Subjects: The Prime Minister’s shocking betrayal on the stage three tax cuts; Labor’s cost of living crisis; Operation Sovereign Borders; Labor’s border security policy; nuclear power; alcohol in Parliament House; Labor’s Big Australia policy; youth crime.
E&OE.
TOM ELLIOTT:
The Federal Leader of the Opposition joins us live in the studio. Peter Dutton, good morning.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning Tom.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Now, a lot of things I want to try and get through and we will take calls in a moment: 133 693.
Firstly, the Albanese Government fiddled with the stage three tax cuts. A bit more money for people on incomes below 140 grand, a fair bit less for people above 140 grand. If you’re elected at the next federal election, will you reinstate the original stage three tax cuts?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Tom, the real answer to your question is it’ll depend on the state of the economy and the budget at the time. So, we don’t want to be putting more money into the system, which would fuel inflation and therefore drive up interest rates.
When the Government broke their promise and they walked away from stage three tax cuts, we looked at whether we could do that as well as what the Government had promised, but it meant that we had to find about $9 billion a year in additional savings in the budget, and we just weren’t able to do that in short time. So, we need to do it in a responsible way. We need to address bracket creep.
The thing that really gives it away here is that we’re talking about stage three. Stage one and two, which we implemented, delivered about $200 billion worth of tax cuts over a 10 year period to people on low and middle incomes.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Jim Chalmers, the Federal Treasurer, has actually said that the budget is in better shape than forecast a couple of years ago, like mine royalties out of WA and the high iron ore prices actually improved the bottom line. So, wouldn’t that mean that there might be some money for the full stage three tax cuts?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, there might be, but the part that he doesn’t tell you is that they’ve spent $209 billion extra in the last 18 months than what we’d budgeted for in our last budget. So, they know how to tax, they know how to spend, and that’s the difficulty under a Labor Government.
As the Reserve Bank Governor points out, interest rates are higher in our country because of the home grown problems – including that $209 billion of extra spending into the economy – and it means out of the G7 nations, we’ve got the highest core inflation. Other nations are starting to bring their interest rates back, or their inflation back, and we’re not at that point in Australia yet.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Although, I see the CEO of Westpac Peter King has said that the Reserve Bank will cut rates, will start cutting rates, later on this year.
Now, what about border security? I spoke to West Australian State Liberal MP yesterday for the Broome region, and over 40 men from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India have turned up sort of unannounced on the shores of Western Australia. Are our borders suddenly porous again?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, clearly in this instance they are, and in part that’s because the Government’s cut cumulatively about $600 million out of Border Force and Operation Sovereign Borders. They’ve got huge problems because they’ve cut back the surveillance flights, and I don’t know…
TOM ELLIOTT:
So, is that what’s happened? We don’t have those Orion aircraft flying over as often as what they used to?
PETER DUTTON:
The Dash 8s, as I understand it, aren’t flying the hours that they were, and as the Commissioner of the Australian Border Force has pointed out, the organisation is stretched.
It’s not just the illegal people smuggling boats, it’s also the illegal fishing that takes place in our waters as well. So there’s a lot of anecdotal reporting from fishermen and from trawlers up in that part of the world that they’re just not seeing the amount of surveillance flights and Border Force operations, as was the case a few years ago.
TOM ELLIOTT:
These men who’ve arrived, as I said, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India. Are they flying to Indonesia – you may not know what is actually happening – and then just getting a boat south from Indonesia to Australia? Or are they – as I think some Sri Lankan asylum seekers did a few years ago – making the trip all the way across the Indian Ocean?
PETER DUTTON:
I think more likely the former. I was in charge of Operation Sovereign Borders for a number of years, and I don’t think the arrangement’s changed. People will fly into Indonesia, they might hop through a couple of countries to get there, but the reality is that people are after an employment outcome, which you can understand, but we have to have an orderly migration program.
The fact that the Government knew nothing about this arrival, they were alerted by the Indigenous leaders, and the Prime Minister said, well, how could he know anything about it because he was stuck in his car? Like his mobile phone doesn’t work in his car, but he was taken by surprise when asked the question about this arrival, which I think tells you a lot.
TOM ELLIOTT:
If these men though, have passed through other countries, surely we have to reject immediately any claims of asylum they might have? I mean Indonesia, while not necessarily a paradise on Earth, is a safe place. I mean it’s somewhere you could go and live if you were genuinely being persecuted in Pakistan or Bangladesh, so do we just send them straight back? What do we do?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, it’ll be difficult, and the Prime Minister makes this claim that these people will never come to Australia – and I don’t think hand on heart he can say that. The reality is that, given the legal ramifications of signing up to UN agreements and just the way that our High Court operates here as well, means that there are limited options, and it will be hard, if not impossible, for those people to travel without travel documents being issued by Pakistan or Bangladesh. That’s unlikely to happen, and unless these people voluntarily return home, which again, is unlikely because they’re claiming protection, then they will get into the legal process. It’ll be some time if they come to Australia for medical attention, as…
TOM ELLIOTT:
But do we keep them here, or do we send them to Nauru or Christmas Island?
