Subjects: Visit to Adelaide; ministerial appointments, Anthony Albanese’s broken promise on a $275 cut to electricity bills; Defence; Labor’s millions in donations from the CFMMEU; the CFMMEU’s storming of an office block in Brisbane.
RAY HADLEY
Every Thursday we try to talk to the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. He’s on the line today from Adelaide.
Peter Dutton, good morning to you.
PETER DUTTON
Good morning, Ray.
RAY HADLEY
What takes you to Adelaide?
PETER DUTTON
We’ve got a few meetings here this morning with local businesses just hearing about their plight, what’s happening in the workplace. All of our effort, I suppose, at the moment is to try and review our policies and come up with better policies in the run-up to the next election. So, we’re just getting out and about around the country to hear those messages and had a good visit to a cabinet maker yesterday – who, like most businesses I think across the country at the moment – is finding it really difficult to source those workers and obviously a lot of nervousness around builders collapsing and the whole building sector and construction sector. So, that’s kept us busy and then I’ll be back home on Friday.
RAY HADLEY
Now the big news while I was away was Scott Morrison and the secret ministries. The Solicitor-General’s advice came out this week, released, of course. As even the Prime Minister admitted there was nothing illegal in what Scott Morrison did. I thought it was a bit weird and strange myself. The Solicitor-General said it’s not a good look. Now the Prime Minister says we need an inquiry. I would have thought and I’ve offered this suggestion yesterday, if you’re agreeable to moving forward with the Prime Minister and saying, ‘look, what we need to do is put in place rules in the future that when ministries are given out or appointed that everyone’s aware of it’, and surely, I mean, he said it’s not political, but it’s simply a witch hunt, isn’t it? I mean, we now know what the Solicitor-General thinks, what we all think, but surely there’s no need for an expensive inquiry if you agree to do what I’ve just suggested?
PETER DUTTON
Well Ray, I agree with that. I think it’s clearly now turned political. I think the points the Prime Minister made at the start were legitimate. We’ve said we’d support a process to ensure it can’t happen again, we didn’t agree with the decision that Scott had made. He’s explained it, he’s apologised for it, and the question now is how you make sure it doesn’t happen again, which is a pretty simple process in terms of requiring Prime Ministers to declare the acting arrangements and that would resolve the matter.
But clearly, the Prime Minister sees political advantage in this and you know, one thing you know about people like Dan Andrews and Anthony Albanese is they’ve been around a long time; they know lots of tricks in the book and you’re seeing it now with the announcement of a royal commission into robodebt – again, a witch-hunt – and I think when the Prime Minister refuses to include the Premiers, including Premier Andrews, for example, in an inquiry to work out what happened during the COVID period and the reason for different decisions and he says ‘no, no, no, we’re not interested in looking at Labor Premiers, we only want to look at the former Liberal Prime Minister.’ I think the penny starts to drop for Australians: that actually for the Prime Minister now, he’s overplaying his hand.
This has become more politicised and it’s morphing into to a witch-hunt rather than pointing out a problem that needed to be solved, and there’s a solution to the problem which we said we will support and let’s get on with it, instead of playing the games and all of this is happening. The Prime Minister is obsessing about this sort of ‘get square’ with Scott Morrison and families are struggling to pay their power bills. He’s still not mentioned the $275 figure that he promised on 97 occasions during the election, that people would see their power prices go down by, and he’s walked away from that promise and families are struggling to pay their bills, and he’s got no answers to problems that he said before the election that he was going to solve.
