Subjects: The Prime Minister’s tricky language on flight upgrades seeking to deceive Australians about his cosy relationship with Alan Joyce; Commissioner Brereton and the NACC; Labor’s Blayney ban farce; Labor’s visa and immigration policy shambles; Labor’s economic mismanagement sending businesses offshore; Queenslanders vote for a better way with a Crisafulli led LNP Government; Labor’s home-grown inflation and cost of living crisis.
E&OE.
RAY HADLEY:
Every Thursday we speak to the Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. He’s on the other side of the continent today, I think.
Peter Dutton, good morning to you.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning, Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
Now obviously, much of the week has been occupied with how Anthony Albanese, when Transport Minister, not Prime Minister, obtained flight upgrades. Now, I just wanted to share with you one text message I got this morning because he’s now, as you’re probably aware, denied that he either called, text or emailed Alan Joyce. Although in case you didn’t catch up with Sharri Markson last night, she identified a former employee of Qantas who was in charge of government relations called Andrew Parker as possibly the go to man. He was a friend of Albo’s and had a history in both journalism and also working for various Ministers, I guess, and Opposition people.
But this email and text message that’s come in:
‘Just taking the upgrade as Transport Minister is enough. It potentially compromises every decision the Transport Minister might take at the time. That’s the issue’. So it’s not an issue of the fact that how he obtained them, whether it was him calling them or them offering it to him. The point being: he took them, and as such, he taints the position of Transport Minister’.
Would you agree with Emmanuel’s text?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, a couple of points here. I mean firstly, the Prime Minister has had different positions and it’s taken him five days to issue a clarifying statement and then he’s had to clarify the clarifying statement overnight. We’re still none the wiser as to what the truth is. So, I suppose it really comes down to whether or not you believe the Prime Minister or not. Why did he obfuscate in the first place? Why did he refuse to give a straight answer? That’s a question for him to answer.
But really, it is about whether, as Transport Minister, he sought from the CEO of Qantas an upgrade to a flight. That’s the first question – pure and simple. He hasn’t been able to answer that, although there’s some clarifying statement, as I say, that’s now open to interpretation. The second thing is, which I think is incredibly important as well, and we shouldn’t let this go, the Government made a decision not to allow Qatar Airways into Australia, which would mean that today, Australians particularly where I am in Perth, or the Northern Territory, are paying more for their airfares to see family, or travel for business than they otherwise would have.
If Qatar was here at the moment, there would be more competition, there would be lower airfares and the Prime Minister took a decision not to allow Qatar into the market, which was frankly at the time, not properly explained. It was against the advice of the Department, against the inclination of the Transport Minister of the day, and the Prime Minister now declares that he’s had this decade long relationship with Mr Joyce.
I think the reality is that it’s similar to the way that Anthony Albanese conducted himself over the period of the Voice where he couldn’t answer a straight question. I just think when he can’t do that, when the Prime Minister’s integrity is in question, people start to question what else is he not telling the truth about? I think that’s the problem for Anthony Albanese.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, I think from memory, and I know from having gone to Paris for the Olympics, I was supposed to fly Qantas, but they co-chair with Emirates and that’s where I went; but weren’t the arrangements with Qatar, they were going to co-chair with Virgin, the biggest domestic competitor with Qantas as well?
PETER DUTTON:
That’s correct.
RAY HADLEY:
So you’re not only jamming it to Qatar Airlines, you’re jamming it to another airline based in Australia that’s servicing the domestic market in direct competition with Qantas?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, we want our airlines to be profitable and to be viable. It’s a tough business, the airline industry, no question about that, but we ultimately though, want to make sure that we have the best possible settings in place, we want competition and at the lowest possible prices for consumers.
Again, I just think these are questions that the Prime Minister needs to answer. But you hear him in press conferences – I don’t know whether it’s a deliberate tactic to get to the end of the press conference and not know what he’s said, or whether he just ties himself in knots with the words that he uses – but I think it’s presumably sort of a deliberate strategy to try and make people continue to scratch their head at the end of the press conference and by the time he’s answered all the questions, there are more questions than answers remaining.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, I played audio from Sharri’s programme last night where he actually said, and this was earlier in the week, where he actually said that they do have a 1800 number that you can call to get a flight upgrade. Now, I can imagine the scenario of the then Transport Minister jumping on the 1800 number and saying, ‘look, it’s member number 10586070 here, Anthony Albanese, I’m flying to Honolulu with my wife, Carmel. Can I get an upgrade please?’. I mean…
PETER DUTTON:
Or ‘it’s Anthony here, is Alan there?’ on the 1800 number. It’s not credible. I mean people can draw their own conclusions about the Prime Minister’s honesty here, but I think a lot of Australians, frankly, have made up their mind about his credibility. If you’ve got a Prime Minister who doesn’t tell the truth, then I think it’s no wonder this Government’s well and truly off the tracks.
