Subjects: Closure of the Afghanistan Inquiry Report; Land Forces protests in Melbourne; Labor Governments weak on crime across Australia; Tanya Plibersek’s gold mine decision shambles; the Green-teals; Labor’s decisions stifling investment in Australia; Queensland sentencing guidelines; aged care reforms.
E&OE.
RAY HADLEY:
So, straight we go to the Opposition Leader federally, Peter Dutton.
Peter Dutton, good morning to you.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
As you’ve probably just heard at the latter end of a news service, as we dropped out there, Richard Marles has stripped distinguished service medals from some defence officers. He’s left Angus Campbell alone, but he’s also decided to leave alone your decision in regards to unit citations – they remain.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, I haven’t got the full detail, but like you, I’ve just seen the story up online. I took a decision as Defence Minister, and I’m glad that that wasn’t overturned because I felt very strongly about the fact that our diggers who had represented our country did what they believed was the right thing. In the heat of the battle, many of them have tough decisions to make, and we should be there to support them, not to hang them out to dry.
Richard Marles has, I think, abrogated a basic responsibility here by letting this dark cloud hang for so long, and when we talk about suicides from veterans and the pressures that are on families, the spouses that we’ve spoken to, I just think the Albanese Government has just let this go on for way too long and there should have been certainty provided well before now.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay. Back we go to other material that we have in front of us.
I’ve been most vocal both today and yesterday over these protests in Melbourne. We’ve now been told that again this morning there’s a large police presence. Not as many protesters – they’ve been turned away by up to 200 officers. Now, I’ll give an example: this particular Land Forces conference. I got an email from a father yesterday, he’s got a daughter who’s highly educated and works in satellite systems, which is a very important part of defence, obviously. So she’s got nothing to do with selling guns or war on Gaza or anything else. She’s down there representing her company, she’s terrified for her life. She’s being abused and jostled as she goes into that particular gathering by these lunatics.
Now, I’ve said before, and whether you’ll agree with me, well, I don’t know. We are currently having Palestinian people come here without any checks and balances. We’ve got people protesting, some may have been born here, of Palestinian parents, we’ve got the keffiyehs in large numbers, we’ve got the Palestinian flags in large numbers, we’ve got the usual ragtag bunch of uni students who wouldn’t work on an iron lung, we’ve got the older lefties from Nimbin out of tree houses protesting as well, and we’ve got a left wing Government that seems paralysed to do anything about it, let alone a left wing Federal Government paralysed to do anything about it. When’s this going to stop? I mean, if they did this in Gaza under Hamas, they’d be incarcerated, probably bashed, shot and left to their own devices.
PETER DUTTON:
There’s no question about that, Ray, and I just think the social experiment has to stop. We see with youth crime around the country where Labor Governments have appointed magistrates who don’t believe in locking people up, or enforcing the law, or providing a deterrence to those people who want to break into someone’s home, or terrify an elderly lady or man in their home.
We’ve seen since October 9, the protest on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, that the police just were given instruction to step back and watch these people chant their vicious, anti-Semitic, racist chants, and nobody’s been locked up. The protests have gone on for months and months and months in Melbourne. Not to the same level of violence that we saw yesterday, but nonetheless, people in the Jewish community are literally living in fear. We’ve got the Jewish school in Perth which has been picketed by some of the people related to, or with the same outlook as those that we’ve seen in Melbourne, and these professional protesters are out there – they would have had a fair expectation going into yesterday that they weren’t going to be locked up because the Jacinta Allan Government in Victoria and the Minns Government in New South Wales had allowed them to conduct themselves with these chants and waving of the flags and the hatred that they’ve expressed for months now.
So, it’s great to see that some of them were locked up. I’m sorry that some of the police were injured and also some of the people who were going about their lawful business, as you point out, who were smeared with paint, or assaulted otherwise. It’s a disgrace.
RAY HADLEY:
Look, if it goes the way some people think when we get to the election early next year, there may well be a Labor Government in minority – I know you hope that’s not the case – and they’ll govern with the assistance of the teals and the Greens. The Greens fully support what happened in Melbourne yesterday, in fact they encouraged it, they absolutely encouraged it. Adam Bandt sent their best wishes, he said stupidly, ‘oh, don’t be violent’. They were already chucking faeces and acid and projectiles at the police in the middle of him saying that. But at the end of the day, I’m terrified – not just for myself, but for my children and grandchildren – that we could be confronting a Green dominated Government because it’ll be like Canberra, it’ll be like the ACT Government in Canberra, it’ll be a Greens in coalition with the Labor Party, we know how disastrous that’s been for two decades or more.
PETER DUTTON:
Well it has, and you’re seeing on the front page of The Australian today with Simon Benson’s article, the Business Council and other groups warning that if the Government continue to do deals with the Greens, they are going to destroy the economy, and this is exactly what happened in Whitlam’s time.
The only way that we can get a majority government and a stable government after next election is for people to vote for the Coalition, for the Liberal and National Parties. There’s no serious commentator, political commentator in the country who says that Anthony Albanese can form a majority government after the next election.
