Subjects: Visit to Alice Springs; improving community safety in Alice Springs and the Northern Territory; the rise of anti-Semitism in Australia and the need for stronger action from the Prime Minister; Labor’s ‘nature positive/mining negative’ secret deal with the Greens; Northern Territory prison system; the Coalition’s plan for a cheaper, cleaner, and more consistent energy plan for Australia; President Trump; Australian Marine Parks; government waste.
E&OE.
LISA SIEBERT:
Good afternoon everyone. It’s such a pleasure to be here today as the CLP candidate for Lingiari. I’m very excited to represent the electorate of Lingiari. It is a pleasure to also to be joined by the National Leader of Opposition, Mr Peter Dutton, and Senator Kerrynne Liddle, and also Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Today we are here visiting Hardy Fencing and Ross Engineering, and it’s fantastic to see the growth of small and local businesses in the community. It’s about empowering and creating job opportunities for our local community members, which is really fantastic to see. Thank you very much. I’d now like to hand you over to Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE:
Thank you very much Lisa. And thank you all for being here today. It’s wonderful, the last two days, to be able to have our Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, here, as well as my colleague Kerrynne Liddle.
What’s great about businesses such as this one is that we’re standing in an Indigenous owned business where they have come from beginning with one business – Hardy Fencing – and now expanding into engineering in our community where those that are employed here are 90 per cent Indigenous workforce, which is wonderful. Working here locally, but also out further throughout remote parts of Central Australia, getting work done, empowering locals to be on their feet. We learned about a wonderful story of a young woman who works here who has been able to establish herself independently and to leave dysfunctional circumstances that she has previously been living in. She’s got her own accommodation, she’s got a job where she’s supporting herself. She is an example of those younger people within her community, within her family, and these are absolutely the kinds of businesses that we will support into the future.
As a Coalition Government going forward, these are the sorts of businesses we know are providing those opportunities to locals, particularly for Indigenous people right throughout, not just in vague sort of ways where we provide a job within the bureaucracy, but through private enterprise, and that’s what we’re learning – certainly over the last couple of days – that it’s about ensuring we’re supporting private enterprise to grow, to thrive, to prosper, to expand, and to be able to continue to provide opportunities for locals. That’s what we’re interested in. That has always been a Coalition mandate, and that is what we’ll continue to do.
So, thank you very much. I will now pass it over to Senator Kerrynne Liddle.
KERRYNNE LIDDLE:
Yes, today is a great opportunity to see a local business, a business that is confident and committed to improving their own lives through the private sector.
Job creation in the public sector is not the way you create opportunity and you improve lives, this is how you do it. This is the sustainable way that you do it, and it’s wonderful to be here today.
When you provide people the stability of a job, when they send their children to school and they do all of those things, you improve the lives of everyone who benefits from that. You improve community safety, you improve individual safety, and you improve opportunity for children who are at school to then go on and get a job later in life. That’s what’s important to us and that’s what the Coalition will strive for.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Kerrynne, thank you very much. Thank you to Jacinta, and thank you very much to Lisa, who’s an exceptional candidate for us here in Lingiari. She’s somebody who has given 16 years of service to the Australian Federal Police and she’s passionate about her community. Lisa has a real understanding of country and of people here and the circumstances that need to change. So Lisa, I want to say thank you very much for sticking your hand up and for being a really important part of our team.
To Syd and to Mark and to all of the people we’ve met here today, I want to say thank you very much for the inspiration that you provide, not just to your workforce and the local community here, but to us as well. This is a business that started essentially from scratch. They took a risk, they borrowed a lot of money, and they set up a fencing business, and they’re now a major player in the Northern Territory, contracting to regional and remote areas – as Jacinda and Kerrynne pointed out before – employing local Indigenous people [inaudible].
We want to use that as an example of how we can expand the employment opportunities and how we can help businesses grow and succeed because it’s a big economic multiplier in the economy, but it provides people with a sense of purpose, a sense of pride with a finished product, and the expertise that they’ve been able to bring together, not only saw them pay off that first loan, but now buy this second business and expand their operation into the engineering space. So I think it’s a wonderful credit to them, and I hope that they have continued success as well.
