Subjects: Department of Home Affairs; Labor trashing border protection policies.
EO&E...........................................................................................................................................
CHRIS KENNY:
Peter Dutton, thanks for joining us.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks Chris.
CHRIS KENNY:
I want to come to offshore processing and this plan for changes to the medevac rules, but before we get to that, a couple of stories that have come up today. One is this revelation that your Department – the Home Affairs Department – has paid over $130,000 to various celebrities to give motivational speeches to the bureaucrats. What's going on there?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Chris, the Department is under attack from all sorts of advocates, left-wing groups, people that are involved in all sorts of causes online and the other aspect is that Home Affairs – I mean not just the AFP or Border Force – I mean Home Affairs is a big Department; so these figures always look worse than they are because they span across the country.
I mean we've got people all over the world. It's a big organisation in Home Affairs and frankly, I mean the article was written by somebody who is an advocate, not a journalist and she takes any opportunity possible to take a swipe at the Department. It reflects I think sometimes more on these journalists than it does the Department, but hopefully they can spend money well and I want to see as much money spent on the frontline as possible.
CHRIS KENNY:
Sure; but taxpayers get pretty annoyed about this. It wouldn't be happening only in your Department. There's people like Magda Szubanskiti, Casey Donovan, Dr Karl, giving speeches or hosting talking sessions with bureaucrats about various diversity issues, race issues, gender, sexuality. It's a big agenda and taxpayers might wonder why on earth we're paying bureaucrats to waste their time and our money on this sort of stuff.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Chris I've certainly not got myself involved in any of these apologist causes frankly. I mean the whole gender debate, I think in this country, is completely out of whack. Most Australians want to see no discrimination, want to see people treated equally, fairly regardless of their sex or race or religion and you're right both in corporate world and within the government sector, there's a lot of money that is spent that the public gets annoyed by. From my perspective, my direction always to the Department is to trim back as much as they can, spend money on frontline services because we've got a big task at airports, at seaports, on the borders, Federal Police, the rest of it. There's a lot of responsibility within the portfolio and the Secretary is aware of that and no doubt he gives that direction.
CHRIS KENNY:
The thing about this that strikes me though, a lot of the people who are getting the money from taxpayers are celebrities in other fields; they're singers, they're actors, they're TV celebrities. If they really cared about these issues, they really want to talk to people about racial or gender diversity, sexuality; surely they'd do it for nothing. Why do they need to get taxpayers' cash for it?
PETER DUTTON:
Well that is a very good question that I'm sure each of them in turn would be happy to answer if you ask them onto your program.
CHRIS KENNY:
Indeed. Well keeping on the theme of taxpayers' money, revelations in The Daily Telegraph and other News Corp papers today that refugees who have arrived in this country by boat, and others, who are on welfare courtesy of Australian taxpayers, have sent collectively a total of more than $5 million overseas. What's going on there?
PETER DUTTON:
It's pretty astounding Chris. People that have come by boat – as you say I mean there were 50,000 people who came on 800 boats when Labor was last in government; they're changing their policy now, so no doubt you would see the recommencement of boats if Bill Shorten is elected prime minister – and out of those people, we've got people who are claiming that they have no money, that they've come from war-torn countries, that they have been dispossessed of their wealth etc and somehow they've got access to money. There's a lot of investigation going on in relation to this very issue.
We've been very clear that we, yes, are a generous nation, we provide support – we have done for a long period of time – to people that are in need around the world. We settle people, we expect people to come here abide by our laws, work hard, take the opportunity given them. We're not going to be taken for a ride and regrettably there are a number of people that came in during Labor's period in government where we were completely and utterly played and we're seeing that in a number of these cases.
So I've asked the Department to look very closely at each individual case to make sure that if a prosecution can take place, it should. We don't know whether people have been involved in criminal activity, whether people are laundering money or whether it's legitimate transfer of wealth otherwise. So there's a big issue to play out here.
CHRIS KENNY:
Yeah you're talking about a few dozen cases here and the maths on it suggests that on average out of those people, they're sending $100,000 overseas in recent years. Now, presumably there's no way of knowing they've been able to save that money through their welfare payments. Presumably they've either gotten that money through other means or had access to cash overseas.
