Subjects: Labor’s immigration detention shambles; Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles – the hapless and hopeless Ministers who have failed to keep the community safe; the Prime Minister’s lack of leadership; Labor’s cost of living crisis; women’s safety; anti-Semitism on university campuses.
E&OE.
RAY HADLEY:
Federal Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton. Good morning to you.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning, Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
The Government. I don’t know if you’ve heard Anika Wells on the Today Show with Chris O’Keefe, my colleague, and Karl Stefanovic this morning. She couldn’t bring herself to support openly the deeds of Andrew Giles and Clare O’Neil, because they’ve been sadly lacking. They’ve come out of witness protection the last 24 hours, but where have they been?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, I just think it’s pretty startling to Australians when you have a look at the terrible photos of a grandmother out of WA, in this case – but could be anywhere in the country – who’s brutally bashed, and the Minister just goes missing in action and can’t explain why the Department didn’t oppose bail in this case. The Government initially said that there was a bail application that they opposed – that’s not the case. Even the judge said she thought the Government was being very “generous” in not opposing bail because if there was an application, she would have opposed bail seeing the history and all of the facts before her.
So, I don’t know who’s got it wrong here, but we can trace it back again to Andrew Giles and to Clare O’Neil. I know that Andrew Giles is a strong factional ally of the Prime Minister, but he’s a liability and just a weight around the Government’s neck at the moment. I don’t see how either of them can survive; releasing 151 hardened criminals who are non-citizens into the community. The High Court said that they needed to release one, not 151. Minister Giles, as we’ve discussed before, was a lawyer involved in the migration space, fought against the Tampa and against the Howard Government’s policies on border protection. He’s now the Minister and we’re seeing what happens when Ministers of his ideology become the leader of the department and are in charge of the portfolio – they’re tragic circumstances. Somebody will be seriously injured again or killed at the hands of one of these people.
Out of the 151, seven are convicted murderers, we know that 37 are convicted rapists, and 72 have been involved in violent offences against Australian citizens. What on earth is going on here?
RAY HADLEY:
I found out through various means where Andrew Giles has been because he’s been very busy, obviously, because he hasn’t been paying much attention to this.
On the 30th of April – a couple of days ago – he released a statement: A new strategy to achieve culturally representative leadership in the Australian Public Service. It’s a joint media release with him, Katy Gallagher and Patrick Gorman:
‘The Albanese Government has today released its plan to increase cultural diversity in the senior leadership ranks of the Australian Public Service (APS).
The Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Employment Strategy and Action Plan, published by the Australian Public Service Commission, sets out clear standards and expectations that the Australian Public Service needs to better reflect the community it serves.
While the APS broadly reflects the cultural and racial diversity in Australia, representation drops sharply at senior levels…’. Senior levels.
The Ministers ‘as part of this strategy we’re setting a target to increase CALD representation in the Senior Executive Service to 24 per cent and achieving 15 per cent representation within 4 years.’
So, they’re more worried about the cultural sensitivity of the public service than a grandmother being bashed almost to death by a person they allegedly let out.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, and no wonder the media couldn’t find him if he’s out drafting this stuff up when he should be doing his day job.
I just came from a Salvation Army fundraising breakfast in my electorate, and I can tell you that the stories there are just harrowing about the number of families who just can’t afford to pay their electricity bill, can’t afford to pay their rent, they can’t get a house. The amount of domestic violence presentations that they’ve had. Just locally, in my small area, they expect to deliver about 4,500 meals this year to people that just can’t put food on their table, and the Government’s running off on this sort of stuff.
It’s like the quantum computing. You know, is quantum computing important? Of course it is. But you’ve got these Labor lobby lobbyists who have come together, and the Prime Minister’s signed up to a deal with Steven Miles to put in $1 billion, at a time when families just can’t afford to put food on their table or pay for their grocery bill at the check out. The Government’s just got the priorities all wrong. At the moment we should be trying to help families, not make it harder for them. If they’re off spending millions of dollars on recruiting people into positions – that I might say pay $1 million a year for the secretaries of these departments now – I just think they’ve got their priorities all wrong and no wonder Australians are shaking their head.