I was very pleased last night to join with my colleagues and the Chief Minister to have a look at the drone technology being deployed by the Northern Territory Police. We had a briefing, as you know, from the Deputy Commissioner of the Northern Territory Police about the situation, particularly alcohol fuelled domestic violence and the break ins and the general crime situation as it’s well known to locals here – they live and breathe it every day. The drone technology is being deployed to try and track down stolen cars, it helps protecting the safety of police officers who otherwise would be in high speed pursuits. It’s really, I think, been part of the Finocchiaro Government’s leadership, that we’ve seen over the last several months, which has led to downward pressure on some of these crime stats.
So we want to see a much better outcome for Alice Springs, I’m passionate about making sure that in government we can provide support to Lia and to her Government, and if we get our two Lisa’s up in Lingiari and Solomon, then we can win government federally, and if we do that, we can turn our country around.
There are a couple of other issues that I just wanted to comment on quickly, and then I’m happy to take some questions from there.
It is deeply disturbing to see the circumstances unfolding in New South Wales, but entirely predictable. I wrote to the Prime Minister in November of 2023 requesting a National Cabinet be convened so that the Prime Minister could provide the leadership that our country needed in the time of a national crisis. The Prime Minister has never responded to that letter, he held a quickly cobbled together national Cabinet meeting by phone, there were no tangible outcomes except that they were going to improve their record keeping arrangements in relation to the acts of anti-Semitism, and the hatred, the racism, that we’ve seen on university campuses, that we’ve seen in protests, the doxxing, the attack on the synagogue through a firebombing, the attack on people’s houses and cars. People are now living in fear, and it’s been entirely predictable that when the Prime Minister hasn’t stood up and been strong and renounced all of this activity over the course of the last 15 months or so, well, of course it’s going to escalate.
Had this terrorist attack taken place – if the reports are correct around the 40 metre blast zone – this would have been the most significant terrorist attack and loss of life in our country’s history. So full marks to the Australian Federal Police and the New South Wales Police and ASIO and the Queensland Police and others who have been involved in this joint counter-terrorism investigation.
This is a deeply concerning matter and it hasn’t gone away as an issue for our country. We’re still seeing, overnight, attacks on Jewish homes, and when you have Holocaust survivors who have lived in our country since 1945 in peace, are now saying that they feel unsafe in our country, it is a national disgrace. The Prime Minister has presided over this deteriorating situation, and I want to make sure that we can do everything we can.
The Parliament comes back next week, the Coalition has put on the table mandatory sentencing for people who are convicted of terrorist related offences. The Prime Minister should introduce that legislation and pass the legislation before the Parliament rises, and we will support that because we want to send an absolute message of deterrence to these people who would think that committing an act of this atrocious nature is somehow acceptable in our country. It is not, it never will be, and under a government I lead, I want to make sure that we send a very clear message to all those who might be thinking about these sorts of activities. We will not tolerate it, and under a Coalition Government, there will be zero tolerance for any act of racism and anti-Semitism, and I want to make that very clear.
Finally, as we know in WA, the Prime Minister’s been playing this two card trick, which hasn’t worked. The fact is that the Prime Minister, I think, is being deceitful with the population in WA. WA and its economy thrives on mining and agriculture, and we now find out that there’s a secret deal that’s been signed between the Greens and the Labor Party about introducing a bill which will stop mining in its tracks in WA, which would destroy the WA economy – not to mention the national economy.
So if the Prime Minister is trying to stitch up a secret deal before the election, he should release that detail so that people know about it before they vote at the election. We have to get our country back on track; we need more mining, we need more support for the agricultural sector, we need to make sure that we’ve got an economy that can compete in a very competitive world, and at the moment, the Labor Party is smashing the economy through its energy policy and through its economic settings, and we will do everything we can to implement our plan to get Australia Back on Track and to help families who are really struggling under this Government.
I’m happy to take any question.
QUESTION:
So yesterday you pledged support for the Northern Territory’s seven point plan. If income management is an effective measure, will you also roll it out for parents of youth offenders across Australia?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, just to be clear, that arrangement already exists. So this was available to the Labor Government – I think rarely utilised, but nonetheless, there’s the ability for the Territory Government to make that request and that arrangement.
So the point that we made yesterday is that we want to work with the Finocchiaro Government because they have listened to the community. I don’t think the Prime Minister has stayed one night in Alice Springs since he’s been Prime Minister.
So our desire is to make sure that we can get kids to school because the truancy rates are truly appalling, we want to make sure that we can give safety and security to a community that deserves it. There’s nowhere else in the country that would accept the crime rates and the domestic violence rates that we see here in Alice Springs.
