Subjects: Hearing from residents and small business owners in regional Queensland; electric vehicles; renewable energy; Labor’s proposal to have political appointees sign off on warrants for National Anti-Corruption Commission investigations.
RAY HADLEY:
Every Thursday I speak to the Opposition Leader – the Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. He joins me online somewhere in rural Queensland. Good morning Peter.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
Where are you?
PETER DUTTON:
I’m in Mackay, great city of Mackay. Weather is beautiful and we’re off to Townsville later this morning. So been up through Bundaberg and Rockhampton and some regional communities and just listening to people on the ground and their concerns and what sort of issues they think we should be fighting for, so it’s been a good trip.
RAY HADLEY:
I don’t know what they’re telling you in rural parts of Queensland, but what they’re telling me all over Australia is power, they’re worried about power.
PETER DUTTON:
100 per cent.
RAY HADLEY:
Chris Bowen is a bit like, I guess, a child who’s eaten too many carbon emission red frogs. He’s coming up with a whole range of plans and while the rest of the nation is just worried about how they get the money to pay the next, either bill for their business, or for their residential premises.
Now, I got some emails yesterday and the day before, and one that stood out was a service station proprietor in South Western Sydney where one of the service stations he owns, the bill, the contracted bill, worked out at something like $4,500 a month for the business. The next bill, with the next contract, with the same supplier is $9,000. He said, I’ve got to pass it on to the customers, there’s no way out of it. That’s a continuing and recurring theme, at the same time that the Labor Party is saying ‘no, we’ve got to go quickly to renewables, we’ve got to get there,’ and we might eventually as you and I both agree, but we won’t get there in the short term and meantime, the place will go broke.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, I think we’ve just got to hit pause for a second and really contemplate where we are as a country on the energy debate, because yes, you want to reduce emissions, yes, you’re happy with emissions reductions through renewable energy, but we can’t go down the path of Germany, you’ve got rolling blackouts in California, you’ve got a situation where in the United Kingdom and Europe people are talking about heating or eating this winter, but not being able to afford to do both.
The path that Chris Bowen is taking us down, and Anthony Albanese has signed up to, is essentially that path. Now we’re a few steps behind where say, a country like Germany is, where they turned off their coal fired generation before the technology was available to them and they’re paying a huge price now. If you’re in a developed country where you’re talking about blackouts for a period of the day, just so that you can deal with the demand in the system – this is the year 2022 – we’re going backwards.
As you say, the people who are paying the price, that Chris Bowen has no regard for are people like your service station proprietor. He can’t find four and a half grand a month in shaving off expenses in other parts of his business. His wages are going up, rents going up, every aspect of his business is becoming more expensive and so of course it gets passed on to the consumer.
Don’t forget, in the end, we’ve got to remember that Chris Bowen was the architect of FuelWatch and GroceryWatch and was probably the most ineffective Immigration Minister – boats arrived on his watch – and this guy has been given the responsibility to deal with energy, the biggest issue that our country is facing at the moment and the price rise of 35 per cent over the next 12 months, I just don’t know how families are going to cope, how businesses, small businesses are going to cope with those sort of increases. Then if you overlay that with power rationing or rolling blackouts, businesses will just shut up shop here and start manufacturing overseas and we’ll lose those Aussie jobs.
RAY HADLEY:
The other thing that Chris Bowen is on about – EVs, electric vehicles – 80 per cent he says of new vehicles will be electric within a space of eight to 10 years – eight years closer to the mark now. There’s been no push from his government and we’ve got to transition. The best transition I can see is hybrid cars and I declare I own one, a hybrid car. So, in the city it runs on electricity and fuel, but when you want to go a long journey, I’m not going to wait for two and a half hours to top up with your power. The other thing he ignores continuously is, these cars that he wants to be 80 per cent of new production by 2030 are run by electricity. I mean, we don’t have enough electricity!…
PETER DUTTON:
…Don’t mention that Ray. Don’t mention that…
RAY HADLEY:
…I mean, they are run by electricity.
PETER DUTTON:
That is a fact. That is a fact in the debate. I don’t want you to mention facts again in this debate because that is very inconvenient to people like Chris Bowen.
So, please don’t upset this Party. I mean, they want you to believe their fantasy land. It’s like the program he’s got to roll out something like $100 billion of poles and wires through communities to provide this transmission. Germany gave up on that after years and tens of billions of dollars of expense and it never happened. So, this guy is leading us down the European pathway and the talk of a tax on cows now is a complete and utter outrage.
So, you’re right on the electric vehicle stuff. I mean, if the range of the electric vehicles was, you know, 600, 900 kilometres, fair enough, but I was talking to a mate of mine the other day who had to go from Brisbane up to Gympie, you know, a three hour drive say. He’s got an electric car and he’s not a rabid greeny, but he’s happy to do the right thing and he’s quite interested in the technology. But he and his wife are semi-retired. They were able to pull into the servo, go inside, buy a coffee and a toasted sandwich and do a few emails, return a couple of calls because he had to plug the car in for 45 minutes. Now, if you’re a sales rep or you’ve got two cars in front of you and you’re having to wait 90 minutes before you can charge your car up, which is 45 minutes, the country will go broke. The technology is not there yet. Maybe it’s coming and good luck, but it’s not there yet and you can’t drive people to a position where they can’t afford it, not only in their families, but in their businesses or the economy.