The teals are calling for a 75 per cent reduction in emissions by 2035, which would close the economy down, and we know that the Labor Party, for all they talk about, and the Prime Minister’s in there in Question Time, having great delight in responding to a question from the Greens and giving them a whack, he’ll do preference deals with the Greens. They always do, and they get elected because of Greens preferences. If the Prime Minister’s a man of principle and somebody who stands by his word, then he wouldn’t accept and he wouldn’t preference the Greens, but he will because it’ll be to their political advantage. If you want a minority Government, worse than what we saw with Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, then that’s what the Labor Party can provide you.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, we’ve already seen Tanya Plibersek – you and I have spoke about the Voice until we were almost voiceless, and we already had the NIAA, we had of course the Coalition of Peaks and then the Australian public rejected the Voice. They rejected it. And it was all about listening to Indigenous people. So, Tanya Plibersek has the Orange Aboriginal Land Council telling them that the mine at Blayney can go ahead because there’s no Indigenous claims on it, she gets a ragtag bunch of people from around Blayney who say, ‘oh no, they’re wrong’, she invokes this section 10. We get to the vote the other night in the Senate, it gets beaten 31-29 to reverse her decision, and all the teals, all the independents and all the Greens voted with Labor to usurp any opportunity to turn this thing on its head, and that’s what you’re going to get full time for a long period if they are in power with the help of the Greens and the teals.
PETER DUTTON:
Of course, and don’t forget, Ray, that the teals don’t run against any Labor or Green Member. So they’re not running against Adam Bandt in his seat – they’d probably have a fair chance as a teal candidate in the seat of Melbourne. They’re not running against the Labor Party anywhere, they only run against the Liberal Party because they’re made up of Green defectors, or people who don’t feel that the Greens are radical enough, or that the Labor Party is radical enough. Look at Monique Ryan and these people – they only ever vote with the Labor Party or the Greens.
If you’re voting for Monique Ryan, or you’re voting for Zali Steggall, or if you voting for any of the Green-teals, you are voting for an Albanese minority Government and I don’t think that our country can tolerate that. We’ve got a lot of debt already, we’ve got huge security issues, the economy is on the brink, and if we have another three years of this then I really fear where a minority government would take us.
Anthony Albanese’s, I just think, without doubt now, the weakest Prime Minister that we’ve seen in our lifetime, and it’s not just, as you point out, Tanya Plibersek’s decision on the gold mine in New South Wales, Ray, they’re also seeking to close down the salmon industry in Tasmania, and in WA there are countless numbers of projects that could be stifled. If we don’t have that mining income, we don’t have schools and we don’t have roads, we don’t have infrastructure, we don’t pay for the defence upgrades that we need. If we close down mining, as the teals want, the Labor Party and the Greens want, then people’s taxes go up and our economy doesn’t survive without that revenue from agriculture, from mining. I just think we need to be very clear about what is at risk here.
RAY HADLEY:
Now look, back to Plibersek and New South Wales on their gold mine. We’ve now got a meeting planned for 121 land councils – Indigenous land councils – in Orange over their concerns and consequences of her decision to intervene, despite the fact the local land council said, ‘go ahead’. The former New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council Chair, Roy Ah-See, says the Minister has undermined 40 years of New South Wales land rights legislation with this decision and huge implications for land rights across the country. I mean this is the same mob who said, ‘give the Indigenous people a voice’ and now they’re taking the voice off. The organisation charged with making the decision under legislation.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, if we’re serious about acknowledging and respecting and protecting Indigenous heritage, then that is something very different from people who see this as an opportunity to grab some cash, or an opportunity to stop a mine for environmental reasons because you’re against mining.
We have to be serious in this country. We either want to compete on the world stage and we want to keep our standard of living or we don’t. We’ve had six consecutive quarters now of individuals going backwards in their own lives in net terms. Fortunately, we’ve had asset growth in house value, so people have improved their net position. But everyone knows when you go to the supermarket, you’re paying through the roof for groceries, people know when you go to pay your insurance premium, and all of that is because of the bad decisions the Government’s making.
Interest rates are coming down in the UK, they’ve come down in Canada, they’ve come down in New Zealand, and the Reserve Bank Governor here is warning the Government to stop spending so much money because you’re fuelling inflation and the Government thinks it’s smart giving people $10 in one hand, but what they fail to recognise is that $100 has been taken out of the other hand to give to the ANZ or to the Commonwealth Bank for your mortgage repayment.
If they close down these mines, ask yourself the question, ‘why?’. I mean, why would Tanya Plibersek be so against it? Because they’re happy to forsake those industries and those regions and those jobs and that economic growth because they’re in a battle to the death with the Greens in her seat, in Anthony Albanese’s seat and other seats in inner-city Sydney and Melbourne.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay, back to your home state of Queensland. Tomorrow I’m going to talk to David Crisafulli, who’ll be the Premier, I guess, in a couple of months in Queensland, and Giggles will be gone, thank goodness. But as a former copper, this case of Ashley Paul Griffith – guilty of being the worst ever child sex offender – 307 child sex charges. Unforgivable failings in the Labor system in Queensland allowed him to continue offending and some failures of police by the look of it as well.