RAY HADLEY
You see when I returned, I got criticised from the right side of politics because I said I thought what Scott Morrison did was rather bizarre and strange, and as I think Greg Sheridan wrote, if you know, Kramer did it in Seinfeld, you would have understood it, but not a Prime Minister of our nation. But given that we now know by the Solicitor-General that it was not illegal, the Constitution was not breached, the only conclusion anyone that’s reasonable can draw is what you’ve just said. The Prime Minister wants to deflect away from promises that were made and maybe even being held to account because of the Mean Girls where he took no action of course prior to becoming Prime Minister, while we’re having investigations and accusations being anonymously forwarded in New South Wales against various politicians, but he wants to avoid that and now all of a sudden, as you’ve just said, he’s announced a royal commission into the robodebt scheme. Catherine Holmes, a Supreme Court justice from your home state has been appointed, and if anyone forgot about it, robodebt was an automated debt recovery program rolled out by the Coalition between 2015 and 2019. The scheme used an automated system to match tax and Centrelink data to raise debts against welfare recipients for money, the then government claimed was overpaid. Doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing you’d want to spend a lot of money on a royal commission, but that’s the path he’s gone down now. But you repeat that you would be amenable to dealing with the Prime Minister and moving forward to make sure what happened under Scott Morrison never happens under any other prime minister, correct?
PETER DUTTON
Absolutely Ray. I mean, I’ve been very clear about that, and we’ve made it clear to the Government that we’re happy to support, you know, reasonable reforms and processes to put the change in place. There’s no suggestion that Scott Morrison acted illegally or with any benefit to him or to anybody he knows. All of that is nonsense. If there was some sort of suggestion of criminal activity or behavior that was questionable from a constitutional perspective, then fair enough, have an inquiry, but the problem has been highlighted. Scott’s detailed his logic, his rationale for it. We’ve all expressed our views in relation to it. Let’s deal with the issue, get it off the books, and move on, but, as I say, the tricky Prime Minister that wants to keep these issues going and that’s why he announces that, you know, there’s going to be legal advice sought and then the legal advice is obtained, so the story runs another day, and then it takes him a day to read the legal advice and then he’s out the next day. So, it goes for three or four days and all the while, he’s not talking about petrol prices, he’s not talking about how he’s going to reduce electricity prices, and these are the commitments that he gave in the run-up to the election and he’s broken promises.
Now, the Government is in a honeymoon at the moment, we all understand that. They can do no wrong in some parts of the media’s perspective and in their eye. That’s fine. I mean, that’s the way the political cycle works, particularly just after an election. But families and small businesses are hurting at the moment, and as I say, as I move around the country talking to them and just talking to people in the suburbs, talking to small business owners, there are a lot of problems on the horizon. When you look at 11 per cent inflation in some parts of the United States, where you see electricity rationing in Germany and in the United Kingdom, massive power price increases in the UK – that is all coming for us. If you think your power price is high now under Labor, wait for another 12 or 18 months. And that’s what really concerns me that they’re worried about the politics, and as I say, I think Anthony Albanese has become obsessed with Scott Morrison and he should start to become obsessed with what’s in the best interests of our country and work for those people who have elected you and put in place the policies that are going to provide support to those people. That’s the priority.
So, we’ll support the Government where they’re putting forward sensible suggestions, we’ve done that. But the Solicitor-General’s advice was very clear. The law hasn’t been broken. There is no breach of the Constitution. Yes, it was an odd thing to do – we expressed that and that’s my perspective, as well. I didn’t agree with it, it’s not something I would have done or something I would have advised the then Prime Minister to do. But that’s all been trawled over and from every angle examined. The Solicitor-General’s come back with his advice. The time now is for the Prime Minister to stop this witch-hunt and get on with helping the Australian public who are very worried about what they’re seeing internationally.
I mean, the saving grace for our country will be that the fundamentals of our economy are very strong. That’s what Kevin Rudd inherited from John Howard in 2007 and Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese are very lucky that they’ve inherited an economy, the fundamentals of which are very strong, because the Coalition Government managed it in that way over the course of the last nine years. So, they’ve got some serious issues to deal with and I hope they can get back to business.
RAY HADLEY
Now, you warned us when you were still in government that the new Defence Minister, Richard Marles, his first action as Defence Minister has been to lift your ban on rainbow morning teas. Now, senior Defence Force personnel have said to me: it’s the strangest of priorities, if this is the most important thing he’s got to do, we’re in a bit of strife.