What we have said in supporting the Chief Minister’s seven point plan, is that firstly, she’s consulted with the community and she’s acting and responding to it. Now that is leadership. It wasn’t demonstrated by the previous Chief Minister and it’s certainly not being demonstrated by the Prime Minister.
QUESTION:
But in terms of the income management plan specifically, will you roll it out to parents across [inaudible]?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, my point is it’s already available in the education system now. That request, as I understand it, can be made.
QUESTION:
And has the Federal Opposition committed any money to new prisons? Seeing as we do have a ‘prison crisis’, as the NT Chief said today.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, that’s a matter that’s funded by the Territory Government and by the State Government, so that’ll be an expense spent by the Territory Government in accordance with the normal funding arrangements.
From a Federal Government perspective, we’re happy to provide support to the Territory in different ways and I think we should. I think we should be doing more here in Alice Springs, in Darwin and across the Northern Territory, because I think the job opportunities are there and by supporting private businesses and small business operations, we can grow the meaningful jobs that are available.
Really, I think the opportunity for the Northern Territory as a new frontier is obvious and should have been obvious to the Prime Minister when he was elected, but they just haven’t done that.
So we’ll continue to support the Territory Government in different ways, but the construction of prisons obviously is a responsibility of the Territory Government.
QUESTION:
Mr Dutton, what other organisations have you visited here during your time in Alice Springs,? Have you met with the Alice Springs Town Council? Mayor Matt Paterson’s been vocal on the issues that [inaudible]. Have you met with the Central Land Council? Have you met with Congress? Any other organisations?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I’ve met with Matt before, and in fact, I was texting with him the other day. We met with a number of NGOs last night who were involved in the operation. It was really interesting to talk to them and hear their concerns and their perspectives about how we might clean up Labor’s mess and get safety and security at the top of the ladder again for the residents and the businesses of Alice Springs. We’ve obviously had this visit, we’ve got another visit after this and we visited another business and spoke to them about their perspective, not just as local residents, but as local business owners and employers as well.
Again, I don’t understand why the Prime Minister hasn’t been able to spend more time in Alice Springs. I think this is one of the most acute issues that our Prime Minister should be dealing with. Unfortunately the Prime Minister, after the Voice, essentially abandoned the cause of Indigenous Australians. I don’t know why? I don’t know what drives the Prime Minister’s weakness, or his inability to make decisions? But as we’re seeing with the anti-Semitism at the moment, when we have a weak Prime Minister who can’t stand up to deal with the issues that are important to our country, to deal with a national crisis, then every Australian suffers as a result of that.
QUESTION:
You mentioned that, just quickly, on the visits and the Prime Minister Albanese’s visits to Alice Springs, how’s your visit any different? Federal Leader’s being criticised for his fly in, fly out, 24 hour visits to Alice Springs. This is seemingly the same case. How’s your visit here any different?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, how many nights is has the Prime Minister spent here?
QUESTION:
He was here last year.
PETER DUTTON:
No, but how many nights has he spent here?
QUESTION:
He’s visited.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I know that he’s visited, but that’s the Labor Party rhetoric. He hasn’t stayed over night as I understand – I’m happy to be corrected.
QUESTION:
Last year [inaudible].
PETER DUTTON:
Yeah, well, hopefully that’s a case. Hopefully he learnt something. But I just don’t think he has because the Prime Minister could, frankly, at the moment visit every day. I just don’t think he’s got the strength of leadership to respond with the decisions that need to be made.
Lia Finocchiaro as the Chief Minister wrote to the Prime Minister and said, ‘Here’s our seven point plan to build on what we’ve already done to try and make sure that there is a safe environment here in Alice Springs’. The Prime Minister came back and said, ‘Well, look, we could do one’ – which was basically a phone call to CASA to sort out a technical issue. So it was a no brainer. And the other six, he’s ruled out.
Now, the Prime Minister can come and listen and learn, but he doesn’t act. That’s the reality. As we saw with the Territory Labor Government, they can’t manage money, they can’t manage law and order, and it’s a Coalition Government which can provide national security settings that can keep our people safe.
As Defence Minister, as Home Affairs Minister, as Immigration Minister and as a former police officer, I understand the decisions that need to be made. I made them as Home Affairs Minister, which saved us from a number of terrorist attacks, and this Prime Minister has been weak and hopeless, and the Jewish community is living in fear at the moment. Unfortunately, their energy and economic policies are just as detrimental in an economic sense, to the Australian public as well at the moment.