But one of my concerns I’m going to bring up with David Crisafulli tomorrow is, and you’d be well aware of it, the sentencing guidelines. You get life in Queensland, you get 20 years, and if they make these sentences concurrent as opposed to consecutive, this low bastard won’t be doing any more than 20 years unless there’s special effort and it’s made consecutive. I mean, we need a change in the sentencing guidelines, Peter Dutton, in Queensland.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, I think David Crisafulli’s done exactly the right thing here in announcing that they will review or conduct an inquiry into this case. It makes any decent person’s skin crawl to think that somebody like this could continue assaulting children, moving from one childcare centre to the next and not be found out and arrested. So there are serious problems in the system.
I think the whole family services system in Queensland is completely and utterly broken. When you see the stories of young kids who bounced from foster home to foster home, being sexually abused in some cases, watching violence regularly in many households that they’re put into, not being taken from parents where they’re drug addicts or questionable characters are visiting the homes each night. These people have developed, in their own mind, a view that it’s okay to leave kids in that situation, and we wonder why we see some of the terrible circumstances in society that we see.
So there’s obviously all sorts of failings, and I hope that they can be discovered because people should be held to account for why this person was able to get away with what he did for so long.
RAY HADLEY:
I’ll just give an example – you may have been knowing about this case – it’s been brought to my attention by A Current Affair because it happened back in 1999, but the crime started in ’72 when the bloke was 18. His name is Geoffrey Robert Dobbs. He was the holder previously of the title of the worst child sex offender before Griffith came to light. He was a former boys brigade leader, Sunday school teacher. Abused 62 girls, some as young as 12 months old. He was sentenced for 100 offences in 2003, committed from ’72 to 1999.
Now, he was given a life sentence which did expire. So he’s been in jail and still in jail since ’99. The Chief Judge of the District Court, Judge Kerry O’Brien, gave Dobb’s life – which doesn’t mean life – in 2003. But in 2015, he said he didn’t think Dobbs was any longer a danger to the community, and he is being considered for parole at this moment. This is a bloke that should – he should be castrated and left where he is, but it’s a bloke that in Queensland being considered for parole despite sentences against children as young as 12 months, and yet he might see the light of day.
PETER DUTTON:
Well again Ray, we’ve spoken about these cases over the years. I just don’t believe that somebody with that sort of offending should see the light of day again. I think that the chances of repeat offending are very, very high and all of the evidence indicates that. There’s a sexual orientation that these people have, and they, as people are attracted to the same sex or the opposite sex or whatever it might be, these people are attracted to children and there’s no sense pretending that that attraction goes away.
It’s a tragedy that the courts have a view that these people can somehow be rehabilitated and put back into society. I don’t agree with that, it’s not the evidence, and I can tell you, having interviewed a lot of parents and a lot of kids who’ve made complaints and investigated these matters, these kids, in many cases, find it hard to form relationships. They have a life sentence themselves and that these people would be back out re-offending, should offend any decent human being.
RAY HADLEY:
Just finally, there was a report this morning there was a Coalition Party Room meeting at 8:30am, but Sky News is reporting – you better get your skates on – there’s a meeting now set down for 10.30am to discuss aged care. Is that where you’re leaving me to go and see at this meeting?
PETER DUTTON:
That is true, Ray. I’ve got a meeting at 10.30am so we can break that news on the Ray Hadley Morning Show. I’m sure your ratings will go through the roof to hear that.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay. Well what about just helping an ageing broadcaster in the twilight of his years by giving us a scoop? What’s going to happen at the meeting?
PETER DUTTON:
We’re having a discussion on aged care.
Look, I think it’s no secret that we’ve been discussing aged care with the Government. I want people to have dignity as they age. I want there to be sustainability in the aged care system. I want people to know that when your mum or dad, grandma, grandpa go into an aged care setting that they’re getting the best care provided. It’s difficult, because there’s no easy solution, there’s a lot of money involved, the beds aren’t being built at the moment, we’ve got an ageing population, early onset of dementia, and so we’ve been in discussions with the Government to have a look at what they’re proposing, and then we’ll make a decision as to what our next step will be.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, as I’ve said before, I hope that the people who’ve looked after themselves through their life – paid taxes and provided for their own retirement aren’t copping it in the neck through any policies that’ll be endorsed by you on behalf of the Labor Government.
PETER DUTTON:
No, well, we want to take care of those people and they’ve been at the core of our Party’s approach for a long period of time. I mean the Government’s charging of capital gains tax on an unrealised capital gains will largely affect self-funded retirees, which we’ve opposed. But look, there is a cost for anyone who wants to go into aged care. That’s a reality for all of us. We’ve got an ageing population, we have to deal with that and sometimes there are tough decisions to make, but we’ll have that discussion and then see what we do from there.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay. All the best, talk soon. Thanks very much.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks Ray.
[ends]