RAY HADLEY:
And of course, the other subject that was raised by my listeners yesterday, was coinciding with the launch of the Voice in the hangar with the Qantas and Jetstar livery being draped with ‘yes’, front and centre was the Prime Minister and Alan Joyce. Now to be fair to Alan Joyce, he was pro the Voice personally, but I noticed the incoming Chairman of Qantas has said, ‘we won’t be going down that path again. We won’t be as a corporate citizen, deciding what people do in elections or what they might do in referenda’. But I mean the development is that people say, ‘well, hang on a sec, these two blokes are joined at the hip and say, let’s have the Voice launch, you know, with the big flash Qantas planes and Jetstar planes with ‘yes’ livery on the side and go from there’. That, again, brings into question the relationship.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I think that’s right. If the Prime Minister can’t just give the basic details in an honest fashion, then people understandably start to question the other elements to it that may be innocent, or may be irrelevant, or maybe just coincidental. But when the Prime Minister’s got a story that keeps changing and he takes five days to issue a statement and then has to clarify that statement again, and still with questions remaining unanswered, then I think people are right to say something dodgy is going on here.
RAY HADLEY:
You got dragged into it when he said, ‘oh well, you accept rides with Gina Rinehart in either an aircraft or a helicopter’ and then all of a sudden he’s seen getting on board Lindsay Fox’s helicopter. I mean – so it goes on and on and on. But I think the main point here is, when you were with Gina, you weren’t making a decision on her future in terms of what was happening, when he was Transport Minister and he was accepting upgrades from Qantas, by whatever means that he obtained them, he was making decisions then and now that would reflect on where Qantas were into the future.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, a couple of points. The flight that I took, care of Gina Rinehart, was from central Queensland, from Rockhampton from memory, to the Bali Memorial service in Sydney and we couldn’t get a commercial flight. I got a charter quote and it was something like $30 or $40,000 and Gina Rinehart’s plane was available free of cost to the taxpayer. I took that option instead of a charter flight. We asked for a government plane from the Prime Minister’s Office, were told that one wasn’t available. The return flight took us back to Mackay where I had commitments in Mackay.
The other occasion is when I went up to Roy Hill to see their mining operation there. I was up in Rio Tinto yesterday. We flew on Qantas up and Virgin back. But you know, that’s a company that’s paying $10 billion a year in tax. So, I think it’s appropriate to be visiting mining sites etc. and I think it was appropriate, frankly, to go to the Bali Memorial. I thought it was small minded of the Government at the time to not provide us with the transport option, given that there wasn’t a commercial option available. I wanted to be at the Bali Memorial Commemoration service, but that’s all to one side.
So, the Government can make all of those allegations – that’s fine. It’s a requirement for people to disclose these things, which is why the Government knows about those flights. But it’s all ultimately a distraction away from the Prime Minister’s woes. They’ll throw as much mud as they want. People declare flights and they declare pecuniary interests and sometimes they get it wrong, or they put it in late or whatever else that’s the human reality of it, but that’s not what’s happened here with the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has, I think, been deliberately evasive. He has questions to answer in relation to the Qatar decision, which has a direct impact on Australian families and businesses.
We’ve got a Prime Minister who can’t lie straight in bed and the Government’s a disaster at the moment. I mean the economy, particularly in Victoria, is in a state of disrepair. In Queensland, the Labor Party’s left an enormous debt there and the Prime Minister’s not talking about the issues which are important to Australians – that is cost of living and how he’s going to get interest rates down – he’s constantly talking about himself and his latest misstep.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay. Now, you would be aware that a Supreme Court Justice and a man that was in the Army Reserve, I think from memory, Paul Brereton, was in charge of the Afghanistan Inquiry. He’s now been appointed the founding National Anti-Corruption Commissioner. It’s revealed today he made a mistake when he failed to remove himself from dealing with a referral from the Robodebt Royal Commission because of someone he knew and then he didn’t deal with it personally, he passed it down the line to 2IC. But there are questions about whether the Prime Minister should self-report in his capacity as Prime Minister for what happened when he was Transport Minister to the same organisation.