PETER DUTTON:
They’re on Nauru now, and that’s appropriate; but if they come here for medical attention, as we found out a number of years ago, once they step foot onto Australian soil, the lawyers injunct, and it’s very difficult then to return them back to Nauru or indeed back to Pakistan or Bangladesh.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Nuclear power. Now you’ve suddenly said – well not suddenly – but you’ve said recently that you do support it, and that small modular reactors should be the future for Australian power generation. Is that a commitment you’ll take to the next election? So if you’re elected, could we expect to see a reactor possibly on the site of an old coal fired power station in Gippsland sometime soon?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, we’ll have more to say about the policy, soon, but I’d just have a look at people like Bill Gates and what they’re thinking in this space, and I think it’s instructive. His essential argument is, why would you take up thousands of hectares of prime agricultural land to produce energy, when you can do exactly the same energy output for a matter of square metres, with a small modular reactor, which is the latest technology.
Interestingly, nuclear technology now is used by 20 of the G20 nations, except for Australia, and they’ve either signed up to it or they’ve implemented it.
The policy here that the Government’s got at the moment of 100 per cent renewables just means that we’re going to have more brownouts, more blackouts, prices are going to continue to go up, they have to roll out 28,000km of new poles and wires, and our argument is why wouldn’t you have a mature discussion about nuclear, given the other 19 countries have done so? And look at whether we can deliver an energy cost of half what it is today – which is what happens in Ontario – or for commercial, for manufacturers, for industrial use in the United States at the moment, those companies are paying one third the cost of what Australian companies are paying for electricity.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Do you think it’s something that people support? I mean a lot of Australians were understandably nervous about nuclear power. They might have watched the mini series about what happened in what is now Ukraine, you know, 40 odd years ago, Fukushima in Japan, Three Mile Island in America. Do you think it’s a vote winner for you to back nuclear power?
PETER DUTTON:
I just think in the end, people have to look at the technology that it is today. A motor vehicle rolling off the showroom floor today is a very different vehicle than it was in 1950 or 1940, obviously. So to with the small modular reactor and the latest technology that’s available. It’s zero emissions and a lot of younger people now, particularly across Europe, but countries where the Greens Parties and others are fully supportive of nuclear because they know that it’s the only credible way of firming up the renewables in the system.
As I say, the Prime Minister’s plan for 100 per cent renewables is just not going to cut it, because, as we’ve seen, sadly, tragically, in Victoria just over the course of the last week or so, if we don’t have the redundancy and without gas in the system here in Victoria, people would still – many more thousands – would still be without power than are today.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Yesterday I spoke with Teal MP Zali Steggall, who’s a big fan of breath testing for MPs, and we played some audio of your colleague Perin Davey, the Deputy Leader of the Nationals, who was slurring her words in the Senate Estimates Committee after admitting to drinking two glasses of wine. Should we have random breath testing of politicians in Canberra?
PETER DUTTON:
I don’t think it’s necessary. The Government can make its own decision, but I know the Prime Minister’s rejected this proposal…
TOM ELLIOTT:
But I can be breath tested here or drug tested randomly at any time.
PETER DUTTON:
Look, I’m not a wowser, people can have a drink, they need to do it responsibly. If they have a committee hearing to go to, or if they have an occasion where they need to be working, they shouldn’t be drinking beforehand. There’s no question about that.
I don’t agree with…I’ve had a zero tolerance approach to drugs my entire life, having delivered death messages to mothers of kids who had died from overdoses, so I take it very seriously, but I believe that we’re adults, in a workplace.
In Parliament House you can – I would normally get to Parliament House about 5.30-6 in the morning, I don’t leave until 10 or 11 at night; so naturally you’ll attend a function there, or you’ll have a dinner, somebody having a glass of wine with dinner is, in my mind, in moderation, completely sensible. If somebody is going beyond that, then that is an issue and they should be held accountable for that.
TOM ELLIOTT:
All right. Come and join us: 133 693, Peter Dutton is ready to take your calls. That’s ahead at a quarter to nine.
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TOM ELLIOTT:
It is 12 to nine. We are joined live in the studio by Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. And we’ll go to your calls in a moment: 133 693.
