Subjects: Snowy 2.0; cost of living pressures; the government’s broken promise on a $275 cut to your power bills; gas supply; Coronation of King Charles III; youth crime; sentencing laws; the Prime Minister’s Canberra Voice proposal.
E&OE.
RAY HADLEY:
I’m about to speak to the Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. On the way to him, I promised you in the first hour we’d hear from Paul Broad. He spoke about the Energy Minister Chris Bowen quite passionately with my colleague Ben Fordham this morning and I make no apologies for the language, because it’s pretty old fashioned Australian language, but it gets and conveys the meaning he wants to convey.
[Excerpt]
BEN FORDHAM:
Were you hiding some of the delays from Chris Bowen? Because I see in the Financial Review, a spokeswoman for Mr Bowen told the Financial Review that it was ‘no secret’ that the government was ‘disappointed in the hiding of delays to major energy projects by the former government including Snowy Hydro 2.0’.
PAUL BROAD:
That is just bullshit. The first meeting with Bowen, my first meeting with Bowen, he asked me and I said ‘yeah, 12 to 18 months’. When it was the last meeting with Angus, which was back in April when a contractor walked into Angus’ office and said that ‘we think you are going to be delaying and have a cost increase’, Angus kicked them out of the office and said, ‘it’s got to be delivered on time and on budget’. That’s the truth. I mean, why does his office want to put out this political spin? What’s he trying to do? I mean, fair dinkum, why not just tell the truth. Pretty easy. In life I find if you tell the truth, you can remember it, you don’t get yourself in too much trouble.
RAY HADLEY:
And then he went on:
[Excerpt]
BEN FORDHAM:
Did you leave or were you shoved?
PAUL BROAD:
Oh, a bit of a combination. The word was filtering down. In fact, I think when Bowen was elected that, you know, I was dead in the water, so it was only a matter of time but I formally resigned.
BEN FORDHAM:
Well, why were you dead in the water? What was it that was such a sticking point between where you stand and where Chris Bowen stood?
PAUL BROAD:
A series of things. Particularly the gas plant at Kurri Kurri. Angus Taylor and I were very strong that you needed gas to keep the lights on. We have more gas in New South Wales than we know what to do with. We need gas, so when the sun’s not shining, wind’s not blowing, gas, hydro are incredibly important. Chris Bowen was against Kurri Kurri. Then he said we’re going to run Kurri Kurri 30 per cent on hydrogen. There is no hydrogen in the Hunter and there won’t be for another 10, 20 years at the earliest.
BEN FORDHAM:
You were just trying to help, right?
PAUL BROAD:
Well, yeah, I was trying to help. I think in the end, there was 18 months leading up to it. In the Senate Estimates, the Parliament was asking us lots of these sort of questions so you got a sense of where Chris was coming from and that’s his political view. I respect that. I just didn’t agree with it and there’s no point being somewhere if you don’t agree with it.
BEN FORDHAM:
You could have just drank the Kool-Aid and said, ‘oh, yeah no, this is going to be the answer to all of our problems. It will be able to carry the load’, but you were being realistic and he didn’t want to hear it.
PAUL BROAD:
Yeah. Plus the fact, the notion that you can have 80 per cent renewable in our system by 2030 is – to use the vernacular, can I use vernacular?
BEN FORDHAM:
Yes.
PAUL BROAD:
Is bullshit. It’s bullshit. You can’t, Ben. Ben, the truth is we need this transition, If it ever occurs, it will take 80 years, not eight. So there’s massive changes need to occur and I’m deeply concerned about the rush, the notion that somehow this is all magic. We’re going to wave a magic wand, we will close a big baseload power plant. It’s kept our lights on for yours and my life. We’re just going to close and all these alternatives are out there. Well, it’s not. I can be absolutely 100 per cent certain it’s not available and the transmission lines are miles late. 2.0 which is a part of the thing is late. We’ll need, I think their own reports tell them you’ll need at least 8 2.0s to achieve their goals. That’s 80 years, not eight.