But we find out today the NACC may have a conflict themselves because the Commissioner, Mr Brereton, was given access to the Chairman’s Lounge in 2023, as was the CEO, Philip Reed, the Deputy Commissioners, Jaala Hinchcliffe and Nicole Rose and fellow Deputies, Ben Gauntlett and Kylie Kilgour were given access this year. I mean, I’m not suggesting anything untoward from any of these people, but if you’re a member of the newly formed National Anti-Corruption Commission, surely to goodness, you’ve got to be very careful about what you accept, as you would understand as a former copper.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, firstly, I mean in relation to Mr Brereton, I don’t know Mr Brereton well, but I know that he’s a person of high integrity, and he was appointed to the Integrity Commission on that basis. So, I don’t think there’s any question about his character, or his intent.
Second point is it’s incredibly interesting when these stories drop out during the week when the Prime Minister’s under enormous pressure. Obviously the timing is deliberate by the Government to put it out there so that it’s a distraction away from Anthony Albanese’s latest drama. I think you need to look at it in that context.
Again, to the point that I made earlier; people will have conflicts, or there will be benefits as a frequent flyer or I don’t know, if you’ve signed up to different frequent flyer programmes for different companies, does that create a conflict of interest? If there’s a perceived conflict of interest, it should be declared, and that’s no doubt what these members have done; but to suggest that Mr Brereton, or the other Commissioners couldn’t conduct an inquiry because they’ve got the frequent flyer membership or a club access membership, I just don’t buy that.
So, I think the main game is the Prime Minister of the day misleading the Australian public, and any distraction away from that, frankly, I think is a pretty tricky move by his office, and I think should be condemned for what it is.
RAY HADLEY:
I’m shocked and horrified! You’re not suggesting that the sitting Government would throw Mr Brereton and his highly acclaimed colleagues under a bus just to get themselves off the front page of the newspaper, are you? You’re not suggesting something as low as that?
PETER DUTTON:
I don’t know if you’ve seen how the Labor Party operate in the past Ray, but they’re pretty smooth operators and they would look for a distraction anywhere.
I just think at the moment, people are rapidly losing faith in the PM and the Government, the decisions they’re making – it’s not just this, it’s the decisions around the economy, there are a lot of businesses out there – I mean we move around the country every day and a lot of people are just closing up, like they’ve had enough, and their coffee shop is in the red, they just can’t make the books balance, and we’ll see unemployment go up in that scenario and interest rates stay higher for longer. I just really worry about a lot of people who are under that stress at the moment and there’s no end in sight.
RAY HADLEY:
Yesterday we had in Orange, a gathering of the New South Wales Indigenous Land Councils, and much of the focus was on the Tanya Plibersek decision over Blayney. It’s incomprehensible that people, including Tanya Plibersek, could go to the community over the Voice and say ‘we want to empower Indigenous people’, yet at the first opportunity of empowering these people, she intervenes with non-Indigenous people. According to the Land Council, they’ve identified one person as non-Indigenous, claiming now aboriginality, as giving false and misleading information that was accepted by the Minister and therefore led to the non-event which is now the Blayney Gold Facility.
But I mean you’re talking about very distinguished people and I just want to share with you something you mightn’t have caught up with. There’s a fella we deal with here quite often – good man. He’s the CEO of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council in obviously the Sydney metro area. His name is Nathan Moran. He said, ‘there are people doing welcome to the country ceremonies who have no background, no authority, they don’t even identify’. He pushed back against a concept which we know about from Sydney Uni, which is a ‘stat dec blackfella’, saying people claiming Indigenous heritage simply by signing a stat dec had to stop, and there was one particular woman who made an application to Tanya Plibersek when she was in fact an employee of the Orange Land Council who didn’t identify as Indigenous, mysteriously, when she left there and she became an opponent to Blayney, she became an Indigenous person almost overnight. It’s just…
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, it is, but I think it’s also disrespectful to Indigenous Australians who are proud of their heritage. I think when you’ve got decisions that are being made by people like Tanya Plibersek, they’re not about the mine, let’s be honest about it. It’s about trying to win votes from the Greens at the next election. That’s why they allowed 3,000 people in from a terrorist controlled zone in Gaza on tourist visas without proper security checks. Why on earth would a Government do that when they know it increases the security risk in our country? I mean, how on earth could a responsible Government do that? Well, it’s because they’re desperately trying to stop the Greens taking seats that Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek and others hold. It’s so transparent and it’s so offensive and that’s exactly what Tanya Plibersek’s done here.
It’s holding up $1 billion mine that will inject hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy and into the New South Wales economy. Our country can’t afford to be going backwards at the moment. We need to make sure that these projects can get off the ground, you’ve got to abide by all of the environmental and Indigenous heritage issues, of course.
