E&EO…………………………………………………………………………………………..
RAY HADLEY:
Minister, good morning.
PETER DUTTON:
Good morning, Ray.
RAY HADLEY:
Now first things first. I said in my intro, which you wouldn't have heard, that I've been trying to get Tony Abbott to do what Malcolm Fraser did yesterday for the last four years in Opposition and then as Prime Minister.
He always politely refused my request on air and off air to do what I said he should do and that's get down and dirty and call the Labor Party for what they are in relation to the hypocritical treatment of Parliament in many respects.
Now I'm just wondering whether the Prime Minister ….[indistinct]…. yesterday morning, but from the feedback I'm getting here, plenty of people are saying about time and I think you might be one of them.
PETER DUTTON:
Well Ray, I think you're spot on. I think Malcolm Turnbull yesterday was incredibly effective at calling out Bill Shorten for one reason and that is that what he was saying was exactly right.
I mean this is a bloke who pretends to be the friend of workers and yet he's flying around on the private jet with Dick Pratt, sitting at Raheen and as the Prime Minister pointed out yesterday, he's somebody different than what he makes himself out to be.
I think what people want in this country is somebody who's genuine, somebody who says what they believe and does what they say they'll do and with Bill Shorten this is a problem with his continual difficulty in Newspoll is that people just have a gut feel about him, just a hesitation to know that he's not a decent bloke.
There are good and bad people on both sides of politics, but there are plenty of people that on the quiet in the Labor Party will tell you about their experience with Bill Shorten and not too many of those stories are positive.
RAY HADLEY:
By the way, I had a seniors' moment. I inadvertently said Malcolm Fraser.
PETER DUTTON:
I didn't want to point it out.
RAY HADLEY:
No well please do. I need it in the twilight of my career and my diminishing years, I need all the help I can get so if I make a blue like that, you've got to pull me up. Malcolm Turnbull of course, but I was only just starting broadcasting when Malcolm Fraser was around, so a mistake …
PETER DUTTON:
…you don't want to date yourself by reverting back to the '70s and '80s.
RAY HADLEY:
I'm afraid I already have. There's not much I can do about that.
Now this story in the front page of The Herald today, you had cooperation in relation to visas from the Labor Party and now they've reneged on this. Just explain to my listeners exactly what they're trying to do and what they're stopping you from doing.
PETER DUTTON:
So Ray one of the things we're trying to do to grow the economy is increase the number of tourists who come here.
One of the big markets for us obviously is the Chinese tourist market and we want those people to come here because they spend money and that ultimately creates jobs and small businesses and bus lines and all sorts of things.
So we want to increase tourist numbers and the US had introduced a 10 year visa so that people from China could come to Australia as tourists – a maximum three months at a time – but they could come here multiple times over that 10 years instead of just a one-off trip and we introduced that 10 year visa just for the Chinese market to see how it would go and then the possibility of rolling it out to other markets.
The Labor Party had a look at a Bill that we put in place, they said it's fine. There was a Senate committee, said it was okay and that it should be voted for. Even the Shadow Minister said to me on Sunday night that they had no problem with this Bill and that they wanted one amendment which we ended up not agreeing to and now they've gone completely off the rails.
What we're asking for in the Bill is that once the visa has been issued to this Chinese tourist, if in two years' time or in three years' time we work out that they're on a terrorist list or they've committed a criminal offence, I want the ability to be able to cancel that visa and Labor's arguing against that. There's another aspect to the Bill …
RAY HADLEY:
…just interrupting you so I understand. The 10 year visa that is in operation, do you also wish to extend that to other nations apart from Chinese tourists?
PETER DUTTON:
We're going to see how it goes in China first and then you can expand it.
RAY HADLEY:
So it's just a matter of saying right you've got a 10 year visa, it's been issued and then all of a sudden whoa there, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's a warning, there's a flag here. We didn't know this when we gave you the 10 year visa so no, your visa is cancelled. That's all it is.
PETER DUTTON:
It's as simple as that. There's a second element to it which says that look if we had an Ebola crisis in China, for example, or there was bird flu, equally we could say instead of if we had thousands of people flooding to the airport to get out to come to Australia because they had a valid visa, again, I as the Minister, I want to be able to say that I'm not going to allow that entry and that we have to do it in an orderly way or we'd have to stop people coming from particular markets.