PETER DUTTON
Well, I agree with that, Ray. I always thought the time for morning teas was after you’ve won the war, because I’m pretty sure in other countries at the moment they’re not having woke morning teas; they’re getting on with how they can protect and defend their country. And we do live in an uncertain time. It’s uncomfortable to talk about, but that’s the reality of a president like President Xi, it’s the reality of a president like President Putin.
RAY HADLEY
Now, I wanted to talk to you, yeah, sorry, you just broke up there, but I wanted to talk to you about your home state. Maybe you missed it last night given you’re travelling, but there was a report on Channel Nine and we’ve got unions ramping things up in New South Wales with rail strikes leading into the election next year which is understandable, even though Chris Minns has said no he shouldn’t be doing it.
Now we’ve got Mark Bailey, the Transport Minister in Queensland, he mysteriously meets with the CFMMEU on Monday. Now he’s to launch a talkfest with stakeholders at the Transport Department yesterday. He’s on the agenda, he’s launching it. The CFMMEU invade, they terrify the workers who in some cases retreat to their offices to hide, while these blokes, many of them connected to outlaw motorcycle gangs storm the place. He gets questioned yesterday about why he didn’t deliver the address and this is old mate of course, this is mangocube6 – he of the hidden emails. He doesn’t front up and then he tried to tell the reporters in Brisbane yesterday, ‘oh no, no, it wasn’t on my agenda.’ They then produce the documents saying, ‘here you are opening it.’ You meet with the CFMMEU on Monday, you don’t turn up. Did they tell you what they were going to do? ‘No, no’, but he didn’t sound too convincing. And I warned him this morning as my mother warned me and probably your mum warned you: if you tell lies you get a pimple on your tongue and he was lying through his teeth yesterday, I’m sure.
PETER DUTTON
I think a lot of these ministers in Queensland are scared of the CFMEU and probably, you know, to be fair to them, with good reason. I mean, they’ve targeted individual families and the links between the outlaw motorcycle gangs and the CFMEU, it’s well-documented. I mean, they use them for muscle on websites, on building sites. They have you know, these thugs picketing on building sites to stop the concrete pour taking place.
On this story, Ray – as you point out – Neil Scales is the Director General in Queensland of the Department of Main Roads and Transport. Now, the CFMEU has taken a particular set against this bloke because he’s obviously not awarding contracts in the way that the CFMEU would want them awarded. So, what do they do? I mean, they don’t write to him or they don’t raise it with the Premier as a normal union would do or a normal constituent would do. They go down to the government building in Brisbane, in the city, and they go down with the bikies. They storm their way into the building where the Director General, a public servant in the Queensland Government, has his office. They storm their way in there trying to try to sort of bash their way in, they knocked over a security guard, caused damage to the building. They had to lock the lifts down to stop these thugs from getting up to no doubt bash the living daylights out of this Director General. I mean, this is a modern-day mafia and the Labor Party continues to take tens of millions of dollars from the CFMEU in donations and the influence that they have on policy, the influence that they have on ministers, a weak minister like Mark Bailey is unbelievable.
But in the end, what does it result in? It means that building prices are higher, you’re paying more for roads, you’re paying more for schools, you pay more for an apartment in an apartment block because of the activities of these thugs and the Labor Party is completely beholden to them and it’s rolling out at a federal level. The union activity already under this Government – the threat of strikes that Sally McManus proposes at the Jobs Summit to go back to the 1970s model where you can have economy-wide strikes and the rest of it. People have moved on from that. That’s something from a previous era and the Labor Party through their donations, I mean, from the union movement, they owe an incredible amount to these union leaders and that’s why unfortunately, we are going to see a lot more strike activity and strange policy outcomes because of the union movement influence within the Labor Party.
RAY HADLEY
As always, thanks for your time. We’ll talk next week.
PETER DUTTON
Thanks Ray. See you, mate.
[ends]