Subjects: Labor’s weak record on border security and immigration; Labor’s immigration record: 50,000 illegal arrivals, 800 boats and 1,200 deaths at sea; the Prime Minister’s endorsement of Ray Martin’s “dinosaur or d***head” sledge towards No voters; the Prime Minister’s divisive Voice, Treaty, Truth proposal; Labor’s cost of living crisis; Labor’s sweetheart airline deal that will keep airfare prices higher.
E&OE
RAY HADLEY:
Peter Dutton, the Federal Opposition Leader, joins us most Thursdays when he can. He’s in Perth today. Mr Dutton, good morning to you.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning, Ray. Congratulations on your success, I might say. It’s an incredible achievement, mate. Well done.
RAY HADLEY:
Thank you.
Look, just on this, Peter, you know, you’ve got a bit to answer for. You know, we look at Immigration Ministers, and according to Clare O’Neil, you’re down there with Chris Bowen. You’ve got a bit to answer for, I’m telling you. I mean, you know, all those gangsters and murderers and rapists you sent back to New Zealand who can now stay here, that was a disgrace. All those people you let in, you let in, on those boats into Northern Australia, that’s a disgrace as well. You’ve got to start taking responsibility for these things you did.
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are a lot of people qualified to give me a good character assessment, but I’m pretty sure she’s not one of them. So, I just think if Anthony Albanese wants to come out and do some dirty work, he should do it himself.
I’m happy to debate the Prime Minister on migration any day of the week. He just nominates a time and place I’ll be there. I mean, he won’t debate me on the Voice. Again, I’m very happy to have the debate. I think there should be a debate in the run up to the Voice because a lot of Australians, you know, as Ray Martin says, are not well-informed and not that smart. So, you know, I think hearing the Prime Minister explain the Voice in some detail before the 14th of October would be a good thing.
RAY HADLEY:
Can you imagine if – and there have been some silly things said by people on both sides of the argument – can you imagine if someone, a prominent proponent of the ‘no’ vote, described everyone who voted yes as a ‘dinosaur, or a d***head’? I mean, the ABC would go into a state of apoplexy. You know, it’d be this ‘disgraceful treatment’. But these people, whether it’s, of course, Marcia Langton, whether it’s Ray Martin, these passionate supporters of the ‘yes’ vote, if you don’t agree with them, you’re either a ‘d***head’, a ‘dinosaur’, or worse, you’re a ‘racist’.
I mean, I just think it’s counterproductive, and as I’ve said all morning, just say the vote goes down to the wire, it goes right to the wire, and we need the double majority of national voters and in the majority of states – whichever way it goes. Just say it’s 50.9 to 49.1 or something like that, right? Just say it’s that. Well, all of a sudden half the population are dinosaurs, d***heads and racists. And how’s that not going to be divisive?
PETER DUTTON:
well, the whole thing’s divisive, Ray. I mean, this is I think Australians have called the Prime Minister out on this. People aren’t stupid, they aren’t dinosaurs, and I won’t use the word which I notice you’ve been using regularly this morning. But I won’t use the description Ray Martin…
RAY HADLEY:
[inaudible]…let me tell you that before I retire, just interrupting you, I’m going to use an even more expletive word in relation to this. It starts with ‘f’, ends with ‘wit’.
Now, I mean, I’ve already described the New South Wales Attorney-General on bail laws –the Labor Attorney-General is a d***head and I’ll keep doing it. I’m glad that Ray Martin has been listening to the program and using that particular term in great numbers now. But I know as a Federal Opposition Leader you can’t be, of course, using the sort of language I use as a shock jock, but at the end of…
PETER DUTTON:
Just in case my kids are listening and they probably – I mean, they would be regular listeners to the Ray Hadley Morning Show as well! So I don’t want to give them any, you know, any bad ideas of language…
RAY HADLEY:
You can just go home and say to Kirilly, ‘look, he’s stark raving mad, kids. Just don’t take notice of him. He’s a boofhead’. But anyway, back we go – I interrupted you. You were halfway through talking about exactly where we’re going to.
PETER DUTTON:
Look, mate, I just think we need to treat people with respect on both sides. Australians aren’t stupid, and this proposition that the Prime Minister’s putting without explaining it – people aren’t going to vote for it. But we shouldn’t be complacent about that. There will be a lot of Australians who like on a normal election cycle, just don’t take any interest up until the day of the election. There will be some Australians who don’t even know there’s a referendum coming up or a Voice, you know, it’s the first time they’ve heard of it when they’re told that they have to go and vote. So, there will be, you know, a lot of people who are susceptible to this message that, ‘just vote for it on the vibe and it’s the right thing to do and it’s respectful and it’s a minimal change’ and all this nonsense the Prime Minister carries on with.
