Subjects: Visit to flood affected areas in Victoria; the Albanese Government’s foreign affairs blunder; the former Coalition government’s strong economic management; review into COVID-19.
RAY HADLEY:
Every Thursday I speak with the Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. He’s online from Victoria today.
G’day Peter.
PETER DUTTON:
‘Morning, Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
Are you looking at the flood affected areas, I guess, are you?
PETER DUTTON:
Yes mate, we’re up in Shepparton, so just about to go in and see the CFA and the control centre here and the response that they’ve had, which has been pretty phenomenal. There’s obviously a lot of damage, and there are a number of areas where the waters are still rising, and in other spots, the cleanup is underway. So, there’s a lot of activity on the ground. So, we’ve come up to see that this morning.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay, I won’t keep you long given that’s what you’re doing. That’s much more important than what we do here.
Now, I’ve just discussed Penny Wong and what your Shadow Attorney-General said, and I talked about unintended consequences. They don’t think these things through. The day that we’re congratulated as a nation or as a government by two terrorist organisations for a decision is the day that we need to review that decision, I would think…
PETER DUTTON:
There’s no question about that. I think one of the concerning elements here is just the way in which the government has lied and deceived on the issue. There’s no other way that you can describe it. They’re saying one thing one hour, and the complete opposite the next hour – as you pointed out in your remarks before.
I think that’s really what has startled most people and the fact that the Israeli Prime Minister has spoken out so strongly against Prime Minister Albanese is quite remarkable. I mean, remember the left-wing media were enraged when President Macron criticised us over the subs deal and Scott Morrison was the worst person alive, and the media continued on and on and on about that, but the fact is that this is a much more brutal assessment of a decision by – a ham fisted decision – by Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese.
It goes against what they say and it just goes to the question of whether you can trust them. I think, to announce it on a holiday when the embassy here is closed, not to have any of the preparatory work done – if that’s the decision that they are going to make – I think just compounds the problem and I think most people are pretty bewildered, particularly in the Jewish community in our country as to why the government’s taken this step.
RAY HADLEY:
The Budget is handed down next Tuesday. I notice economic experts were saying yesterday and look, this isn’t just particular to a Labor Government, blaming previous governments for inherited debt – it was of course what happened when the Labor Party was replaced by your government and inherited debt – but one of the points made by these people yesterday was; all the way through the pandemic, as the debt grew and grew and grew, the Labor Opposition was saying ‘you got to do more, you got to give them more money, you’re not giving them enough, more’, and yet here they are being critical for inheriting a sizable debt because we were giving plenty of money – not as much as they wanted – but giving plenty of money to people who needed it.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, I always think you’re on safe ground if you just stick to the facts and here are the facts. When we came into government, we’d inherited debt, which was in total about $667 billion by the time it compounds and that they locked in spending. We spent about $300 billion, a bit more than that, with the response to COVID. So, Labor at the time, as you say, supported every dollar of that. Money that we spent on JobKeeper saved literally hundreds of thousands of businesses from going broke, and millions of Australians from losing their job and the support payments that we gave to businesses really kept the economy alive. So, Labor supported all of that spending, and as you point out, they promised and they advocated at the time for another $80 billion worth of spending.
So, in this Budget, what they’ll do is they’ll front end load spending in this coming financial year and they’ll say how terrible it is that they’ve been left this terrible situation from the Coalition government, whereas the reality is quite different. Over the last nine years we’ve taken decisions to keep our economy strong. Without COVID we would have gone back into surplus without any question and you can see that very clearly by the numbers.
We had taken tough decisions over nine years to give our economy strength, such that it will ultimately, I think be the case that we won’t go into recession. I hope and pray that’s the case over the course of the next 12 months when the US and the UK are very likely to go into recession.
