Subjects: Apex Gang; 501 Character Cancellations; United States resettlement of refugees from Nauru and PNG; Syrian Refugees; Leadership.

E&EO…………………………………………………………………………………………..

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

Our special guest this morning is the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Peter Dutton. Good morning Peter.

PETER DUTTON: 

Good morning Eddie.

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

Welcome to the show.

PETER DUTTON: 

Thanks mate.

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

Peter, this is a very tough portfolio you've got. You're cheered by some and condemned by others on basically every decision that you make at the moment. You've just recently deported another alleged member of what we call down here the APEX gangs. What is the Government's position at the moment on gang members and kicking them out of Australia?

PETER DUTTON: 

Well Eddie, for people that are committing violence, I mean it doesn't matter whether they're part of a gang or not, if you come to our country on a visa, you're coming here as a guest, we expect you to abide by the laws and if you don't abide by the laws then you can expect to be deported and we've done that in a record number of about 2000 people over the course of the last couple of years. We've really ramped it up. And there are millions of people that come to our country; 99 per cent of them do the right thing. We welcome them, we're a generous country, but for those people who seek to do harm against Australians then they should expect to have their visas cancelled.

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

Do we have a benchmark Peter at the moment as to what's the level that sees you getting rissoled out of Australia?

PETER DUTTON: 

There are a couple of ways. So if somebody's sentenced to 12 months or more, if they're a member of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, if they've been involved in sexual offences against children for example, then there's some automatic cancellation of visas and then there's ministerial discretion beyond that. So we can look at particular cases and make a decision about whether or not we're going to cancel those visas.

MICK MOLLOY:

As a Richmond supporter can I ask you to make a royal pardon please for Dusty Martin's father? Is there a way we can organise this?

PETER DUTTON: 

That's a half-hearted effort there Mick.

MICK MOLLOY:

I mean it.

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

What about if he leaves Richmond at the end of the year?

MICK MOLLOY:

Throw the book at him – never to return to these shores. Can I ask though seriously when you say we can get rid of these guys who come to this country, is it possible to set something up by saying if you come to Australia and you get a visa, if you commit some crime within a certain period of time or is it one strike and you're out, that you're put on the plane, it's a return airfare?

PETER DUTTON: 

Well it can be as I say if you meet one of those criteria and there are ways that we're looking at perhaps the run up to citizenship to have a look at people's backgrounds beyond their criminal history. So this is around the Australian values. So we're saying if somebody wants to become an Australian citizen, bearing in mind there are 65 million people in the world at the moment that would want to come to a great country like ours, we want to take the best of those people. So if people are abiding by the law, if they're sending their kids to school, if they're learning English language, if they're integrating into the community, they're the sorts of tests that we could look at to determine whether or not those people are going to make the best Australians and that's a debate that's going on at the moment whether we make those changes.

LUKE DARCY:       

Peter your background is as a police officer in Queensland for nine years. You know this stuff intimately before you joined the world of politics.

There's a sense in Melbourne that – and we're not alarmists at all on this show, but perhaps law and order's out of control. We had Andrew Rule, one of the most respected journalists in this town, telling a personal story of being attempted carjacking on his way home from Geelong in recent weeks. We hear carjacking stories every other day as though we're living in Johannesburg. Is there a solution to this that we can fix it in Melbourne?

PETER DUTTON: 

Well mate it's pretty hard for people to accept this. I mean we're in Australia in the 21st century and we're wanting to go about our lives in a lawful way. We want our kids to go to the park, we want to take them out to the movies or to a shopping centre and to do it peacefully. I mean that's why people come to this country.

So there is a law and order issue in Melbourne. There’s no surprise in that. The question is whether or not the police can step up their response. The question is whether the Government will sanction that response because as we saw in New York, as we've seen in other states, as we saw in Queensland when we had Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Members, the biggest distributors of drugs in the country, dancing on tables in restaurants, up-ending tables, disrupting families that were just out there with their kids having a meal, the Government came down hard and they stamped it out. And so there does need to be a stronger response in my judgement and if people realise that they are going to go to jail, they are going to have bail denied and they are going to be able to face consequences or serious jail time if they commit an offence, you will see a reduction in crime and that's been proven the world over.