But I think this is an important point too, Ray, that you know, the Prime Minister preaches inclusiveness and tolerance and all of the, you know, the woke agenda that they’re pushing out. But the Prime Minister was actually at the speech that Ray Martin made, right? And he praised it on ABC Radio the next day to say that it was a great speech. Now, far from the Prime Minister coming out and condemning the words – and I presume if he’s asked in a press conference today, he’ll say, ‘well, everyone should be respectful on both sides, you know, I don’t condone, you know, bad language’, or, you know, some rehearsed line like that – but he was there at the speech. He didn’t hop up and say, ‘look Ray, that’s inappropriate mate. Have respect for people on both sides’, he applauded the speech. It was actually in the Prime Minister’s electorate, I might say.
RAY HADLEY:
Yeah, Marrickville.
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah, that’s right.
So, the Prime Minister applauded Ray Martin for that reference to Australians, to millions of Australians. Then on ABC Radio the next day, the Prime Minister says Ray Martin gave a great speech last night in my electorate. So, the hypocrisy, I don’t think, knows any limits and I think it’s why even a lot of Labor people you speak to now in private are shaking their head at what on earth the Prime Minister’s doing.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, the Prime Minister, of course, via his spokesperson, Clare O’Neil – and I might just play this for the benefit of the people given I’ve already spoken about it – what she said on the 730 Report:
[excerpt]
CLARE O’NEIL:
This is just an amazing fraud that’s been perpetrated on the Australian people here. We’ve had Peter Dutton, who’s built his political career talking to everyone about what a tough guy he is on borders and at the same time he’s been cutting funding to compliance, cutting funding to the immigration section of the Department. And on his watch, literally people with criminal convictions walked into the country and oversaw large rings of human trafficking and sexual slavery. Literally the worst crimes that can be committed on this great earth. So, I think Peter Dutton’s got a lot to answer for here.
[end excerpt]
RAY HADLEY:
So now you’re a perpetrator of sexual slavery, according to Clare O’Neil. But the point being, given that the previous LNP government is to blame for all the ills of immigration, we’ve now discovered that the Prime Minister having said one thing about petrol prices during his term as Opposition Leader, has an entirely different view as the Prime Minister.
Now, I think he made comment at one stage that Scott Morrison as Prime Minister wouldn’t have got out of the Commonwealth car to find out what the price of petrol was. Well, in the meantime, Andrew Clennell on Sky News provided this to us:
[excerpt]
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Can you tell me what the price of petrol is roughly at the moment?
ANTHONY ALBANESE:
Oh, the price of… Well I don’t go and fill up my car but it was around about a $1.80 last time I did.
ANDREW CLENNELL:
Well it’s $2.10-$2.20 now.
ANTHONY ALBANESE:
Sure.
[end excerpt]
RAY HADLEY:
It’s laughable. I mean so you’ve got to be smarter than he is – and like he’s a knockabout and you and I’ve agreed on that point. But he’s not – I’ve got to say this and you won’t agree with me: he’s not a very smart man, and he’s showing that in the Voice, he’s showing that in a whole range of things. And while he’s banging on about petrol prices saying it’s all to do with Ukraine and Russia, today we find out via the regulator power bills have gone up by 20 per cent in the last 12 months, despite his much promised $275 annual relief.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, Ray, I agree with all that. I mean, the trouble for the Prime Minister is he can’t go into one audience and tell them, you know, this is the scenario on petrol or this is the story on the Voice or this is the story on migration, and then you walk out of that room and you walk into the next room and you tell the next audience completely the opposite. I mean, does he not realise that the media keep these recordings and they keep the detail and if he doesn’t have a consistency, if he’s just telling people what he thinks they want to hear, or what he thinks is convenient or politically beneficial to himself, then I just don’t think that’s what we would expect from a Prime Minister of our country.
I mean, he wants to be Bob Hawke, but as we know, Anthony Albanese is no Bob Hawke. I mean, he’s not even a Paul Keating. I think there are echoes now of Kevin Rudd more than any other former leader and obviously Anthony Albanese was the Deputy Prime Minister to Kevin Rudd and involved intimately with that period of the Rudd-Gillard era. But, I mean, they are lurching from one disaster to the next, but they are choking the Australian economy with all of their economic decisions.
I’m over in WA at the moment, businesses are literally having to ration power to keep the lights on in the city of Perth and we’re losing out on economic productivity. We went to a firm yesterday – a thousand jobs are at risk because the state government and the gederal government just won’t engage with them. They can’t get an audience with Chris Bowen. So where does all this finish? And similarly, in relation to the Voice or on migration, as you point out, I mean, their stories just don’t hold water.