RAY HADLEY:
Yeah. 80 years, not eight. The Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. I don’t know if you heard that this morning given you’re in Brisbane but it certainly created a furore in Sydney where it was done by Ben Fordham. Good morning.
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah, good morning, Ray. It was a good interview and he spoke very frankly and I think a lot of people now are really starting to get nervous about whether the lights are going to stay on, whether there’ll be a disruption. People are obviously distraught, in households and in small businesses now where they’re opening up the bills, they were promised the bills were going down, but they keep going up. As Paul points out, with 28,000 kilometres of poles and wires being rolled out at the cost of $100 billion, which is Chris Bowen’s proposal, all of that cost is going to be passed on to consumers. So, if you think your power bill has gone up over the course of the last 12 months under Labor, wait for the next few years. If lights go out or there is a disruption to supply, manufacturers are going to close up operations here and just go to another part of the world. There’s not going to be a reduction in emissions, but we’ll lose out on the industry and the jobs and they seem to be just pathologically blind to the reality and just want to believe that the batteries can store power for longer than they can – but they are putting us in a dangerous position.
RAY HADLEY:
And you see one of the things and I said earlier, maybe the Morrison Government had run its race but I kept saying, ‘look, I don’t know whether Anthony Albanese will be the best Prime Minister or the worst, but you get with him a package of people who’ll ruin the place. And the captain coach and sole selector of ruining the place is this Bowen. He graduated from university. He started being a worker for various state and Labor federal politicians. He then went to be the youngest mayor in Fairfield from memory. He’s never had a proper job in his life. Never. And now he’s elevated to one of the most important ministries in the Commonwealth.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I think again, Ray, I mean, look at the track record. If you’re backing a horse tomorrow – I suspect you are and you might give us that tip in a sec – but if you’re backing a horse, you look at their form and Chris Bowen’s form in government as the minister who had the most boats and people come on his watch when he was immigration minister. He was the person who designed FuelWatch, GroceryWatch. They never came to fruition. Grocery prices never went down. Fuel prices never went down. He was the minister who told us that it was okay for, you know, power plants to shut before the new system is ready because his vision of the world is one where science doesn’t matter and you don’t have to listen to the physics and the reality of the limitations on storage at the moment. You cannot have, if you’ve got, let’s say they want to go to 80 per cent, 90 per cent of renewables in the system, you still have to pay for the 10 per cent firming up. So you’ve still got the fixed cost of firming up or providing that power when, as Paul pointed out before, the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing or during the hours of darkness.
So, you’re right, if any of them on the frontbench had any experience in small business or in running a business or having real jobs, I’d feel safer but, you know, the Prime Minister wants to be popular and wants to, you know, go to all the celebrity events and wants everybody to like him – that’s fine if that’s his thing – but he has to make decisions that are in our country’s best interests and at the moment he’s allowing somebody like Chris Bowen to dictate around that Cabinet table, which is going to be detrimental to the interests of the Australian public and our country and we shouldn’t sit by and watch it happen.
