Subjects: The Attorney-General’s outrageous outburst; Labor’s immigration detention shambles; the Prime Minister’s weak leadership; the barbaric attacks on Israel and the ramifications around Australia; calls for National Cabinet to condemn anti-Semitism.
E&OE.
SHARRI MARKSON:
Let’s bring in now Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in Canberra.
Peter Dutton, thank you so much for your time tonight.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks, Sharri. Pleasure.
SHARRI MARKSON:
Look, I’m going to get your reaction first to this outburst from the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, today. He wagged his finger at a reporter, female reporter, our Sky News colleague Olivia Caisley. He told her, her question was ‘absurd’ when she asked whether the Government should apologise to the alleged victims of the criminals who have now allegedly re-offended. Do you think that was a fair enough question? And what did you make of his response?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, Sharri, there’s no question it was a fair enough question.
The response, I thought, was outrageous. It demonstrated to me a man who’s under great pressure, who knows that he’s got it wrong, and knows that this Government has made a very serious error that’s resulted in at least one Australian being sexually assaulted, and there are many others out there at the moment who have serious criminal histories. There will be a lot of Australians worried that further offences will be committed.
I don’t understand where Tanya Plibersek has been, or Katy Gallagher, or Penny Wong, or others out there calling out this misogynistic behaviour by the Attorney-General. It was completely unacceptable, and you know you’ve got it pretty wrong when you get Clare O’Neil calling you up for bad conduct, but that’s exactly what she did today. She tried to silence the Attorney-General because she knew that he’d gone too far, and she tried to move the conversation on as quickly as she could.
SHARRI MARKSON:
Look, Labor’s introducing new preventative detention laws. Do you expect that they’ll be strong enough to put the worst of the criminals – the 147 who’ve been released – back behind bars?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I certainly hope that’s the case, and we’ve tried to strengthen what was a very poor bill to start with. We want to make sure that these people are back in detention. They shouldn’t be out in the community in the first place. The court hasn’t ordered the release of these individuals – let’s be very clear. The Minister has made a decision to release these individuals. It was unnecessary, and it has resulted in harm to the Australian community, and that causes me and I’m sure many other Australians a great deal of grief because I don’t want to see Australians put at harm and that’s exactly what has happened here.
The Minister for Immigration, Mr Giles, and the Home Affairs Minister, Ms O’Neil, should be sacked. There’s no question about that. This fourth individual now has been arrested. I think we’ll see more arrests and I think the Albanese Government has completely lost control of this issue.
SHARRI MARKSON:
Well Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, she hasn’t given a media appearance for a couple of days – she did in that press conference today – but she rubbished the claim that her Government only had to release one detainee initially because of the High Court decision. She says that they always had to release 140. Why do you think that’s not the case?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, it’s not just 140, they were talking about 340 at one stage. So, what’s happened to those individuals? Are they about to be released? Are they waiting for Parliament to finish before they release those individuals? Again, there’s no transparency here. The Prime Minister’s gone to ground, he won’t do press conferences, he won’t answer questions in relation to these issues. He won’t repeat the outrageous slurs that the Ministers say under parliamentary privilege or in the public domain.
This is a Government that’s rattled and the wheels are coming off, and this is a weak and woke Prime Minister who won’t stand up for Australia’s best interests, and I think that’s why people are marking him down at the moment.
In relation to the individuals, the High Court found in relation to one case. It didn’t find in relation to other cases. Now, the Government will argue ‘well, if there are similar facts in other cases, then the decision will hold for those individuals as well’, but the distinguishing factor here – at least without knowing the details of each of the cases – is that there is an opportunity for these individuals, whether they’re stateless or whether they are from a country where at the moment they can’t be returned, that there is opportunity to find third country settlement options for those people. It’s exactly what we did when we were in government, and we didn’t have these problems of Labor’s making.
The High Court has ruled because the Minister agreed to a fact that he should not have agreed to. The Attorney-General allowed the Human Rights Commission for the first time to make submissions in relation to this matter, which no doubt has been instructive for the High Court as well when the Attorney-General gives permission for the Human Rights Commission to make a submission to the High Court. Christian Porter and Michaelia Cash – previous holders of that office of Attorney-General – refused to allow those submissions to be made and this has been botched right from the start.
SHARRI MARKSON:
Look, another area where the Government is struggling, is to try and deal with this explosion in anti-Semitism we’re seeing on our streets. Just yesterday, Israel issued a warning to its citizens, saying that it wasn’t safe to fly to Australia among other countries because of the anti-Semitism here. What do you think about how Albanese has handled this and what should he be doing?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, Sharri, I feel as a nation that we’ve been let down by our Prime Minister. We’re now on the list with Russia and with other countries, and we shouldn’t be on that list. We should be on the list that is very proud to talk about us as a country who is welcoming, tolerant and talks down and deals very sternly with acts of anti-Semitism. But the Government just hasn’t put their words into action.
There was an opportunity, because there was a National Cabinet meeting today, and we’ve been calling on the Prime Minister for a couple of weeks, that this meeting should have had on the agenda the issue of anti-Semitism, because there should have been a strong statement that came out from the Premiers and the Chief Ministers and the Prime Minister that we don’t have any tolerance whatsoever for anti-Semitism in our country. We can’t have kids going to school, to Jewish schools, or people going to a synagogue, or people going to a neighbourhood where there are a large number of Jewish residents, or people going to a supermarket frequented by people of Jewish faith – we can’t have a situation where people are doing that and they don’t feel safe or that they’re being targeted.
This is a Prime Minister that needs to stand up and send a very clear message and the Premiers need to instruct the police that if there are neo-Nazi lunatics or others on the hard left who are out there peddling this nonsense, that they should be dealt with according to the law, and that’s exactly what should have been the direction today from the Chief Ministers and the Prime Minister, and it didn’t happen.
SHARRI MARKSON:
I mean, I reported on the show last night that there was a group of 13 year old girls at a shopping centre in Sydney who experienced an anti-Semitic incident because they were in a Jewish school uniform. That’s how bad it’s getting.
I’m interested, do you think that comments from senior government ministers that implicitly accuse Israel of war crimes, they continue to lecture Israel about its military strategy, the anti-Israel bias we’re seeing in the ABC, do you think all of this is also fuelling this rise of anti-Semitism?
PETER DUTTON:
Yes, I do, and I think on our university campuses, as well, we’ve got a hotbed of activity there of anti-Semitic behaviour, and it hasn’t been called out. The Education Minister hasn’t called it out, the Prime Minister hasn’t called it out. There should be a radical shake-up of the way in which our kids are being taught, impressionable young minds, some of whom go on to be teachers in pre-schools or primary schools or secondary schools, and they are influenced, no doubt, by the rhetoric and the fanaticism of some of those lecturers and tutors within that environment.
So, I think there are many levels where there needs to be leadership, to call it out, and it’s utterly, utterly unacceptable that people should be targeted because of their religious belief or because they’re associated with Israel. It is disgusting. it’s humiliating for our country to be on that list, and we shouldn’t tolerate it.
SHARRI MARKSON:
No. Very strong words. And we haven’t even mentioned, I mean, you refer to students, but the role of teachers as well and how they’re trying to bring this conflict, this war, into the classroom is disgraceful.
Peter Dutton, thank you so much for joining me this evening.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks very much, Sharri. Thank you.
[ends]