Subjects: Visit to Rowville; our Liberal Party candidate for Aston – Manny Cicchiello; Labor’s cost of living crisis; Dr Chalmers at war with the Reserve Bank Governor to distract from Labor’s poor economic management; Tanya Plibersek’s gold mine decision shambles; Labor’s visa and immigration policy shambles; gambling advertising; the NSW Liberal Party.
E&OE.
MANNY CICCHIELLO:
Good morning. I’m delighted to have Peter Dutton here today, visiting Tieco here in Rowville, a great local business.
Everyone knows Australia cannot afford another three years of Labor. I’ve been out talking to the local residents in Aston. They’re suffering under mortgage stress, high electricity prices, higher grocery prices. We need a leader like Peter Dutton who’s got the policies and the plans to make our lives better here in Aston.
I’d like to hand over to Peter now.
PETER DUTTON:
Manny, thank you very much.
Firstly, Manny thank you to you. You’ve given back to your community, you have been a huge influence, a positive influence, on many local young students, and your role as a Deputy Principal is, I think, something that’s very important for our candidate to have that quality, to have that engagement, to have an understanding of what families are going through. It’s great to have you as our candidate here in Aston, so thank you very much for being here today.
I want to say thank you very much to the amazing team that we’ve just met and gone through the factory with this morning. When you look at Australian manufacturing at the moment, it’s under all sorts of pressures. There are pressures on energy costs. In Victoria, here, people are talking now about having to import gas into Victoria, which is just going to drive up the cost of electricity, it’s going to drive up the cost of doing business, it’s why people are paying more for their groceries when they go to the supermarket, and it’s why families this winter are making a decision about whether they eat or heat, but not do both. There are a lot of Australians who are really hurting at the moment, which is why it’s quite amazing to see Jim Chalmers out there at war with the Reserve Bank Governor.
Jim Chalmers has saved all of his anger for the Reserve Bank Governor, and frankly, he’s got nothing left in the tank to fight inflation. I don’t understand what is happening with the Albanese Government. The wheels are falling off this Government.
The Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is at war with the mining sector, and in WA at the moment, I think people are horrified by the fact that even though there is an approval in place in the gold mine in New South Wales, the Government has taken a decision to close that project down. Now, are we going to stop gold production in this country? I mean is that what the Prime Minister’s proposing? Are we going to stop mining, per se? We don’t keep our schools open and we don’t have roads, we don’t have infrastructure, we don’t have hospitals, and we don’t pay for police, if we don’t have a successful mining and manufacturing industry in this country. I think that’s why the Prime Minister, frankly, needs to start showing some leadership instead of the weakness that he’s been demonstrating so far.
We’ve seen, in the Government’s attacks on the Reserve Bank Governor, a Government that doesn’t understand how to run the economy. The fact is that Labor at a state level here in Victoria, and at a federal level across the country, is slowly choking the Australian economy and Australian families are paying the price for Labor’s bad economic management.
The Government’s now had three budgets. They had decisions which could have been taken, as have been taken in the UK, in Canada and New Zealand, where interest rates have already come down, but here in Australia, the Reserve Bank Governor is warning that because of federal and state spending, they’re fuelling inflation, which is what’s keeping interest rates higher for longer. We would have expected interest rates to come down by now, but as it turns out, they’ve come down in New Zealand, in Canada and in the United Kingdom, but not here in Australia.
I’m happy to take any questions.
QUESTION:
Yeah, great. We’ll start out with ASIO boss Mike Burgess says his comments over the Gaza visas were misrepresented. He now says so much as liking a tweet that endorses October 7 would be a problem for anyone trying to come here. What’s your response to that?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I welcome the clarification from the Director-General of ASIO. Mike Burgess is a very good man, and he works day and night to keep our country safe, and the work of ASIO is to be respected by all Australians. But the problem is that they’ve got a Government who has brought in 1,300 people from Gaza without the requisite security checks. It’s reckless, it puts our national security at risk.