RAY HADLEY:
Now to the Prime Minister and I might have a different view to many out there about his arrival for the Coronation of King Charles III. There’s a story today about his hypocrisy over actually meeting with the King or King Charles III before the Coronation, and then telling the British broadcaster, Piers Morgan, that he thinks we should be a republic. Now, he is the Prime Minister of a Commonwealth nation. Regardless of his personal views he’s got to go there and represent us as the Prime Minister. So he can have a private view that he expresses to Piers Morgan but, I mean, he’d be in more strife if he didn’t go, if you know what I mean. I mean, you know, yes, they say it’s hypocrisy and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day, he’s got a duty to perform as our Prime Minister and he is the Prime Minister of everyone, even those who didn’t vote for him. So he’s got to go and represent their interests as well as those who voted for him. So, I mean, he’s damned if he does and he’s damned if he doesn’t. If he doesn’t go, well, it’s a snub. If he goes and says how he feels, but still pays respect to His Majesty, well, he’s a hypocrite. So I don’t think he can win. Your view?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I think it’s appropriate that he goes as the leader of our country to represent us at a very important event. We’re a stable democracy. We have a very proud Indigenous heritage in this country, but we don’t talk near enough about the European influence, the British influence and the society that we’ve got today – the civilisation, the cities, the design, all of the institutions, they arrived from the UK and from the United States and European influence otherwise, and the Italians and the Greeks and people who came here and, you know, slashed sugar cane and laid concrete and built buildings, they’re the great success story of our country and we should talk a lot more about it. I think it’s fine for the Prime Minister to go to represent our interests. I think it’s appropriate for that to happen. But don’t come back here and then bag the bloke, bag the King, or bag the royal family. Don’t be hypocritical. I think Australians, you know, are a pretty tolerant lot and we don’t mind hearing both sides of the argument but when somebody is saying, you know, one thing on the even side of the street and the opposite on the odd side of the street, then I think you start to sniff out a bit of a fake. I believe very strongly that if somebody believes that it’s in the best interests of our country to have a TV celebrity or a sporting celebrity as the president of this country and that somehow that’s going to be a better system than what we’ve got at the moment, you know, I’d be happy to have that debate. But I think, you know, if you’re over there swanning around at Buckingham Palace, I think as prime ministers past have done, you don’t give interviews at that stage talking about the republic. You’re there for that occasion and save your interviews for when you get back to Australia.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay. Now you’ve travelled to Alice Springs a lot longer than the Prime Minister managed to get there. In the last couple of days – and I’d be interested in your comment about your home state, Queensland – I’m being told there was a meeting of shire councils, most notably Moree and Dubbo, where youth crime – Indigenous youth crime, unfortunately – is out of control. The coppers can’t control it. It’s a bit like what’s being done in the Alice Springs, but it’s also being done in regional New South Wales. Do you get the gut feeling it’s happening in Queensland as well?
PETER DUTTON:
It’s certainly happening in parts of Queensland and I think in, you know, just speaking with Mark Coulton, our local member down in that part of the world, and Moree as well. I mean he’s made lots of representations to the police and, I think there’s a small element, it seems, within that community – there’s a big Indigenous population within that community, but there’s a small element of people who are committing crimes and in the end the response has to be from the police, but they can only work according to the laws that the Parliament passes. I think particularly in Alice Springs where the Northern Territory Government there is as bad as I’ve seen. The Police Minister up there still refusing to recognise that there are problems in Alice Springs, or that somehow, you see some of these Indigenous leaders who live in capital cities saying, ‘oh, you know, you’re playing politics with what’s happening in Alice Springs’. Complete and utter rubbish. I think we’re condemning these kids – particularly in Alice Springs, to a life that we wouldn’t tolerate in capital cities. If children were being sexually abused here or the sort of rampant behaviour that we’re seeing in Alice Springs or in Moree or elsewhere, I think, frankly the Police Commissioner would be under a lot of pressure.
I think there is a lot of frustration in the community and I really worry in places like Alice Springs, quite genuinely, that one of these stolen cars with four or five 13 year olds is going to wrap itself around a telephone pole or flip over, and that’s not to mention the grief that they caused to another car that they run into or a house, the front of the house they plow into. This is not pie in the sky stuff. People are living in fear in some of these communities, particularly Alice Springs, where people are in tears and some people have decided that they’re going to move to other parts of the country. That was obvious when we were up there. Now, the Prime Minister flew over Alice Springs again the other day but didn’t drop in and they promised money, none of the money has been spent on the ground and I just think people have got to roll their sleeves up, go up and have a listen to what’s actually happening on the ground. I don’t think you’d have to spend too many hours there to realise that it’s not tenable, it’s not acceptable, and it has to change.
RAY HADLEY:
Look in relation to this, and you’ve touched on, you know, children in cars and people losing their lives. There is someone before a court after the death of three people and another person’s critical after what happened in Maryborough over the course of the weekend. The Premier in Queensland was asked about this yesterday – the fact that it was a closed court and members of the public and the media couldn’t report on what was happening in that court, and she kept referring to the judiciary; ‘oh, it’s a matter for them’, when in fact Bill Potts – a legal mind in Queensland, and you as an old fashioned copper would know that the police enforce the law, the judiciary make judgements on the law, but the law is actually made up by the government. The government of the day enacts the law. Now she has it within her remit to actually make a difference and make people accountable for their actions and it’s very important she do that.