Again it's non-controversial, but what Labor's done is they've gone out there pretending that this is some grab for power because basically they want us to be talking about this and not the political thrashing that Bill Shorten got in the Parliament yesterday.
So it's the tackiest approach, but what it says about the Labor Party in my mind is firstly we know that they can't be trusted on borders, on stopping boats and protecting our borders, but now it says that they're playing games essentially with the national interest of this country because this is a national interest and a national security issue for us.
The Immigration Minister of the day must be able to cancel visas of people that could potentially pose a threat to our people or to our biosecurity and the fact that Labor's out there saying 'oh this is a Trump-like power for the Minister' – this was introduced before President Trump was elected, before he issued his Executive Order and I think Bill Shorten… honestly I believe that this is a real issue now for Bill Shorten's leadership.
RAY HADLEY:
Yeah, but just let's be clear – I mean Shayne Neumann's saying Labor won't support a Bill that could see whole groups of people targeted based on their place of birth, passport or religion.
But if we're specifically at this moment talking about Chinese nationals who get a 10 year visa because we want to encourage them to come here and spend their dollars here, I mean surely to goodness that's a good thing that we encourage people to come here over an extended period without jumping through hoops all the time, but if we find out they're crook people and we don't want them here, surely we can revoke the visa. I mean, where's the problem?
PETER DUTTON:
Well there is no problem and Labor, as I said, even as late as Sunday night in a conversation with me he said 'look mate, we've got no problems with the Bill, there's just one aspect that we want you to amend'. I said well let me have a look at it and I'll come back to you during the week. We went back to them on Monday or Tuesday, said no sorry we're not going to amend that aspect.
It had been through a Senate Inquiry. Labor had had their Senators trawling over it and they expressed no concern whatsoever, but as I say, it's been thrown out there to try and distract away from the shocker that Bill Shorten had yesterday.
RAY HADLEY:
Yeah, sure.
PETER DUTTON:
And you can't play politics with these national security issues.
RAY HADLEY:
Well surely - I mean, if you explained it as simply as you explained it to me, surely the crossbenchers can't have a problem with it?
PETER DUTTON:
Well I think the crossbenchers will support it, but up until now we just believed that the Labor Party would honour their word and support it, which means you don't have to have conversations with the crossbenchers, but we're happy to do that now because it's a sensible position.
Frankly I think Mr Shorten needs to come out and give Shayne Neumann a bit of a smack around the ears…
RAY HADLEY:
…well a haircut at least.
PETER DUTTON:
Sure.
RAY HADLEY:
Okay.
PETER DUTTON:
His hair's about as short as mine so maybe not.
RAY HADLEY:
Maybe ….[indistinct]…. for both of you.
The Australian newspaper's suggesting in exchange for the 1250 refugees the US agreed to take from Manus and Nauru that we're going to be resettling complicated caseloads from Costa Rica or Central America, where we don't know who they are, their health concerns, their character, their security.
Surely if we're waiting for them to check everyone that's going there we'll be checking everyone that's coming here, won't we?
PETER DUTTON:
We won't allow people into this country that don't meet our checks. We've got one of the most stringent security checks in the world and our nation's really a world leader in terms of security and intelligence checks that we conduct before people come here so there's no way in the world that we enter into any arrangement where we're putting our national security at risk.
What we want to do now is accept that the deal has been ratified by President Trump, for which we're very grateful and at an officials level now we want to work through the detail, individual cases, get people out of Manus and Nauru that Labor put on those two islands.
We've kept the boats stopped now for well over 900 days. We've not had any drownings at sea. We've got all the kids out of detention and closed 17 detention centres. We've got this right, but the threat still exists and this is a one-off deal with the US.
And the biggest threat is if Labor got back into power and the boats restarted, Manus and Nauru refill, the detention centres here reopen and there's no way in the world that the US would enter into a second agreement to remove people. Those people ultimately would come here which again would just start the problem in an even bigger fashion with the people smugglers and Labor needs to accept that. So that's where we're concentrating now.
RAY HADLEY:
You can't blame Donald Trump for trying because he's stolen an idea that I have suggested here mythically in the past so that - I was talking about when the swaps were being spoken about by the previous government - not your government - and I said 'yeah look, just imagine if someone said to us we'll take 10,000 of your people'.
