Subjects: Visit to Adelaide; MYEFO; Labor’s cost of living crisis; Bali Five return to Australia; the Victorian Labor Government’s slow response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Australia; Labor’s energy policy shambles; a cheaper, cleaner, and more consistent energy plan for Australia.
E&OE.
NICOLLE FLINT:
Well, good morning everyone. I’m absolutely delighted to have the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, here with me again in Boothby for his third visit to see me in my wonderful local community.
We’ve had a great visit here this morning at Dematec, which was founded by one of my local residents, Mark Stevens, in 1990. We have seen practical technology and then the translation of that using the very latest software and the cloud and digital technology. It is absolutely amazing what my small and medium family businesses do here, and everything that I do every day, the reason I work so hard and that Peter Dutton does as well, is to support our incredible small, family businesses and my local community, my local residents. We are determined to get our national economy back on track so wonderful family businesses like Dematec can thrive as they have in the past, and so my local families and my local residents can afford to live the lives that they want to live, not worried about this terrible cost of living crisis that we’re seeing under Anthony Albanese.
So Peter, thank you so much for being here once again. It’s always great to see you and I’m so excited to be part of your team.
PETER DUTTON:
Nicolle, thank you very much.
Firstly, thank you very much to Mark and the team here. It’s an innovative company. They’re helping small businesses, bigger businesses, find efficiencies within their own model, and what they’re doing here in concert with the Defence Force and other big primes within that network, is quite remarkable. It’s an overnight success story, a couple of decades in the making, three decades in the making! It’s quite phenomenal, and it’s a great credit to Mark and the staff for the culture that they’ve created here. Of course, it’s reflective of many small businesses around the country, where they’re involved in those contracts, they’re involved in negotiations, involved in trying to find just a little bit of efficiency for a company that can make them that much more competitive for when they’re tendering for the next contract.
So I think we should, as Australians, be incredibly proud of what is going on in relatively humble surrounds, in sheds like this, around the country. People who are really world leading in the technology that they’re embracing, and we want to make sure that we have an economy which is helping them grow, not contract.
As we’re seeing from the Treasurer at the moment, he’s lost control of the budget. This much is obvious. He has blamed Putin, he’s blamed Trump, he’s blamed Ukraine, he’s blamed Israel, he’s blamed everybody but himself, and Australian families know that it’s taken Labor two and a half years to severely damage the economy, which is why they’re finding it more and more difficult when they go to the supermarket to pay for their groceries, paying more and more for their electricity and for their gas. The Government promised on 97 occasions that power prices would come down by $275, instead, they’ve gone up by $1,000 and there is no end in sight, because the Government’s energy policy is damaging the economy.
We see from the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, them thrashing around day-to-day not knowing what to do. This Prime Minister is the weakest Prime Minister we’ve had since Federation, and when you can’t make the tough decisions, or when you can’t make the decisions that are in our country’s best interests, everyday Australians suffer, and that’s exactly what’s happening under this hapless Treasurer and Prime Minister at the moment.
I’m happy to take any questions.
QUESTION:
The Treasurer has said that the extra billions of dollars in spending we’ll see in the budget was unavoidable. Do you agree with that? If not, where Would you be cutting spending?
PETER DUTTON:
I just think that’s at odds with the economists at the moment. The Reserve Bank Governor has pointed out very clearly to the Treasurer that if you continue the reckless spending, inflation’s going to stay higher for longer, which means interest rates stay higher for longer. Australian families who have had 12 interest rate increases under this Government don’t see any relief in sight.
Interest rates have already started to come down in Canada, in the United States, in New Zealand and in the UK. Now, they should have already come down here, but they haven’t because as the Reserve Bank Governor points out, the Government continues to spend, and as we’re seeing in Victoria, the Labor Party there is destroying the local economy and it’s exactly what Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers are doing at the federal level as well.
QUESTION:
Isn’t that spending needed to help families with cost of living pressures?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, there’s some spending, of course, which is necessary, but there’s a lot of spending which the Government has created, which is what has driven inflation. Ask yourself this question; are you better off today than you were two and a half years ago? And heaven knows how bad it will be in three years time if we end up with a Labor-Greens minority Government. Every political commentator at the moment is pointing out that the best outcome for the Labor Party after the next election is that they’re in minority Government. They can’t form a majority Government, and that would be damaging to the economy.
If you think you’re paying more for your electricity now, if you think that there’s a prospect of blackouts and brownouts and you’re paying more for gas and more for groceries, wait and see what happens after a second term of an Albanese Government. I just don’t think Australians can afford another three years of Anthony Albanese and Labor.