So, it’s no good blaming the judiciary and say, ‘oh, separation of powers; police, government, judiciary all separate’. But no, the judiciary follow what you tell them to do. I mean, I know I sound like a broken record about the record in Queensland of sentencing paedophiles, but all she has to do is change the law so that there’s a minimum requirement for a person who has sex with a child to spend a period of time incarcerated, not some sort of ICO or the equivalent where they’re let back in the community or given a paltry sentence.
PETER DUTTON:
I mean, Ray, you couldn’t be any more spot-on. You know, I don’t mind Annastacia Palaszczuk at a personal level. I think she’s a nice person, but her race has run here in Queensland. The public here, I mean people in city suburbs, let alone in places like Townsville, or you know, in more remote areas, I mean, people have just had enough and they’re not stupid. John Howard used to always make this point, you know, the people get it right. You may not like the outcome of an election if you lose, but generally speaking, they get it right. Here in Queensland, it’s the only state where you don’t have an upper house. So in New South Wales at the moment there’s debate about numbers in the Upper House and what happens there. In Queensland, there’s no Upper House. It was abolished decades ago. So the Premier here has a thumping majority in the Lower House. She’s not relying on the Greens, she’s not relying on the Katter Party or One Nation or independents or teals or whoever else. She has the majority in her own right and she has the ability to pass whatever law she wants in Queensland, and if she’s not happy with the way in which the judiciary is imposing sentences, she can change the law tomorrow.
I mean, does she think people are stupid? They see through it and they see that it’s not sincere. You know, she made this suggestion, ‘oh well, I’m going to address it by increasing the maximum penalty’. The maximum penalties never apply. If you want to make a difference, put in place a minimum penalty. If you’ve got a history of stealing cars and the likelihood of you continuing to do that and the likelihood of you running in to somebody at high speed and killing them and their family increases with every extra car stolen, well do something about it because these families are going to live with this grief. This poor girl up in Maryborough, her family will be destroyed for the rest of their lives and in a similar situation with young girls or boys. That’s why we’re so passionate about these issues, because it destroys their lives that they live with those memories and that haunting reminder of it on a regular basis, and there needs to be a deterrence.
You can’t blame the judiciary when you’ve appointed the judiciary. Premier Palaszczuk has appointed the judges and the bureaucrats in charge of departments. Well, let’s be serious about it, and innocent people who are just working hard, trying to take care of their ageing parents or their kids or just leading a normal life, they’re the victims in all of this. I think the Prime Minister, frankly, should be having a word to the Premier about it, because as we’ve seen, there’s been a weakening of the laws at a federal level which allowed us to deport criminals back to places like New Zealand and elsewhere around the world who has committed sexual offences against children or who had committed crimes, including dangerous driving causing death, and we could punt them so that they didn’t do it again here to our public. So we’re not a safer society, we’re less safe because of their actions and trying to blame the judges or blame somebody else when you’re the Premier is a complete nonsense.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay. Just one thing further about this. And you no doubt know that in Serbia, eight children and a security guard have been shot dead by a 13 year old, and then we’ve got another six other students hospitalised, some with life threatening injuries, so the death toll may climb. In Serbia, they have a law, if you’re under the age of 14, you can’t be criminally prosecuted. Now, there are people in Queensland among the Labor government talking about doing the same thing and others across Australia. I mean, can you imagine if the same thing happened in any state or territory here that had a law that, ‘oh, this person can’t be prosecuted’, they’ve killed nine people, including eight children, but ‘oh they’re 13, we can’t prosecute them’. It’s lunacy, absolute lunacy.