PETER DUTTON:
That's exactly right. I mean people are either…if you're on welfare for the last three years, you claim that you've come here not with a dollar to your name, you don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to be transferring into offshore accounts. So people have either gained access to wealth that they already had, they've come into wealth somehow or it's through ill-gotten gains.
As I say, our refugee program is for those who are most in need, people who are being persecuted, people who are in the Yazidis case, for example, or Christians elsewhere in the Middle East at the moment that are facing persecution, they're the people that we offer support to. We're not a light touch anymore under this Government and we're not going to allow those people that have played the system, that have got here through lies or through the peddling of mistruths otherwise, to continue to game the system. We've been very clear about that.
We've cut back welfare for a significant number of people that weren't entitled to it and again, we shouldn't apologise for that. Migrants have come to our country over a long period of time – the majority of whom have worked hard, they've educated their kids, they've abided by the law, they've created wealth for their own families – but we're not going to allow the system to be gamed by people that don't have that good intent at heart.
CHRIS KENNY:
Well, of course, it's worth pointing out that you could be a refugee and still have significant wealth overseas, but in that case you shouldn't be…if you have access to that wealth you shouldn't be getting welfare from Australia or accepting welfare from Australia. Presumably you're going to be tracking down, investigating all these cases. Will we find out the results at some stage?
PETER DUTTON:
Yes, I've got no problem with releasing the results at all and you're right, I mean people who have wealth can, of course, be subject to religious persecution, for example, and they wouldn't be excluded from our program, but the reality is that the vast, vast majority of people that would come under the refugee and humanitarian program would come with limited means, if any at all so.
So we need to be realistic about the composition within that group and if people have committed offences, if they've done the wrong thing, then they can expect to face the same consequences that Australians would.
CHRIS KENNY:
Alright. Let's switch to the changes that are being promoted by Independents and Greens, and Labor are supporting them, these legislative amendments that will be put to Parliament next year to make it easier for people in offshore detention on Nauru or Manus Island to get medevacked back to Australia. Just before we talk about how that's going to play out, how many…this has all started really from a concern about children on Nauru. How many children are remaining on Nauru at this stage?
PETER DUTTON:
Chris, there are 10 children on Nauru at the moment; four are on their way to the United States and we've got six kids who are part of family units where there might be some difficulty – either Dad's been charged with a criminal offence or the child won't leave unless the Aunty and Uncle can accompany as well as the parents – so they are difficult cases. But David Coleman the Immigration Minister obviously is working through each of those.
By way of example, there was a case a few weeks ago where the doctors ordered the evacuation of a person off Nauru, came down to Australia, underwent medical attention and checks at the hospital and after having spent over $100,000 on the air ambulance transfer of that person from Nauru to Australia, we find out that the Australian doctor assessment of that person is that that they had constipation.
So let's be realistic; there are many activist doctors in this space, we need to be very careful again about the system being gamed. Ultimately people have paid money to come to our country. We already do medical transfers. We already provide tens of millions of dollars of Australian Government support to upgrading medical facilities, fly-in-fly-out doctors and people receive the requisite medical attention that they need, but there are many, many games being played here and I don't think Australian taxpayers would support that for one moment.
CHRIS KENNY:
Well it's so obvious isn't it? The numbers have been out there for so long. Many people in the media refuse to report them, but the last I saw publicly put out there by you and your Department was that 490 people had been medevacked from Nauru back to Australia and of those 460 were still here, of course, but presumably because they've taken legal action while in Australia to stay here. So obviously there's an incentive to either self-harm or confect some sort of medical condition to get to Australia.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Chris sadly you will see self-harm attempts under the policy that Mr Shorten's proposing, that's the reality now.
One of the reasons I feel so strongly about this and people sometimes say; oh you're too hard or too tough…but I haven't had a call from the Operation Sovereign Borders Commander at two o'clock in the morning to say that they're pulling kids out of the water or a boat's overturned. I haven't put a single child onto Nauru. I've closed, along with Scott Morrison, 17 detention centres here in Australia. We've got the children out of detention – Labor had put 8,000 kids into detention – I just don't want to see us go back to those days.