QUESTION:
You touched on the spending that’s driving inflation. What would you be cutting then, to help bring inflation down?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, we’ll make announcements in relation to our programmes closer to the election, and it’ll be dependent on the economic circumstances. But what I know is having been Assistant Treasurer Peter Costello in Government, and worked on the Expenditure Review Committee for a number of years, the Coalition will always better manage the economy than Labor. We’re much better at managing money than Labor. Labor always tax and spend, and then when they run out of money, they tax more, and when they continue to spend they drive up inflation. That’s part of the problem at the moment.
We’ve had three budgets from this hapless Treasurer. Every decision he’s taken has hurt Australian families and small businesses. We’ve had a three fold increase in the number of manufacturing businesses that have closed over the last two years, and when you compare us to our international competitors, or comparable economies, interest rates have already come down, but they’re not coming down here. I want them to come down – I think they should have come down by now – but the Prime Minister and the Treasurer continue to ignore the advice of the Reserve Bank Governor.
QUESTION:
On the return of the Bali prisoners – the Bali Five. The Prime Minister says this is just simply an act of compassion from the Indonesian President. Is that plausible? And is it possible that maybe a future Dutton Government might owe a favour [inaudible] to the Indonesian Government for this?
PETER DUTTON:
I certainly think if your question is about the transparency from the Prime Minister, then yes, I agree that the Prime Minister should be open and honest and transparent with the Australian people. From a personal perspective, for those individuals and their families, you can understand that they’ll be overjoyed to be back in Australia for Christmas. But as a police officer, I can tell you I went to many scenes where people had overdosed, or people had committed crimes because they needed to feed a drug habit, and when you look at break and enters into businesses or into homes generally, that’s because people are looking for cash or looking for equipment and belongings that they can hock and get the cash to buy drugs.
These people aren’t national heroes, they’re not political captives, they have been serving a sentence because according to the laws of Indonesia, they broke those laws and they were imposed with a heavy penalty.
I just think it should be a very, very significant message to every young Australian – whether you’re travelling overseas, or if you’re just staying here in Australia – that drugs, the use of drugs, the use of the distribution of drugs, there’s no good that comes from it.
Heroin is a particularly evil drug, as we know. It’s mind altering, and 20 years ago, if you think back, the deaths from heroin and the impact that that had on our society are profound. There are many families who didn’t get their 20 year old back at all, because of a drug overdose from having taken heroin, and that’s something we should always remind ourselves of.
QUESTION:
Victoria has announced a ban on flags and symbols of terror organisations and also the use of face masks at protests. What do you make of the changes?
PETER DUTTON:
I just can’t understand why it’s taken the Allan Government so long to react to the reasonable requests, particularly of Jewish Australians who have been treated in the most deplorable way. It’s unimaginable that we would allow people of any other background, history, religion to be treated the way that the Jewish people have been treated.
When you look at Jacinta Allan, when you look at Anthony Albanese, sitting on their hands for the last 14 months, of course it’s escalated and it was always going to. They were warned about this at the time. If you allow these lunatics to continue on their protests at university campuses and you allow them to spew out their hatred and affiliate with a listed terrorist organisation, and there to be no consequence, well, of course we’re going to see the sort of outcomes that we’ve seen – which most recently has culminated in the firebombing of a synagogue in Melbourne, as you know.
The firebombing, or the arson attacks, the graffiti, the doxing, the fact that Jewish schools now have armed guards outside at schools where children are attending, and this has all been allowed to fester on the Prime Minister’s watch. Now, the Premier of Victoria says that she needs to do something about it. Well, of course she does and she should have done it 14 months ago. I think Victorians at the moment are completely and utterly amazed at how bad the Labor Government is in Victoria and they see the same traits, frankly, in Anthony Albanese that they see Jacinta Allan as well.
QUESTION:
Just on nuclear policy, the Government claims that your approach would cost Australians $4 trillion in lost growth by 2050. What is your response?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, it’s just comical. I mean Jim Chalmers is like some sort of comedy routine where whatever he says I would fact check. He refuses to release any of the detail in relation to that claim. I’d make this point; Frontier Economics has done work for the South Australian Government. You will have seen the footage of Danny Price standing up with Premier Malinauskas because of the work that he did, or Frontier Economics did, for the South Australian Labor Government, and you’ve seen the work that they’ve done for the Federal Government as well.
Frontier Economics is the most credible modeller in the country when it comes to energy. They released two reports. The first report said that 100 per cent renewables only policy from Labor wasn’t going to cost $122 billion, as the Prime Minister claimed, it was going to cost five times that, closer to $600 billion, and that’s a conservative estimate. Now, the Prime Minister, Chris Bowen, Jim Chalmers, never attacked that policy, never attacked that piece of work at all, and it demonstrates I think that Frontier Economics is beyond reproach.
Frontier Economics released the second model, which is to look at what we’re proposing in relation to a zero emissions nuclear technology so that we can get electricity prices down, we can keep the lights on and we can decarbonise as well.