PETER DUTTON:
It is. It is. I mean, if there’s any thought of that in Australia, people should vote them out as quickly as they can get to a ballot box. Honestly, Ray, I mean, are we talking about a big part of the population here? No, we’re not. Most 13 year old kids are, you know, kicking a footy around or riding a bike or being made to do their homework. Their parents know where they are through the hours of darkness. They demand that they be back home if they’re playing at their mate’s place next door by dark. We can’t live in a society where people can’t conduct their affairs in a reasonable and safe way. I mean, we’ve got to get back to the basics here. You can have all these niceties and all these theoretical thoughts and universities pumping out all of this stuff. But the job of leaders is to actually lead and stand up for what is right, whether it’s popular or not, and that’s supposed to be what they’ve been elected to do, and you need to stare down.
I mean, nobody wants to see a 13 year old in jail, but if they’ve gone out and shot somebody or they’ve been old enough and mature enough to break into a house to steal keys to cause damage and then, you know, drive the stolen car down the highway at 160 kilometres an hour and run into somebody and kill somebody, well, they should be accountable for that. I mean, that’s not a radical thought. It’s just enforcement of the rule of law which any civilised society has to adopt.
RAY HADLEY:
Sorry, one final thing – the Voice. I think we’ve got agreement that there should be a general acknowledgement of the First Nations Indigenous Australia, although I notice that you go to the Northern Territory, they call themselves Aboriginal people, but anyway there should be a general acknowledgement. But there are now more and more legal minds challenging that of the Solicitor-General and others, that this will do nothing but lead to High Court challenges on a regular basis, and depending on the make-up of the High Court at that particular time, we could be bogged down for years. Look, is there any hope of some bipartisan suggestion? I know some people on the ‘yes’ side of the vote are saying, ‘well hang on, maybe we just need to have a discussion about where we get to with the Liberal National Party so we get bipartisan support’. Is there any rumblings in Canberra that may happen?
PETER DUTTON:
Ray, I think it’s been interesting just having a look at some of the research and polling from different groups over the course of the last couple of weeks. It’s obvious that there is a rising level of frustration and anger with a lot of Australians who feel that they should be trusted with the detail, and if you’re asking me to change the Constitution – our country’s rule book – why can’t I know what it’s about? The absurd proposition that the Prime Minister is putting forward that you vote on the Saturday and they start designing it in a six month consultation process that starts on the following Monday. It’s absurd. So is there a bipartisan position? Yes. I believe that we could come together as a country instead of being divided as we are at the moment. I think we could legislate for a local and regional voice from Indigenous people, from Aboriginal people, but I want to hear from the elders on the ground in Alice Springs and Tennant Creek and Katherine and elsewhere, in Moree, where there are problems. I don’t want to hear from the academics out of Canberra and Sydney and Melbourne. I want to hear about those people that can provide an opportunity for us to make for a better future for these kids and Indigenous families.
So, I think we can legislate it. That way you can be very specific about the fact that it doesn’t have an impact on High Court appointments, which the Voice at the moment would be able to: they’d be able to, and there’d be a requirement for them to be consulted on the Voice. There would be a requirement for them to be consulted under the Prime Minister’s model on defence matters, on tax cuts, on interest rate increases or interest rate deliberations by the Reserve Bank. All of that is exactly what is being proposed at the moment, but the legal advice, as you point out, is at best ambiguous. No matter if you’re on the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ case, there are very significant legal minds in our country, some of the best constitutional lawyers, who are arguing the case either way. So, the conclusion you can draw out of that is that they don’t know and that it will be left to the High Court, which will give rise for years and years of litigation, and our system of government will become even slower than it is now at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands more public servants, and likely no outcome for those people in those local communities.
So, I think there is a position and I would be happy to sit down with the Prime Minister to co-design that legislation, to show how it would work. The Labor states that have adopted their own Voice haven’t done it through a constitutional change. They’ve done it through legislation in South Australia, for example under the Malinauskas government there. They’ve sought not to change their Constitution and I think the Prime Minister, frankly, at the moment is looking for a political wedge more than he is for an outcome for Indigenous Australians and I think that is pretty poor form. If we sat down and worked through the detail of where it could have a practical and positive impact, we could introduce that legislation in a matter of weeks.
RAY HADLEY:
Thanks for your time. We’ll talk next week.
PETER DUTTON:
Thank you, Ray. See you, mate.
[ends]