Subjects: King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s visit to Australia; Senator Thorpe’s embarrassing antics; QLD state election; Labor’s cost of living, energy and housing crisis hurting families and small businesses; the Coalition’s plan to revive the home ownership dream and boost building across Australia; Mike Pezzullo.
E&OE.
RAY HADLEY:
Every Thursday, I’m joined by the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. He joins me online again from Brisbane this morning.
Peter Dutton, good morning.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning, Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, the King and Queen have wrapped up their successful visit to Australia on the way to the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Samoa. You got to meet His Majesty, King Charles – private meeting. We spoke about you doing that last Thursday. What was it physically like?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I think they had a fantastic visit. I think the reception and the public really embraced them. It was a huge opportunity for us to see a new King and one on one, I’ve got to say, he’s very relaxed, very affable, very easy to talk with. There was no pretence and it was a pretty easy, free-flowing conversation.
RAY HADLEY:
I watched all the body language – particularly out at Parramatta Park, when he was tossing the snags on the Barbie and talking to people, just everyday Australians who gathered there, and he seemed very, very relaxed and made them very, very relaxed. He seems like a really nice person.
PETER DUTTON:
He is, actually, and I think he’s got a genuine affection for our country. So, I think this was his 17th visit, and obviously he spent time here in his formative years and has still a friendship network here. He watches closely what happens in Australia, and I think one of the points we tried to make during the week was that the stability that comes with the monarchy, when you look at other parts of the world and the disaster that takes place in their democracies, ours is stable, and one of the true reasons for that is the monarchy and the independence and the stability it provides to us, as opposed to a head of state who’s out there seeking media attention each day or trying to take part in the political debate. So, I think we’re very fortunate to have a system of government that we do, and I’d be very reticent to change it unless somebody could convince you you were going to something better.
RAY HADLEY:
You’re in the Great Hall, you’re there honouring Their Majesties, all of a sudden you look across to the walkway and then you hear it. What did you think when you heard or saw Lidia Thorpe doing what she was doing? Basically making a spectacle of herself, and it was that Kath and Kim moment, ‘look at moi, look at moi, look at moi’, which she predictably does both in and outside Parliament. So, what was your initial reaction when you started to hear the ranting?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, it was no surprise because it was predictable. The disappointing thing was that the Government wasn’t prepared for it. So, it was obvious – I couldn’t see her from where we were seated on the stage, but I’m told that she had her back turned to the King during the course of his speech, and it was obvious that she was going to make some sort of scene and the fact that the Government took so long to react to it, surely, it would have been planned for, and I just think it’s all about her, all about attention, and you’re really, frankly, loathe to give it to her.
RAY HADLEY:
I mean, one of the things I’ve noted, you’ve been outwardly critical of her actions. Even members of the Indigenous community – Marcia Langton, has been appalled by her behaviour. The best we could get out of the Prime Minister – and I don’t know whether she’s got photos of him in some sort of compromising position – was it was ‘disrespectful’. I mean, that’s it! A one line, it was ‘disrespectful’. Why the protection racket by the Prime Minister for Lidia Thorpe?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, don’t forget Ray that Lidia is a crucial vote for the Labor Party in the Senate, and she was elected as a Green, and I think this is a lesson to all Australians: these Greens might have a green shopfront, but you walk in through the front door and it’s just a hotbed of madness and crazy ideas, and Lidia Thorpe’s on the extreme even of that.
So, Anthony Albanese, everything he does at the moment is through the lens of, ‘will it upset the Greens’ or ‘I don’t care about people out in the regions or in outer metropolitan areas, it’s how do we stop votes going from the Labor Party to the Greens’. So, he does as little as he can to upset that support base.
RAY HADLEY:
She’s come up with this insane pledge allegiance to the Queen as it was then, where she said, I didn’t say ‘heirs’, I said ‘hairs’. I mean, I think people just thought at the time when she said it, ‘oh well, everyone has a word they mispronounce’. Some people say, ‘ar-damant’, and I’m very ‘ar-damant about that’, as opposed to what it should be. Some people say ‘intensive purposes’, instead of ‘intents and purposes’. I think people were just thinking, ‘oh well, she probably think she’s saying heirs’, but she’s now saying she said ‘hairs’ deliberately, which I don’t believe.
PETER DUTTON:
Again, I just think it’s just the latest attention-seeking opportunity that she sees and best ignored and moved on.