At the moment of course, and you see that in a speech today from Bill Shorten that he believes he's already been elected prime minister, if you believe the polls, he will be elected prime minister in May of next year and we've spent the last five or six years doing pretty hard yards to clean up Labor's mess. It's not finalised yet. We're down to 480 people or so on Nauru and a little more than that up on Manus. We've got 494 people or so off to the United States – the deal there was for 1,250 people in total to go – but we've now got 90 people who have been offered positions or were on their way to a pathway to the United States, who are now saying that they won't go.
CHRIS KENNY:
It's extraordinary. What are the reasons they're giving for not wanting to go to the US?
PETER DUTTON:
Well some of it is quite appalling frankly. I mean people who were saying that they've gone to the United States, they didn't realise that they had to find a job there, they've got friends and family who have moved to Australia, the welfare system is pretty good – as it is of course in New Zealand – and they didn't realise it was going to be that tough to find a job in the US.
I mean millions of people have found their way from all over the world to the United States to start a new life in an amazing country. So I mean we just need to be honest and open about what we're dealing with here. This has been a very difficult issue to deal with and if you see people flood off Nauru and Manus in the first couple of weeks of a Shorten government, I promise you the boats will restart, the deaths at sea will commence again.
We've worked hard to get to the position where we are. We do medevac people off when people need that medical attention. We fly specialists onto Nauru. We take people to Taiwan to the International Hospital there for medical attention, because as you say, once people are brought to Australia, the lawyers here acting for them go straight to the Federal Court and they prevent us, at least in the first instance, from sending those people back once the medical attention has been provided.
The Operation Sovereign Borders model has only worked because of three reasons; the turning back boats where it's safe to do so – you've only got limited capacity to do that – you've got the Operation Sovereign Borders second leg, which is offshore detention – and Labor is promising to dismantle that with this medical transfer model – and the Temporary Protection Visa which replaced permanent protection visas – Labor's already announced that they will abolish that.
So I don't understand why they need to dismantle the model which has worked well and Mr Shorten will carry the day in the conference, Left of the Labor Party won't succeed in overturning formally, but as Kevin Rudd did, when Bill Shorten is elected next May – if that's what's to happen – I promise you, when they dismantle Operation Sovereign Borders, we'll see deaths at sea again, you'll see kids back in detention and all of these people, advocates with big hearts who think they're doing the right thing now, I think will rue the day that Bill Shorten is elected prime minister if that's what happens.
CHRIS KENNY:
It would be the gravest and most avoidable tragedy if that were ever to occur. I'm staggered by those numbers that you started off with there Peter Dutton, you've got less than 1,000 people now in offshore detention on those numbers, fairly evenly split between Nauru and Manus Island and yet you've got some hundreds of positions yet to be filled with the United States. Just how close are you now, can you give any idea in months or years before you've got everybody resettled or accommodated as best they can?
PETER DUTTON:
Well Chris, we're well on our way. So within those numbers we don't only just have people who have been found to be refugees, but people that have been found not to be refugees.
Now, on the United Nations figures, there's north of 65 million people in the world at the moment who are not refugees or people that would seek to come to a country like ours, so we need to be very careful about the messages that Labor's sending out here.
At the moment when Bill Shorten is jumping up saying that people will go automatically to New Zealand, the people smugglers and people are willing to pay money to get onto boats, frankly see Australia in New Zealand as the same end destination, they see it with a good health system, a good safe society, good education, good housing, good welfare system. So again, let's be sensible about the messages that people are hearing at the moment.
They're pulling out of going to the United States because they believe that if there is a change of government here, they will go to either Australia or New Zealand. The United States has been very clear that if a new boat arrives, including with children on it, that those people won't be eligible to go within the 1,250. So again, 1,250 doesn't go very far if you've got 50,000 arriving and we've been able to get people off in a way that hasn't restarted boats. We've done it without fanfare, we've been criticised, we haven't answered the critics. The fact is the conditions on Nauru and Manus are very different to that which the advocates would have you believe…
CHRIS KENNY:
…absolutely…
PETER DUTTON:
…to be the case and, again, this is why we've had to be tough, but at the same time we've got kids off, we've got them out of detention, we've done it in a compassionate way, we don't get credit for it and we don't seek the limelight, but we do it in a way that doesn't restart boats or send a green light and at the moment, all that anybody is hearing out of Bill Shorten's mouth, is that he will be worse than Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd when it comes to border protection.
[ends]