I mean Labor has a real capacity here to drive us into recession over the next few years when the fundamentals they’ve inherited are very strong. The US and the UK are in a precarious position and we shouldn’t be going down this path of madness where consumers and businesses are going to end up really copping the brunt of it.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, I’ll remind everyone what I’ve reminded everyone about for the last 10 or more years about Chris Bowen. He’s never had a proper job. He graduated from university, he was an operative within the Labor Party, he was the youngest ever Lord Mayor of a Sydney council and he’s been on the public teat from the day, basically, he started in some form working. He’s got no knowledge of small business or he’s got no knowledge. He lives in this dream world and he was one of the ones I pointed to before the election along with Kristina Keneally. I said, ‘if these people are in charge, even if we allow for Mr Albanese to be a bit smarter than the rest of them. They’ll all drive us to desperation,’ and that’s exactly what he’s doing.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, and lucky he’s got Dr Chalmers looking over his shoulder, just helping him out when he can’t work out basic math, because don’t forget, Dr Chalmers got his doctorate from a study of Paul Keating and then was the Chief of Staff to Wayne Swan. I mean, pity help us and wait for the Budget.
I mean, this is amateur hour and we’ve got to have an honest conversation. We want to be responsible in regards to the environment, of course we do, and we want to reduce emissions, of course we do. You can’t though pretend that the technology exists. I mean I see our old friend Greta Thunberg is out overnight saying that Germany should keep nuclear power and that they should not put themselves in the hands of Vladimir Putin to provide them with their energy supply. Well, you know, no big deal Sherlock – I’ll try and keep it polite on your show Ray. I mean is that not a statement of the obvious when Greta Thunberg is talking common sense, like jeez, I mean are these people are going to jump into action.
As you say mate, they’ve never had a real job, they’ve never had a small business, they’ve never had an overdraught, they’ve never had to pay staff, they’ve never had a bad week in their business. They’ve just had a credit card from the union movement and they’ve been able to swipe that at every restaurant they go to and turn up for work when they don’t have a day off, a sickie, or a declared public holiday. It’s a fantasy world and this is what got us into trouble in the Keating years and frankly in the Gillard years with Wayne Swan.
I want to support the government where they’re making sensible decisions, but they are putting us on a pathway to ruin here and farmers will be destroyed if they’ve got to start reducing their herd numbers because of this tax on cows.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, how do you stop a cow or any type of herd animal that you farm, from either belching or flatulence is the best way I can put it.
By the way, that expression you were looking for earlier, in case people were there was ‘no **** Sherlock,’ so that’s what he meant to say.
PETER DUTTON:
You can say that.
RAY HADLEY:
Exactly. Anyway, we move on. Admin Appeals Tribunal, now you have been supportive of the National Anti-Corruption Commission. I said yesterday and I’ll repeat today for your benefit, that they’ve now decided the Admin Appeals Tribunal will now have the power to sign off on warrants under the current plan. I wouldn’t trust the AAT to hang out my washing in the main – there are some good people among them – but they come up with the most radical bizarre decisions I’ve ever witnessed in 35 years of broadcasting. Yet here we are thinking about giving them the power to issue warrants against people to either tap their phones, check things, I mean, leave it to the Supreme or Federal Court, for goodness sake.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I agree with that 100 per cent Ray. I have a zero tolerance for corruption and we’re embodied with the responsibility to spend money wisely. Governments don’t always do that, but it’s especially egregious if people are ripping money off, as we’ve seen with some Labor politicians in New South Wales that are in jail this very day.
So, I have zero tolerance for them and they should be arrested and prosecuted.
Both sides of politics make appointments of former MPs to Parliament – some of them good appointments and some of them had appointments – but that’s the composition of the AAT. Now, if you’ve got somebody who is not a factional ally of say, Anthony Albanese as Prime Minister, we have respect for him as the holder of that office. If you’ve got somebody that’s from the Labor Party, appointed to say a deputy president position within the AAT and is signing off on a warrant, signing off on a warrant to collect information from the Prime Minister’s phone as part of an investigation by the ICAC – I find that completely and utterly unacceptable.
We’ve got a judiciary appointed, they have an independence, they have a level of oversight and intellect that they bring to the job and we should be relying on them to make the decision about the warrant being issued to collect information from a Member of Parliament.
It shouldn’t be motivated by political revenge or outcome. It’s there to weed out corruption and to prevent corruption from happening. As I say, we’ve signed up to support the body, but we want the proper safeguards in place or we’ll regret it.
I’m not interested in the show trials or embarrassing people publicly, whether they’re Liberal, Labor, Greens or whoever. The other point is that this applies to the Chief of Defence Force, to every soldier in our country and they deserve the innocence as is afforded under our law of the protection of their own rights and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
So, we shouldn’t be abandoning that principle in some sort of witch hunt, show trial arrangement. I think the Prime Minister will prevail on the side of common sense in this, I hope he does, but Mark Dreyfus is out there pushing a silly line at the moment and we should push back on it.
RAY HADLEY:
We should. We’ll talk to you next Thursday, thanks for your time.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks Ray. See you mate.
[ends]