for a long time, but the Prime Minister actually needs to get up there, show the leadership, and do what he’s paid to do, and that is lead. At the moment, he’s not providing any of that leadership.
RAY HADLEY:
As always, good to talk to you. We’ll catch up next Thursday.
PETER DUTTON:
Thank you mate.
[ends]