So we win the election, which I’m sure that we can do with a lot of hard work and by getting Lisa Siebert up, and getting Lisa Bayliss up, we can get our country back on track, if we do that.
QUESTION:
Just on the what you said about the Jewish community, there have been calls from the Jewish community not to politicise this issue of anti-Semitism. Wouldn’t you say that by doing this, you are going against their wishes in some ways?
PETER DUTTON:
No. I think when we’ve had a terrorist attack that’s just been thwarted, that had the potential to kill hundreds of people and blow up a synagogue and other Jewish interests, I don’t think it’s politicising it to talk about it. If you speak to people in the Jewish community – which I do on a regular basis – they are completely disgusted with the Prime Minister’s inaction.
This hasn’t happened just overnight. You see, it’s escalated – this is the point, and this is why I wrote to the Prime Minister after we saw the terrible circumstances on the steps of the Opera House, two days after people – including women and children – had been slaughtered in Israel.
I wrote to the Prime Minister asking for a National Cabinet to be brought together because you could foresee that what we saw on the steps of the Opera House by these zealots and by these protesters was going to spread. The Prime Minister ignored that, and the Prime Minister has, for his own political purposes, sadly and tragically, decided to put the votes of Green supporters ahead of people in the Jewish community and in regional areas. That is the fact.
I have not seen a national leader conduct himself in such a way before, and so when we saw the spray painting of cars and of houses, did we think it was going to stop there? No. When you then see the bombing of a synagogue, did we think that it was going to stop there? No. When we saw the bombing or the attack on a childcare centre, did we think it was going to stop there? No. Are we surprised that these people now, with no red lines having masqueraded as protesters, when really they’re just racist bigots who have been protesting on university campuses for months without the Prime Minister doing anything? Should we act surprised that has escalated now to an attempted terrorist attack? No, we shouldn’t. The Prime Minister needs to show national leadership here to deal with the national crisis, and so far there’s been no sign of it.
QUESTION:
Mr Dutton, what’s your Party’s plan to bring down electricity prices in the Northern Territory?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, we’ve been very clear about this; we pay about three times the cost of electricity compared to comparable nations across the world. That’s why, when you talk to a small business like this one, it’s not just wage cost or rent, it’s the fact that under Anthony Albanese, electricity costs have gone through the roof.
So at home your electricity bill’s up by over 30 per cent, so to for small business. Gas is up, and every other input cost is up. We have to create an environment where, yes, we have renewables in the system, but we have reliable baseload power. We need a significant amount of gas to come into the system because at the moment we’re exporting gas and we’re charging Australians for the use of gas here at a much higher rate. The Victorian Government is on the cusp of importing gas – unbelievably, with no regard for cost to consumers or businesses at all, which will drive small businesses broke. We’ve got a situation in the Northern Territory where we should be approving new projects, and if we do that, I think we can transform the Northern Territory economy, we can provide cheaper electricity with more gas in the system, and then for the national electricity market, over time, as has been evidenced by Danny Price’s work for Frontier Economics, our policy is 44 per cent cheaper than Labor’s renewables only policy, which is why I think Chris Bowen is one of the most reckless Ministers since the Whitlam Government, and he’s destroying the economy through his energy policy.
QUESTION:
You’ve proposed nuclear plants for both the West Coast and the East Coast, could we potentially see one in the Northern Territory if you are elected?
PETER DUTTON:
We’ve been clear in relation to the seven sites that we’ve identified, and we’ve done that quite deliberately and specifically, when we look at the needs across the energy network.
I want to make sure that we have stable baseload power. This pretending that the solar panels can work of a night time and that batteries last more than four hours, that game is up. Renewables are good in our system, but we can’t pretend that they operate 24/7.
So we’ve got a lot of work to do to clean up Labor’s mess in the economy, in the national security space and in the energy space as well, but we’ve thought through, and when you look at the top 20 economies in the world, 19 of them have or have signed up to nuclear power, Australia is the only one that hasn’t. We’re being left behind. This is a three year wasted period for our country.
If the Prime Minister’s to be re-elected, it can only be with the support of the Greens, and the Greens would be a disaster for the Northern Territory. They’d be a disaster for the national economy, and Mr Albanese is such a weak leader he would be dominated by Adam Bandt and we would be seeing after six years, an embedding of the really bad decisions that they’ve made and it would take a long time to turn that around. That’s why our country can’t afford three more years of Labor, and that’s why I think there is momentum to change government and to get our country back on track at the next election.