Very quickly though Mr Dutton, there’s a federal inquiry into the power of supermarkets. I think former Labor MP Craig Emerson is running that. The ACTU recently had its own inquiry into the cost of living. If you were in charge, would you try and do something about the supermarket duopoly here in Australia?
PETER DUTTON:
Yes. It’s a huge problem for us in this country because we’re a population probably not big enough to support three or four majors, so we don’t get the competition that other markets might.
There’s also many questions around the relationship, particularly between agricultural suppliers, farmers, and manufacturers into big chains. There’s certainly competition issues around placement on shelves, and how that impacts the consumer.
So, I think there is a lot that is wrong. I also think there’s a significant problem still with the oil companies in this country where you can drive five minutes down the road and there’s a 50 cent differential in the price you’re paying for petrol, and I think we’re being gamed there as well. So, I think there are a few areas where competition policy clearly is not working.
TOM ELLIOTT:
So, what do we do? Do we sort of beef up the ACCC or what?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I think one of the things that you need to look at is the concentration of market share within particular areas, and I suspect that most developers when they’re opening up a greenfields site, already have a relationship with Coles or Woolies. We know that Aldi, and the bigger footprint of IGA, is very competitive and they are keen for more market share – and again, it’s that competition that will bring the opportunity for prices to come down.
TOM ELLIOTT:
It’s easy to say that though, because…
PETER DUTTON:
There’s no question, and you’re not starting from scratch too, Tom. I mean that’s the difficulty. It’s not a clean sheet of paper we’ve got. You’ve got a legacy of decades of leases and entrenched relationships and practices that have spanned CEOs and Chairs and the rest of it.
In the end, the companies have got to make a viable return for their shareholders, otherwise they don’t operate, they don’t employ people, but equally, we need to make sure that consumers are getting value for money and the farmers aren’t being ripped off.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Alright, let’s go to a few calls.
Gary joins us. Gary good morning.
CALLER:
Good morning. Peter, I listened to Clare O’Neil being interviewed this morning, and it wasn’t parliamentary privilege, she called you a liar, and she said they’ve put in nearly half a billion extra to what you put in into the defence up in that area.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Into Border Force.
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah, good morning Gary. Well, that’s probably the kindest thing that Clare O’Neil’s said about me in a long time. She’s an angry person, and that’s okay.
If you look at the budget papers, which is what we’re looking at from the last budget, there is a cumulative impact of $600 million being taken out of Border Force. When Labor was last in Government – the Rudd-Gillard period, they did take money out of Border Force, they took it out of ASIO, they took it out of the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Crime Intelligence Commission. They never see national security as a priority and as the Commissioner of Border Force has said, even at Estimates last year, the organisation is stretched.
So, if the Government’s putting more money in, then that’s great, but the budget papers show that they are taking out $600 million cumulatively across the forward estimates, and the budget papers are there in black and white.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Thank you, Gary. Susan, good morning to you.
CALLER:
Yeah, good morning. Hey Tom, hi Peter.
PETER DUTTON:
Hey Susan.
CALLER:
Really love you and love your work. I just wanted to ask one thing: with immigration, are we going to be looking this year and next year, into cutting our numbers down just as an entirety, so we can sort of start focusing on a better Australia and starting to build us up a bit more?
TOM ELLIOTT:
Because the immigration numbers have been just colossal over the past 12 months. I think we had – depending on which figures you look at – between 5 and 600,000 net increase in immigrants last, that’s during the calendar year of 2023. This year, I think it’s forecast to be a bit lower, but still very high by historical standards. Would you change that?
PETER DUTTON:
I think it is too high. That’s the short answer. We can’t have a situation where we don’t have the supply of housing and where do we accommodate – I think the figure last year was 516,000, but about 1.5 million people over three years under this Government.
Now that is dramatically ramped up from what we did when we were in Government, what the Rudd-Gillard period provided year-on-year, and it has had a massive negative impact on housing, it’s made it harder for Australians to rent or to buy, and I think in the end, you’ve got to have a housing policy which accommodates people coming in or you have this perverse outcome.
So, just to put it into perspective, 1.5 million people is the size of Adelaide being created every three years, and we’re already in gridlock, the public transport’s full, the schools and the hospitals etc. aren’t coping. So, I don’t think the Prime Minister’s made the right decision here.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Should we start though, with a population policy? Like Kevin Rudd, back in Kevin07 era said, ‘I believe in a big Australia, I want to have, say it was, 50 million people by the middle of the 21st century’. Now a lot of us disagreed with that, but at least there was a statement about what size population was appropriate. Now, would we start with that? Let’s say have a target, so you say ’35 million, that’s what we kept the population at’, and then worked the immigration numbers back from that.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, the way that we approached it was to make sure that the migration program was working to our country’s advantage. So, with an ageing population, like most Western countries, we needed to make sure that the migration program was focused – this goes back to the Howard days – about two third, one third, in favour of younger people, people who had an ability to come here and work, pay taxes, before they started to draw on welfare, or the health system as they aged. I think we got the balance right.