RAY HADLEY:
Domestic violence. I noted last night you’re in agreement with the Prime Minister something needs to be done, but he’s thrown more money at it. I identified earlier this week, that he had allocated – because you people were terrible in government at dealing with women, so all of a sudden he comes to power in 2022 – he allocates $2.3 billion for The National Plan to Tackle Violence Against Women and Children. That hasn’t worked too well. So, instead of coming up with something immediately – $2.3 billion in 2022 through two budgets – he throws another billion or $925 million, close enough. So, we’ve got $3.2 billion now thrown at the problem. But as David Crowe – even David Crowe writing in the Herald today – couldn’t bring himself to support the Prime Minister, saying, ‘well, hang on a sec, we want something done immediately for this crisis and for these women’. No good saying in June next year ‘we’ll give you $5,000 when you’re terrified for your life and you’re trying to find somewhere to live’. I mean, how is a woman supposed to wait that long and then get five grand for emergency accommodation while the bloke is throttling her at home? How does that work?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, first point, everyone wants to do whatever we can – and it’s not just government, it’s society as well. We need to do everything we can as a country to make sure that we reduce violence and make sure that we put money into programmes that are working. It’s not just a money issue, as you point out it. You need to make sure that the programmes that are working well are ramped up, and you can provide additional funding for them. The programmes that aren’t working well, then we shouldn’t be putting more taxpayer dollars into it, because ultimately there’s a finite budget.
Good on the Prime Minister and the Premiers for coming together and talking it through, but as a lot of groups have pointed out, there’s a lot that hasn’t been done or that’s missing, and there’s a lot of frustration from the frontline police and ambos and social workers that you speak with, when they shake their head, they don’t know where some of the money’s being spent and they can’t find the spots available for crisis accommodation or circumstances otherwise, which are just horrific. Not just women, but kids in that circumstance as well, and whilst a much lesser number, some men as well, in terrible situations. So, there’s a lot that needs to be done, but I just don’t think the priority at the moment is to put money into building solar panels locally. Everyone loves the thought of Australian made, but they’re not going to compete with China, and we can’t be putting $1 billion into a US company to build a computer here to try and save Steven Miles from the next election, just because the Labor lobbyists have lobbied the Prime Minister to do so. I just think that money is much better directed into helping people put the money where it works and make sure that we can change the course of what’s a pretty bad pathway at the moment.
RAY HADLEY:
Just finally, I mentioned before you came on, anti-Israel activist Randa Abdel-Fattah, this is the woman who is connected to Macquarie University and is being investigated at the moment, leading the protest of school students, but little kids as young as five, chanting ‘intifada’ and ‘Israel is a terrorist state among…’, you know, ‘river to the sea’, all that sort of stuff.
So, anyone that criticises her, she goes for the race card: ‘we’re white supremacists.’ I mean, look, in any normal world, and I often talk about protests and how children shouldn’t be there, you know, carried on their parents shelves and all that. Maybe they haven’t got anyone to mind them, I don’t know. But to actually coach a little kid to say things they have no understanding or knowledge of, and then to call the people criticising her for doing that, on the basis she gets over $830,000 from the Federal Government in some sort of grant. So we’re white supremacists because we call her out for using kids to her own means. It’s just disgraceful.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, her grant should be cancelled immediately. I just think we need to start to get serious about this problem.
As we know, the allegations out of Western Sydney in the last couple of weeks, the target was of the Jewish community, we’ve got armed guards outside Jewish schools and preschools. What have those kids done and how are they any different to any other child at any state school or Catholic school or Anglican school, or atheist school, whatever it is? I can’t believe that we’re seeing effectively a repeat of history that we thought would never be repeated.
October 7 – the attack on Israelis – that was the biggest attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust where six million people were gassed. How do we accept in our society that the Jewish community at the moment is being ostracised and vilified? We wouldn’t tolerate it if it was a campus protest against people of Indigenous heritage or people of the Islamic community or people of tall stature or if they were Catholic or they were Indian or Chinese or whatever it would be, and these are the people who would normally be preaching inclusion and tolerance, and criticising, as you say, anybody that doesn’t fit their mould. But somehow, the Governments and even the response of the police, I think, has been weak on these campuses as well.
As for the universities and some of the Chancellors and Vice Chancellors, they’ve got to look in the mirror themselves as well, because we can’t be tolerating the vilification of any part of our community – not the Jewish community, not anyone else. I think the Prime Minister really needs to stand up and show some backbone here and call for an end to these nonsense protests. They’re racist, they’re anti-Semitic, and we shouldn’t be tolerating it for one moment and I think most decent Australians have that same view.
RAY HADLEY:
I’ll leave you with this: history, we should always learn from history. We don’t always. Sometimes we confront things we’ve never seen before, but on a minor scale compared to what happened in 1938, there’s a thing called Kristallnacht. The Nazi leaders on November 9 and 10 unleashed a series of programmes against the Jewish population in Germany. They became known as the Night of Broken Glass: Kristallnacht, because of the shattered glass that littered the streets after the vandalism and destruction of Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues and homes. They were targeted because that were Jewish. And in a clear definition of what happened in 1938, the same thing, the same type of thing, without the same level of vandalism, and of course, destruction is being portrayed and played out in Australia in 2024. We need to learn the lesson of history and we haven’t.
PETER DUTTON:
Absolutely right.
RAY HADLEY:
Thank you for your time. Peter Dutton, the Federal Opposition Leader.
[ends]