When you strip it back to the facts, I don’t think Jim Chalmers has got a leg to stand on. He was Wayne Swan’s Chief of Staff and he’s got some pretty strange views. I see he is at odds again today with the Prime Minister over the tax cuts. He’s still trying to make this argument that they should backflip on the tax cuts, which would be a major, major broken promise, but we’ll see what they do next week in the budget.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay, I don’t know if you’ve had time – given you’re down in that flood ravaged part of the country – to go through this review by Peter Shergold on the COVID response.
Now, I think it’s fair to say during all of this, we had bipartisan support from state government and state opposition and federal government and federal opposition on how to deal with it. We’re dealing with something we didn’t know anything about and we saw what was happening in other parts of the world. He’s spoken critically today, Shergold, about the way things were happening and says that we should have done it differently and as I’ve said earlier today, hindsight’s got 2020 vision.
But you see, it looks like he’s not just ripping into your federal government, but also Labor state governments who took the same decision or even more strident than the federal government in relation to all these matters. So where do you sit with the Shergold Report? And I guess the answer would be ‘we do it differently’, but we won’t know that until we’re presented with that sort of situation sometime in the future.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, a couple points. I mean firstly, I understand the point about 2020 vision, I agree with that. I think if you remember back to 2020, we were describing, or the world was describing at the time, the situation with COVID before there was a vaccine and what we were seeing in Italy and elsewhere as it being a warlike time and a warlike response. So, I think it’s fair to say that you don’t get every decision right, but at the start of this, I remember sitting in the National Security Committee being pretty confronted by the thoughts that we were going to have to set up morgues adjacent to public hospitals, we had a shortage of all sorts of supplies, we’d ran out of ventilators in our country and there was a prospect of intensive care units being overwhelmed.
But clearly with some of the lock downs, I think they went too far – particularly in Victoria – and there was a different response by different state governments. Quite a different response in WA to what we saw in New South Wales for example. So, I think it is prudent that there is a review, both of the federal government and the state governments and territory government actions because if there is another pandemic, then we should learn the lessons from the last.
So, I think it makes sense to review the decisions, understand the heat of the moment, and that some decisions were made in pretty quick time. Sure, if you had the calmness and the light of day and weeks to make a decision and more advice you could commission, well, maybe you would have made a different decision. But where you’ve got to make decisions on the spot, you don’t always get them right, and I think there are lessons to be learned and I would support a review of some nature in relation to that, particularly around hospitals and kids at school, etc. I think there’s a very cogent argument for that to take place.
RAY HADLEY:
But in the early stages, it wasn’t until we were well into it that we realised that it wasn’t as harmful to children as it was to the elderly or other people. I mean, there was not that realisation, because I sat through it for that whole period, and we didn’t really know whether it would attack children. We didn’t know.
PETER DUTTON:
You’re spot on Ray. I mean I remember being in Washington in February-March of 2020 and the Health Secretary that I was meeting with had to take a call from Vice President Pence because they had a ship off the California coast – I think it was at the time – where the virus is spreading and the state Governors were refusing to take people into their hospitals. They didn’t know what was happening, they were looking at the deaths in China, in Wuhan and in Europe, there was no prospect of a vaccine at that stage, it was a huge worry that older people were going to suffer disproportionately, and that turned out to be the case when you look retrospectively at it.
When I came back and I contracted it whilst I was in Washington, I had 26 days in isolation to start with. I got admitted to the infectious disease ward, at the start. I thought I was going to come out with something much worse than COVID.
But that was the response and people were genuinely concerned and worried – particularly elderly people. You saw what happened in aged care facilities and the like. So, it was a pretty dramatic time and looking back on it calmly now that we’ve moved past it, and people are living with it, I think it’s always pretty cute for some people to say, ‘we’ll judge it by the standards and all the facts that we know today that we didn’t know back then.’
RAY HADLEY:
Well said. I won’t say enjoy your visit, but it’ll be pretty stark with what your confronting in that part of the world today, and I wish those people that are experiencing those dreadful times all the best.
Thanks for your time.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks Ray, take care mate.
[ends]