QUESTION:
So if the nuclear plants are built on the West Coast and the East Coast, how will that benefit citizens in the Northern Territory?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, it’ll take pressure out of the national system to start with, so in relation to the other energy mix, gas is a very significant player. As I said, we shouldn’t be afraid of the natural resources that we have. I mean, how in our country, when we have an abundance of natural resource, can we be paying three times the electricity cost compared to, say, Tennessee or Ontario? It’s inexcusable and it’s crippling.
I think one of the things that we can do as a Federal Government is to help businesses with that one input cost. In a manufacturing business like this, for welding and for businesses with cold storage, for businesses with big utilisation of urea as fertiliser for their farming operation, which is very energy intensive. All of that cost we should be trying to reduce for businesses.
So we’ll work closely with the with the Government here. The Northern Territory has a capable and competent Government again, and a Chief Minister, who I think has really hit the ground running. She’s got a hell of a mess to clean up, as we will in Canberra after the election, but I think she’s up to it and I believe we are as well.
QUESTION:
On the gas giants; the gas giant Tambaram – the CEO has flown to Washington to meet the Trump Administration and to propose a $8 billion Australian data centre for the Northern Territory. One, do you support that proposal? And two, if you were elected, would you bring Trump to the Northern Territory?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, a couple of points. I mean, one is that I want to support every Australian industry. Over the course of the last three years, under the Prime Minister’s watch, we’ve had a threefold increase in the number of manufacturing businesses which have closed. Over the same period as Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have been making economic decisions, 27,000 small businesses have closed in our country. I want to turn that around. I want to build our economy, I want to make those one person, stay at home mum business – I want to grow that into a small business and then grow it into a bigger business. I want this business that Syd started and worked his guts out for his whole life to grow into purchasing the property next door and employing another dozen Indigenous apprentices here in the Alice. I want to see every part of our economy grow.
So, if there’s an opportunity for investment to be made in the Northern Territory, we should be facilitating it. Australia is becoming a hard place to do business, when you speak to a lot of these CEOs. I meet with the CEOs and Chairs of mining companies all the time and other big businesses. They aren’t investing in Australia. They’ve got legacy projects – they’re trying to extend the life of those projects – but very few of them are investing in greenfield projects. We should be really worried about this because the investment pipeline is drying up under the Albanese Government. The jobs in Western Australia and the Northern Territory and Queensland in particular, those jobs will go and I don’t know what replaces them.
The Prime Minister has no plan for our country other than to give control to the unions and to try and placate Green voters in inner city Sydney and Melbourne. Well, he’s employed 36,000 new public servants in Canberra. I just say to the people of the Northern Territory, how has that helped you in your lives? Are you better off today than you were three years ago under Anthony Albanese? I just don’t think so. That’s why we have a lot of work to do. I think we’ve got a fantastic candidate in Lisa, here. If we win Lingiari and we win Solomon then I believe we can win at the next election. We’ve got a lot of hard work to do yet.
One last question?
QUESTION:
Ah yes. I do have further questions, obviously, on the details of the nuclear plan and I think given the criticisms in solar, etc.. But we’ve just been told question, so I’ll jump to another topic if that’s okay.
Will the Coalition do anything to expand Australia’s Marine Park network or put extra resources into managing it in remote places like the Northern Territory?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I think I know the project you’re talking about. So, that was a project of the previous Coalition Government. So again, I think if you look at what the government says as opposed to what they do, that will give you a good indication. So when we were in government, we obviously provided a lot of support and that will give you an indication, not just of our track record, but what we can do into the future.
Look, all of this is possible if you manage the economy well, because that gives you the money to do it. Managing the federal budget is no different than managing a business budget or a household budget. If you are spending more than what you earn, you’re in trouble. That’s where Labor’s at. That’s why taxes go up and that’s why businesses go broke. That doesn’t give you the money then to invest in the other projects which are a priority for our country.
So, we’ll invest because the Coalition always manages the economy better than Labor. We always manage the national security settings better and we also manage health and education, and we also manage many other aspects of government endeavour much more effectively and efficiently than Labor can.
Jacinta Price is going to head our new efficiency agency within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and that will be an opportunity to get money out of the hands of bureaucrats and back into the hands of frontline services so that we can do everything we can to support the people of Alice Springs and Darwin and the Northern Territory.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
[ends]