The work of Frontier says that over time electricity prices will be 44 per cent cheaper under our policy than Labor’s. And just to provide, I think, another point of clarification here; in the United States, the energy agency, when it contrasted an economy which is renewables only, compared to one which is renewables plus nuclear, which is our plan, it’s a 37 per cent cheaper electricity cost under the renewables and nuclear policy. So, 37 in the US, 44 on the modelling here, and somehow Jim Chalmers wants you to believe that by throwing out this red herring that he’s got credibility. He just doesn’t. He promised a $275 cut in electricity, it’s never materialised and Australian families are suffering today because Jim Chalmers, along with Anthony Albanese, are probably the worst duo in our country’s history since Gough Whitlam – let’s be very clear about it.
QUESTION:
Why didn’t you model the impact of your nuclear plan on residential power bills? And is that something you’re willing to consider?
PETER DUTTON:
Well again, we didn’t do the modelling, it’s not a Liberal Party document. I think it’s really important to point this out; it’s Frontier Economics. They refused to take any money when we asked them to model our plan, because they are fiercely independent. They have put together a report which provides a like for like comparison with the Government’s policy. So where an element has been included in the Government’s costings, it’s been included in the costings for our policy. So you’re comparing apples with apples. That’s why the first report was important, because the Government wants you to pretend that over an 80 year period, an offshore wind turbine which has only got a 19 to 20 year lifespan, they only want you to take into account the first life cost of that particular asset, not the subsequent three that will get you to the 80 years.
For nuclear technology, it’s cheaper electricity because you amortise the cost – you spread the cost out over a 60 to 80 year period and probably closer to a century with the technology developments that we’re seeing. It’s why 19 of the top 20 economies in the world have embraced nuclear, or have signed up to it. It’s why there are 32 countries who are using nuclear at the moment and 50 have committed to do so, and there are over 400 reactors in the world.
Now, the Prime Minister signed up to the nuclear submarine, which is going to be housed here at Osborne and also in Henderson in WA. Peter Malinauskas is a very strong supporter of the nuclear submarine technology and says to all South Australians that it’s very safe. Why would we believe Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese against all of those world leaders who have looked at the latest technology and embraced it? If you look at what Trudeau has to say, or Macron, or Keir Starmer, all of them have been very clear; we are not meeting our net zero by 2050 targets without the use of nuclear power.
This juvenile attack that we’re seeing from a Government that’s floundering at the moment, in relation to energy, in relation to economic management, they can’t be taken seriously. Let’s have an adult debate, and I think when you look at it intellectually, it’s very hard to understand when 90 per cent of baseload power comes out of the system by 2034 over the next decade, it’s not going to be replaced by green hydrogen. Okay? It’s not commercially viable. It may be in time, but it’s not now, and that’s why we’re seeing warnings this day that we might have further blackouts in New South Wales and potentially Victoria over Christmas as well.
Why are we de-industrialising? I want our economy to grow, I want more jobs, I want this business to expand, I want our economy to expand, not contract, and at the moment we’ve had seven consecutive quarters of household recession. So families are going backwards, and the Government can prop up the employment figures with public servants being employed, but people know that there are a lot of families going into this Christmas who are doing it tougher than ever because of the last two and a half years of decisions of Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese.
QUESTION:
And on your nuclear plan, how much gas will be needed in the domestic market in the short term, and where will you get that gas from?
PETER DUTTON:
There’s a lot of gas that’s required in the short term and we’ve spoken about Narrabri before, we’ve spoken about discovering more fields, and we are strongly supportive of condensing the timelines, as we’ve said before, because we need the gas. We have a natural competitive advantage, and in South Australia at the moment, you’re paying up to 56 cents a kilowatt hour, in Wyoming and Tennessee, where they have a similar mix of renewables and nuclear that we’re proposing, they’re paying 18 cents. So you’re paying three times the cost for electricity here in South Australia as people are paying in their households and their small businesses, in jurisdictions where they’re using renewables and the nuclear in the same proportion that we’re talking about.
So gas is going to be incredibly important for peaking and it’s going to be important for the grid to operate, and we’ve been very open about that. I think Peter Malinauskas and others have pointed that out as well.
QUESTION:
Your experience as a Queensland police officer, and what you spoke about before, do you believe the Bali Five, all of them should have been pardoned?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, that’s been a decision that the Prime Minister has taken, and obviously he’s been negotiating with President Prabowo. President Prabowo, I know well, and is a very good friend of Australia. He would have naturally been generous and he would have demonstrated a genuine clemency and he would have understood what the Prime Minister was proposing.
So the Australians are back, we welcome them home, but there should be a very clear message to every young Australian; these people have had 20 years of their lives lost, and don’t put yourself in that same position and don’t be selling drugs and involved in outlaw motorcycle gangs and others – the biggest distributors of amphetamines in our country – because ultimately there are young people who lose their lives as a result of that.
Thank you very much.
[ends]