We’ve been an incredibly successful migrant story. People have come from the four corners of the Earth over generations, but when you bring people in from a war zone controlled by a terrorist organisation, you can’t issue tourist visas, no face-to-face interviews, no biometrics, no checks, and people were granted visas in 24 hours. So now you’ve got ASIO and the Australian Federal Police chasing their tail, spending an enormous amount of resource and money trying to identify whether people are of questionable character or not. Now, maybe 100 per cent of those people are law abiding, wonderful citizens who just want to make Australia home, but we don’t know whether that’s the case or not because the checks haven’t been done.
I think the Prime Minister, by misleading the Parliament about ASIO’s role in all of this, suggesting that ASIO had checked each of these individuals – which they haven’t – I think he’s put Mr Burgess in a difficult position. I think, frankly, the Prime Minister should be apologising to the ASIO boss for what they’ve put in place, which has made ASIO’s job much harder.
QUESTION:
How would the Coalition have handled Palestinians fleeing Gaza to Australia differently? And just on that, what should happen to Palestinians from Gaza already in Australia? They can’t go home, so what should happen to them?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I understand of the 1,300 people who have arrived, they’re part of a cohort of 3,000 people. So there are still 1,700 odd who are in Gaza, but will wait for the Rafah Crossing to open and then have free passage to Australia. But I understand of 1,300, about 750 people have claimed protection. Now, the reason that they’ve done that is because it puts them on a pathway to permanent residency and Australian citizenship. It would be without precedent that the Government has brought in people on a tourist visa, and then allowed them to claim protection, to ultimately get to Australian citizenship when we don’t know anything about their backgrounds.
When we were in Government, as Immigration Minister, we brought 12,000 people from Syria, but we staged people in northern Iraq, in Jordan, and we conducted the biometrics tests. It took 12 months to conduct the tests. This Government’s issued visas in 24 hours, which shows how reckless and dangerous their policy has been. We listened to and worked with our partners, and any people of concern didn’t come to our country.
Now, those 12,000 people have come here, and have made a contribution, a very positive contribution to our country. Labor criticised me at the time for not issuing the visas quickly enough, but that’s how you manage a humanitarian and refugee programme. You don’t bring people from a war zone controlled by a terrorist organisation into Australia on tourist visas.
QUESTION:
In other news, Sky News‘ Andrew Clennell is reporting the PM is considering a ban on TV gambling ads within two years and an almost immediate ban on online ads. Is that something you would support?
PETER DUTTON:
Well look, I’ve been advocating for reform in this space for a long time. Like any parent, I get sick of the ads. When you sit down on a Friday night or over the weekend, I want to sit there with my son or daughter, or with my mates and have a conversation about the game. I don’t want it to be dominated by multis and betting ads, etc., etc..
So, the Government again has been all over the shop though on this issue. The Prime Minister’s presided over a process where there have been Cabinet leaks, Ministers are pitching against one another. It’s a dog’s breakfast this Government and this is the latest demonstration.
So, we’ll wait to see what the Government has to say. There are obviously a lot of stakeholders and different considerations of the impact of these bans. We’ll make a comment once the Government’s made an announcement. I understand Andrew Clennell’s broken yet another story on Sky News, but we’ll wait for the detail from the Government. No doubt it’ll be leaked from the Albanese Government at some point, and hopefully we can comment on it then.
QUESTION:
Last one, are you convinced the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party is competent enough to support your election campaign there? And are you still considering intervention?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, short answer is yes. We must win seats in New South Wales, and we’re polling well in New South Wales at the moment.
Again, I think people in New South Wales, like here in Victoria or indeed across the country, just see a Federal Government where they can’t manage the economy, they can’t manage the energy system, they have a three-fold increase of manufacturing closures over the last two years, and it’s a Government where the wheels are falling off.
People know that interest rates have gone down in the UK, in Canada and in New Zealand, but they’re still sticky here. The Reserve Bank Governor has warned the Prime Minister and the Treasurer that the extra spending is fuelling inflation, which fuels interest rates. Instead of accepting the advice from the Reserve Bank Governor, you’ve got the Treasurer out there abusing the Reserve Bank Governor, which is not a way to manage the economy, it’s not a way to give confidence to the markets and it demonstrates that this Government really has lost control of the basics.
They can’t manage national security and they can’t manage economic security of our nation, and for that, I think Australians are really starting to question the competence of the Prime Minister.
Alright. Thank you very much.
[ends]