RAY HADLEY:
You mentioned Bob Hawke just then. It’s funny because Tom from Wollongong – I just looked for it while you having a yarn – sent me something which I’d forgotten but was reminded of overnight and I checked it and it’s right. A quote attributed to former Prime Minister Bob Hawke way back in 1988: “In Australia there is no hierarchy of descent: there must be no privilege of origin. The commitment is to all. The commitment to Australia is one thing needed to be a true Australian”.
To even mention Anthony Albanese in the same breath as Bob Hawke is almost insulting to his memory. A great Labor Prime Minister, a great Labor Prime Minister, and said it all way back in 1988 and maybe Anthony Albanese needs to go back to the books and have a look at what a former great Australian Labor Prime Minister said.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I agree. I mean, the Prime Minister’s out yesterday or the day before referring to the Voice as, you know, not dissimilar to a school P&C! I mean, it’s comical. I mean, does he think that people are silly or that they can’t see through it? The detail is not being provided deliberately. The design of the Voice starts on the Monday after the vote takes place.
People don’t want our country divided. People are struggling to pay their power bills at the moment and the 20 per cent you speak of, is just the start. AEMO, the energy regulator is warning that the power is going to go out, possibly in Victoria, for example, over the course of this summer because they’re turning off the old system before the new system is ready. They want you to pretend that the batteries, the latest technology battery, is going to firm up wind and solar when it’s not working. But the battery at a cost of $190 million lasts for an hour.
So, we have this surreal conversation where we’re expected to pretend that there’s no economic impact, there’s no social impact, that pensioners will be able to afford to turn on their air conditioning over the course of summer, when the opposite is the reality. The Prime Minister, sort of, lives in this fantasy land and I think he’s going to come back to work on the 15th of October because I suspect Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek and others – who are already talking to journalists – are going to be pointing out the deficiencies of the Prime Minister’s expertise around campaigning in an election campaign like this one.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay, just finally, I’ve been saying for weeks now that Alan Joyce, when he was the boss of Qantas and the Prime Minister, were in cahoots that day, shortly after Catherine King announced that Qatar Airlines were being sidelined for more slots into Australia. Then we had the livery of the Qantas and Jetstar jets unveiled with the Yes campaign. You’ve been critical of big business for entering this debate, and I agree with that. But surely to goodness, the fact that Catherine King will not in any way, shape or form confirm or deny before a Senate Committee what happened and what influence Qantas had via Mr Joyce over her decision, in cahoots with the Prime Minister. I mean, that sort of stuff, it just doesn’t pass the pub test. People won’t cop that. The rantings of the Prime Minister, ‘oh, no one from the Lower House has appeared before…’ Well, that’s not right. There’s a precedent for that to happen.
But the simple fact of the matter is, he’s running, you know, I guess, a campaign to hide her from questioning about what took place between her and, of course, Ms Hrdlicka, Jayne Hrdlicka from Virgin, where she said, ‘yes, yes, those slots will be there’. And then all of a sudden, within a space of a few days after meeting and talking to Mr Joyce, what she told Jayne Hrdlicka was basically reversed and was knocked head over turkey.
I mean, you can’t keep hiding from it. There’s going to be leaks eventually to illustrate that Catherine King changed her mind on the basis that Qantas quid pro quo, ‘yes’ on the planes, ‘yes’ on the livery, keep Qatar out, and we’ll keep going ahead. And all of a sudden it’s about human rights, despite the fact that Qantas codeshare with airlines from the Middle East who have dreadful human rights issues.
PETER DUTTON:
I think that’s right, Ray. I think the fact that Catherine King’s had four or five different versions now as to why she made the decision to exclude Qatar, I think just demonstrates to people that there’s more to this story. I mean, the Prime Minister’s hanging out with Alan Joyce, red carpet events and, you know, they’re besties having dinner together, all the rest of it. Qantas gives a couple of million dollars of shareholder’s money to the Yes campaign, as you say, the planes that are carrying the ‘yes’ logo. I mean, as if there was no discussion, as if there was some, you know, lull in the conversation where they were talking about everything else but the most important issue to Qantas. It just doesn’t add up and doesn’t pass the pub test, as you say.
So, this is a Prime Minister who promised transparency and I mean, he bagged the living daylights out of Scott Morrison for not being transparent and honest and the rest of it. This government now is starting to look like the Rudd Government and the scattery way that the Prime Minister approaches these issues – and including this one and running a protection racket for Catherine King – I think it raises more questions than it provides answers, and when Parliament goes back, Catherine King can expect to get a lot more questions and it just doesn’t add up. There’s a big price to pay here because people are paying more for not just international airfares, but for domestic airfares as well, because that competition’s gone out of the market.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay, enjoy Perth. We’ll talk next week on the eve of the referendum.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks, Ray. See you, mate.
RAY HADLEY:
Peter Dutton, the Federal Opposition Leader.
[ends]