When it’s ramped up so dramatically, over the last couple of years under this Government, it has had a negative impact because the planning hasn’t been there, which I think is your point, Tom. You can’t pretend that we can widen roads in suburbs where it’s already landlocked, you can’t pretend that the school can take another 1,500 kids because they’re already at capacity.
So, I think the planning is important and population targets, an idea of what’s going to happen to regional cities, but the planning just hasn’t been done there. Largely, I think, because across different Governments and across different persuasions of Governments, there just hasn’t been the coordination between the three levels. When you’ve got the Councils and the State Government responsible for planning and the Federal Government responsible for the migration intake, I don’t think there’s been good enough coordination between the three.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Well again though, I mean couldn’t we have a – what do we call that? Do we still have National Cabinet? Does that still exist?
PETER DUTTON:
There’s still a National Cabinet. You can have one of those summits. The Kevin Rudd 2020 Summit.
TOM ELLIOTT:
And get all the famous people to draw things on a whiteboard. But, I mean you know you sit down with representatives of local and state Government and federally, and say, ‘alright, let’s work this out’. It’s no good us increasing immigration, but you, the local council, making it very difficult to build a block of flats or something like that, and try and get a sense of, here’s the population we’re aiming at, here’s what has to happen. You know, we know that 30 per cent of the immigrants will go to Melbourne, and probably 30 per cent to Sydney, and the remainder scattered around the country. Let’s work it. It just seems to me that we end up with just different arms of government pushing in different directions.
Rob, good morning to you.
CALLER:
Good morning Tom. How you going? And good morning Peter.
PETER DUTTON:
‘Morning Rob.
CALLER:
I’m a tradie, and I’ve always been a Liberal voter, for the simple fact that Labor wastes too much money [inaudible]. My question to you is what are you going to do about this youth crime [inaudible], because cars [inaudible] and then, you know, [inaudible].
TOM ELLIOTT:
Sorry Rob, your phone’s cutting out, but I think Rob’s question is about youth crime. I mean, that’s perhaps more of a State Government issue because law and order is, but is there anything a Federal Government can do about the rising tide of youth crime?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I think there’s one significant thing the Federal Government can do, and that is introduce legislation that stops kids using social media where they have used it in a crime.
So, for many of these kids now, the motivation is not to break in and steal food or money to support a drug habit, it’s because it gives them kudos within their gang or within their social setting…
TOM ELLIOTT:
They want notoriety.
PETER DUTTON:
Exactly right. The problem is that the severity of the crime increases; it’s a photo with a grandmother in her bedroom is the task, it’s BMW, not a Mercedes tonight, and it’s all about uploading that image to social media, and there is a lot that the Federal Government can do in that regard.
At a state level, look, I think in Victoria, Daniel Andrews has done an enormous amount of harm to this state in many ways, which hurts me a lot to see, because when you speak to a lot of friends, the legacy he’s left is a terrible one. One of the legacies he’s left is to appoint people to the courts, including the Magistrates Court, where they just don’t have a belief that people who are there time and time again before the courts, should go to jail…
TOM ELLIOTT:
They’re locked up.
PETER DUTTON:
…And so I think there is no deterrence there as a result.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Well, this is the thing. I mean it’s no good the Federal Government having some, I don’t know, if you publicise a crime via a carriage service – which is a very old fashioned term for the internet – saying ‘you must have an increased penalty’, but then at the Magistrates Court level – which is a state thing – them saying, ‘oh, well, we’ll just stick you out on bail, we don’t want to lock you up because, you know, it might make you an even worse criminal’.
PETER DUTTON:
And the result of that sort of thinking is that the next victim is just around the corner. I think across the country at the moment in different communities, in different ways, people are worried about – you hear these stories of people who are leaving their keys by the front door, or the car unlocked, or are very concerned about somebody breaking in and coming into their bedroom, which would be horrific. The scars of that are obvious. In different examples, people have been injured or killed. The tragic story of that young doctor who was killed only a few months ago chasing after somebody who had broken into his home. These are real victims, and this is why we’ve been so critical of the Government releasing 149 people into the community from migration detention, who included murderers and sex offenders, and the rest of it. These people are likely to go on to commit more crimes.
TOM ELLIOTT:
We’ll leave it there, Peter Dutton. Thank you for coming in today.
PETER DUTTON:
My pleasure Tom. Thank you.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Let’s make it a regular thing this year.
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