As I said, I was in the Pilbara yesterday, these companies are paying – as I pointed out before Ray – $10 billion in the case of Rio each year in taxes and royalties. The NDIS alone is going up to $50 billion a year over the course of the next 12 months. If we stop these mines and we close down the golden opportunity that we have as a country to create wealth, what pays for road upgrades and for local parks and for police and ambulances and hospitals? I don’t know where the replacement income comes from.
This Government is doing so much damage to the economy at the moment. The Japanese and Koreans are taking their money elsewhere. Companies, big companies here who want to expand mining and agricultural operations are taking their money to Asia, to North America and to Africa, and they are doing untold damage all for political reasons.
I just think this is a bad Government getting worse, and unfortunately, Australian families and businesses are the ones paying the price. I believe we’ve got a huge future in our country and we should be very positive about it, and we should be working with these companies to create the employment and the economic development. If we do that, we’ve got bright days ahead, but otherwise we’re going to be in a very desperate situation, as we’re seeing in Victoria with Labor and in Queensland at the moment.
RAY HADLEY:
Speaking of Queensland, we’ll finish there. I want to thank our Queensland listeners because before the election last week the polls were saying, ‘oh, he’s been a great campaigner – Miles. Oh, ‘Giggles’ is on the surge. You know, he’s not going to get walloped like they thought he would’. Then even at the close of the poll on Saturday night, people saying, ‘oh, it’s going to be the LNP in conjunction with Katter. They’re going to have the minority government’.
Well, of course it all turned out the way the polls were showing the week before, two weeks out from the election. The people of Queensland handed a ‘no thank you’ to Giggles Miles – ‘go away. Leave us alone’. The Labor Party in disarray after the LNP win by David Crisafulli.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, you’re spot on, Ray. I think full marks to David Crisafulli and his team. I think people got different criticisms and the rest of it, but they ran a disciplined campaign and they had all of the union movement up against them – the CFMEU back-dooring money into the Labor Party to pay for the campaign. Steven Miles got absolutely smashed and appropriately so. It was a seven per cent swing in the end, which is bigger than what John Howard had in ’96, it’s bigger than anything Joh Bjelke-Petersen had in Queensland.
David Crisafulli, I think, has started very well in a measured way, he’s respecting the commitments that he made to the public, he’s introducing these laws about crime and law and order before Christmas as he committed to, which is what Queenslanders voted for. I think he’ll show a real contrast to somebody like Jacinta Allan in Victoria who is destroying the economy there. I think he’s done a great job and he’s about to appoint Ministers and get Queensland back on track and get the economic productivity going and get people employed and young people with the ability again to buy a home and manage the economy well.
So, I wish him well and he’s off to a good start and that’s a great thing for Queensland.
RAY HADLEY:
I’ll leave you with this email from a listener – it’s a bit long, but this listener’s confused and I think you will be like me when you finish me telling you about it:
‘A few weeks ago the Prime Minister said that when interest rates go up, it’s always basically the Reserve Bank’s fault. A short time later, maybe a week later, at a press conference, he said that when the rates go down, that’s because of good Government management. A couple of weeks ago, the Prime Minister said, it was reported, he hoped the Reserve Bank would lower interest rates. Then a while ago, the Treasurer, Dr Chalmers said that the Russia-Ukraine war would put upward pressure on inflation and rates for a long time to come. Then a week or so ago, the same man said, ‘there’s light at the end of the tunnel’, referring to things getting better on the inflation and rates up front, I suppose. Must be a bloody long tunnel with a very dim light’, says Mark.
‘On the weekend, Jim Chalmers said ‘the Israeli attack on Iran would be bad for the economy, inflation with us for a long time’. Yesterday, Jim Chalmers said ‘the alleged reduction in inflation is all due to the wonderful Government policies’ and something to the effect ‘the economy is heading in the right direction’. Whatever that means. Presumably if inflation number yesterday was not down but up or sideways, it would be Israel’s fault, not Ukraine’s, nor his, nor his Government’s. I can’t keep up with all the positions. It’s like the Kama Sutra on steroids of politics and the economy. It can’t all be right. Can you help?’, says Mark.
I would say I can’t help and I’m pretty sure you can’t help either.
PETER DUTTON:
I think Mark’s got a very wise synopsis there, and I don’t even think Gough Albanese could answer it better than that. They’re all over the shop, they don’t have a clue what they’re doing and hopefully we can get the result we need at the next election and get our country back on track, Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay. Enjoy your trip on the West. We’ll talk to you next week.
PETER DUTTON:
Thank you mate. Take care.
[ends]