RAY HADLEY:
Look, you’ve got the election coming up on Saturday in your home state. They had a very, very strong lead – David Crisafulli, Liberal National Party – according to the polls. And they’ve still got a very strong lead, they’re $1.08 with the bookmakers, which is as short as you want to be, but they have thrown everything at this election – the Labor Party and ‘Giggles’ – Giggles Miles, bar the kitchen sink. All uncosted. I mean talking about the most ridiculous things they’re going to offer and that’s caught the attention of some of the electorate, but like I say, it’s uncosted and it’s unaffordable.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, it is, and it has an impact as well, Ray. These State Governments continue to throw money at the electorate, and they do it without any consideration for what it means for the national economy. As the IMF has warned, we’ve got a huge problem with inflation in this country and we’re way at the back of the pack. It’s because Labor Governments keep spending money, and they drive us into more debt. They put at risk our ratings, which means that you’re paying more money for the debt that you try to service, and it’s why interest rates are staying higher for longer.
Interest rates are already started to come down in comparable economies around the world, and the IMF points out that Australia, I think, is up there with Slovakia, but the countries that we should be compared to – the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, etc – are all coming back. Interest rates have dropped in all of those countries and they should have dropped here by now. That is very hard for the Reserve Bank to do when you’ve got State Governments, or in the Federal Government’s case, employing 36,000 more public servants in Canberra, which is not productive for the economy by any stretch, and it should be deeply concerning.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, I don’t think the Prime Minister knows what the acronym ‘IMF’ stands for, let alone what they’re doing, but Mr Chalmers should, and if they’re urging Governments to rein in spending, and he’s doing exactly the opposite, it’s little wonder we’re neck and neck with Slovakia in terms of advanced economies and high inflation.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, you know, it’s just another layer of hurt for people and small businesses. I was talking to a small businessman yesterday in Sydney and his electricity costs over the last couple of years have doubled, and he just can’t continue to put up the price of coffee and the price of the goods that he’s selling in his store. His labour costs have gone up, insurance is through the roof, and the Government is just making it very difficult for people to get ahead at the moment. That has a human impact and people are losing their businesses and their houses, and it’s a tough time out there for a lot of Australians.
RAY HADLEY:
The Labor Government’s still talk about the housing. You made an announcement through the week that we’ll get to, but they proudly boasted – I did a story yesterday – they’re going to build 300 homes at Bonnyrigg, in South Western Sydney. That’s like a drop in not the bucket, a drop in the ocean in terms of the housing crisis. I mean, if you go further out past Bonnyrigg to Appin or to Wilton, and people out there, including Walker Corporation, are building 3 or 4,000 homes, another organisation a little further out, 3,000 homes around Menangle, thousands of homes, and they make a chest-beating exercise of 300 homes at Bonnyrigg.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, it’s worse than that Ray, because when you look at what they’re doing with their housing fund, they’re funding training programmes which are sponsored by the unions, they’re putting money into education seminars. This is, frankly, the first time that they’ve decided to put some money into a project that might actually get something off the ground. The rest of it has just been talk fests, giving money to State Labor Governments for union member employee projects and it’s not helping the housing crisis – in fact, it’s making it worse. They make it a lot worse when they bring in a million people over the last two years and only build 350,000 homes.
RAY HADLEY:
Now, your announcement – $5 billion for 500,000 homes – if you were to be elected to government next year, how quickly could that happen?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, we were out yesterday with the Liverpool Mayor and we’d spoken to him previously – and Michael Sukkar, literally, has spoken to hundreds of councils and stakeholders across the country about what is the best thing that we could do to address this housing crisis – and as the Mayor pointed out yesterday, there are literally thousands of blocks of land waiting to be released or waiting to be developed, but they can’t get Sydney Water to do the upgrade, they can’t get the sewerage system upgraded, they don’t have the balance sheet, the council hasn’t got the money to put the extra road in to connect it up to the road network.
Our argument is that if you are using the money that we’ve announced to get those projects up and going, that is how by bringing 500,000 new homes on as part of the supply solution, that’s how we can help young people with housing.
At the moment, the Labor Party’s putting a heap of money into this ‘rent for life’ scheme and I just don’t think it’s in the long term interests of young people to be locked into a rental arrangement that they can never get out of, and at the moment they’ve got no hope of home ownership.
We want to make sure that we can help them achieve that dream. People, young couples are putting off having kids at the moment because of the need to save longer and longer and longer for a deposit, and it’s just not how our country should operate.