Well the first thing you'd do, you'd go to Supermax in Goulburn and say 'well you 102 blokes, you're going there' and then we'd go to the other jails across the country and say 'you're going there'. And we'd say 'we've got 10,000 for you, they're on their way'.
We'd send the worst possible people if it meant we were getting rid of them. So in the same vein, the Americans are saying why don't you take a few from Guantanamo Bay? That won't happen obviously.
PETER DUTTON:
No and as I say, we're not taking people that we believe wouldn't pass security checks or that would pose a threat to our country and that's the abiding principle.
And similarly for the US, we're very clear in saying that we'll decide who comes to our country and if they're here and you're doing the wrong thing that we'll cancel your visa and deport you from our country.
That is a sovereign right and equally for the United States they have a vetting process that they're going through. They will ultimately give a tick or a cross to each of the individuals, and that will be an issue for them, and we would not put somebody up to the United States that we believed would be a national security threat to them.
The difficulty - don't forget, out of the 50,000 people that came on the boats, there are still close to 30,000 people living in our country now in Australia costing billions of dollars over a number of years and for some of those people, we still don't have proper identification of those individuals. I mean, Labor allowed these people out into the community and we are working through those individual cases now. So the legacy of that period of failure, I mean, it lasts for years and years and costs the taxpayer billions of dollars when we could be spending that money on helping pensioners or helping people with child care or whatever the case may be.
That's the real frustration in the cost as well as the human cost of losing control of your borders.
RAY HADLEY:
Just finally, on a lighter note, you sit I think to the right of Barnaby Joyce. Did I see you?
PETER DUTTON:
No, I'm a bit further down, down to the left. So I sit to the left of Scott Morrison.
RAY HADLEY:
Oh so you're on the other side. Ok. Well, all the vision I've seen this morning concentrated on the Prime Minister and Barnaby. I just thought you might need to check with him whether he actually wet himself yesterday.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, what [laughs] … my view is that …
RAY HADLEY:
…because he seemed to lose control at different stages with laughter and he was doubled over with laughter and then he went red in the face and I thought well he could have a problem here, poor old Barnaby. You know.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, the relief for me is that there are three people who sit between Barnaby Joyce and me so at some stage …
RAY HADLEY:
Because he sticks people in the ribs. He's one of those blokes when someone's telling a joke. He's like oh, what about that one! Here give it to him, yeah, parasite, how good's that!
PETER DUTTON:
And the good thing about Barnaby is that he comes to Question Time without having had a couple of beers so you can only imagine him on a Friday night after a couple of beers.
RAY HADLEY:
That might be a go! Why don't we open a bar in Parliament at Question Time and let everyone just rip and tear?
PETER DUTTON:
That's it. But the good thing – the point I was going to make – the good thing is that because there are three people that sit between Barnaby and I, I'm just assuming at some stage when he needs mouth to mouth that somebody else can get to him before I do because ..
RAY HADLEY:
…Morrison will be there. So it's a bit like the Alan Jones building here. I insisted they install a defibrillator between the two studios in case something happens to him and my future depends on him greatly and so …
PETER DUTTON:
…giving mouth to mouth to Barnaby Joyce, you know I'd do anything for him, but geez, I'd have to …
RAY HADLEY:
You wouldn't take one for the team?
PETER DUTTON:
I just hope the ambos are quick on the scene, that's all I'm saying.
RAY HADLEY:
Anyway, I keep laughing at him when I see him laughing. He really is enjoying it.
PETER DUTTON:
He's a great bloke, he really is. He's down to earth, he listens to people's concerns and I think he's part of a great team with Malcolm Turnbull and I think Malcolm yesterday showed some fire in the belly that people have wanted to see for a long time and he called Bill Shorten out which Shorten deserved to be called out, because he is a fake and I think people saw the sort of tenacity and drive in the Prime Minister that some had questioned for a time, but I think it was a gutsy performance and I think he showed that he wanted to fight for our country.
RAY HADLEY:
I'm getting emails from conservatives who aren't fans saying about time. Okay. We'll talk next week. Thanks for your time.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks mate, cheers.