RAY HADLEY:
I’ll give you an example that I know firsthand. I’ve got a – my youngest daughter, her husband and one of my grandchildren are living at a place called Wilton on the South Western outskirts. Now, they were in a development out there and they bought off the plan a number of years ago. So, they’re living in stage one, and there are some wonderfully aspirational young people and older Australians living in that area, but stages two and three, all the young people who put deposits down on that land waiting for approval have been told by Wollondilly Shire Council – not their fault – that they can’t proceed because Sydney Water have not provided the infrastructure either by the developer, but it’s just not there.
So, at the moment there are trucks taking the effluent out for stage one from a sort of mini processing plant, a mini effluent plant, but there’s no hope of building the other 2 or 3,000 homes in the foreseeable future because Sydney Water has said, ‘oh, it’s 2032 before we’ll have the necessary infrastructure in that area’. Now that’s just a small microcosm of what’s happening across Sydney.
PETER DUTTON:
That’s not an unusual story either, Ray. I’ve heard that story before and I’ve been shocked by it, to be honest. I think part of our argument is that – and we were talking to some developers and builders yesterday about this exact problem – there’s a certain amount of the Sydney Water work that can be done by contractors and then beyond that needs to be done by Sydney Water, but again, our argument is that if the councils can’t afford to pay for it, if the project doesn’t stack up, then that’s when we can provide some assistance to get the project off the ground.
As one developer pointed out yesterday, he’s got a land holding, it’s costing $3 million a year in holding costs, he says probably another three years before it can come online – it’s ready now – but that will ultimately add $70,000 a block to the finished product. It’s crazy.
We can be helping young families and getting these things organised. But the Prime Minister’s been running around for the last couple of years on the Voice and all these other distractions that he comes up with and they haven’t rolled their sleeves up and got on and made these decisions and helped people practically.
RAY HADLEY:
Governments make decisions that are politically motivated, but I’ve never seen a more disgraceful one than to strip Mike Pezzullo of his honour, his Order of Australia honour. Now he has not only been the former head of the Home Affairs Department. He also served a very prominent Labor man in Kim Beazley, as his Deputy Chief of Staff back in ’97 through the 2001. The former Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie has launched into it, but so too has Jeff Kennett, John Anderson, Warren Mundine – people who’d lean to the right.
So, when you’ve got people from both sides of the political divide saying this is just ridiculous and it is – it’s embarrassing that because of perceived bias that this man may or may not have had towards a previous Government – they strip him of an award that he’s well earned. I just think it’s bizarre?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, its vindictiveness in its worst form. I do think it’s bizarre, I think, to be honest – and I know Mike well – but he’s conducted himself with grace and hasn’t complained. I’m sure he doesn’t want the attention, he’s a very private person. But he has served our country in the public service for decades. He was in Defence, and as you say, he served Labor and he’s a Labor man. I mean, he’s on the right of the Labor Party but the Labor Party are great haters.
He served our Government well, and loyally, and he did exactly the same when there was a change of government and Anthony Albanese was elected Prime Minister.
This is a clear demonstration of political interference in the process. I actually think it’s a matter for the Integrity Commission to investigate because there is no conviction against Mr Pezzullo, there’s no impropriety alleged against him that would warrant the stripping of this honour, and it is nothing more than the Government trying to seek retribution against him.
They passed a retrospective law to take part of his salary away or his payout, which was done to apply to him only. I’d never seen anything like that before and I haven’t seen anything like the stripping of this award. If this is the standard that the Government’s setting, we can send them a list tomorrow of people – prominent Australians and others, who are either before the courts or have been convicted of pretty serious charges and have held their honours.
So, if the Prime Minister believes that he can justify this, he should be out talking about ‘why?’, because I think it’s a matter, frankly, the Government should refer to the Integrity Commission, because there clearly has been interference in what is supposed to be an independent process.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, I’ll give you one prime example: there’s a TV, or former TV personality in New South Wales, Andrew O’Keefe, who’s had numerous convictions for violence involving violence against women, and he still enjoys being a member of the Order of Australia. I mean, and this has been going on, not just for months, but for years, and there’s been no investigation – or they say there’s an investigation now – but they did this very quickly with Mike Pezzullo, they haven’t been quite as quick with someone who has been before the courts and convicted on numerous occasions.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I’m pretty sure in Andrew’s case or in others, that the Minister hasn’t been directly involved and I’m sure that Katy Gallagher and others, frankly, need to disclose what sort of instruction they’ve given to the Committee and what their expectation has been, because it’s not a fair process. In the end, it should be, and it should be impartial and independent – and it’s been anything but.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay, good luck, and we’ll talk after the Queensland State election, next Thursday. Thanks for your time.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks very much, mate. Take care.
[ends]