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

Peter one of the other issues that's been a big one has been Australians and they could be Australian citizens who decide to go and fight for ISIL and then return to Australia at some stage. How are we going on that, is it starting to drop off? And it's a multi-prong question this one because one of the problems we have - and we were talking about this before you came on, is that you get a lot of young kids these days coming in and the festering sore - well the sense of adventure even while they sit around maybe without jobs, without education, without job prospects and they think well, we want to get into this. Let's go back to the home country and get into something pretty exciting.

PETER DUTTON: 

And I think that's right. I mean it's true the world over, but it's amazing that we have a higher per capita rate of young people going off to fight in Syria than say even the United States.

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

So we have their parents come here to get away from a war zone and the kids want to go back to get into a war zone.

PETER DUTTON: 

Well this is the thing you know, their parents come out, they want to escape all of that and you find in the second or third generation that they're the ones that decide to go off and fight. And they've been given the opportunity of a good education, they fall into the wrong crowd, they're being indoctrinated online, combination of a fairly passive welfare system, all of that is a breeding ground for discontent and for corruption of young minds. They head off and sadly many of them were killed in the theatre of war and many of them won't come back and their families are destroyed, their parents distraught forever, so tragic on every level.

MICK MOLLOY:

Peter I want to ask you about the detention centres. The immigration portfolio is for tough hombres that yourself and Scott Morrison have had it. It's bipartisan. I don't know, no one seems to have the answer. Labor's policy's no different to yours. It just seems there must be a more humanitarian way for Australia to negotiate a very sensitive and a very tough edge. I think Australia's just become a meaner country somehow. Is there not some way, some bipartisan way everyone can get together and work out a better result for people who are living in terrible, terrible circumstances overseas under the auspices of this country and this Government?

PETER DUTTON: 

Well Mick the problem is, for example, if you said we'll take a million people a year across the seas, for example, those people who arrive by boats we'll take a million. What do you do with a million in first and the second million people - the number of people who come through? I mean there are 65 million in the world who are displaced now and whilst...

MICK MOLLOY:

Yeah, just see what's happening in Europe. There’s millions being taken in by countries.

PETER DUTTON: 

And the difficulty is that if countries lose control of their borders as we've seen in parts of Europe, you get crime, you get the sort of spikes in rapes and assaults and social disruption that we've seen in parts of Europe that we don't want.

So we run on a per capita basis one of the most generous settlement programmes in the world, but you've got to do it in an orderly way and you can't have people drowning at sea.

The people smugglers in Indonesia or Sri Lanka or Vietnam take money off these people. This is just one line of business right. They're trading in people, they're trading in guns, they're trading in prostitutes, drugs, whatever. They don't care once they've received this money whether these people go to the bottom of the ocean or not.

So we've been able to close down 17 detention centres in this country. We've got no kids in detention. We've had no drownings at sea and yet we've still been able to bring a record number of refugees into our country, but by plane. And if we do that we can offer them the employment, the education, the housing, the start that they need in a new country like ours. Because if people are coming in in a disorderly way they do lose their lives at sea and that is a greater tragedy frankly than people being in detention and we've struck this deal with the US to get people off Nauru and Manus as quickly as possible...

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

Is that deal going to be honoured, Peter?

PETER DUTTON: 

Yeah it will, mate. And I think President Obama was generous in the way in which he put the deal together. President Trump's continued it and we're appreciative of that.

MICK MOLLOY:

And we're going to take some Puerto Rican refugees, is this part of the deal?

PETER DUTTON: 

Well there was a discussion earlier in September at the United Nations where the US had a problem with some people coming from South America. We want to work with the US to help them, as a number of other countries committed to as well, but for us our priority is to get these people off as quickly as possible.

MICK MOLLOY:

Is that part of the one deal?

PETER DUTTON: 

It's a separate arrangement and that's appropriate. But it's part of a broader relationship. There's a lot that we do for the US. We've got troops who are fighting in Syria and Iraq at the moment…

MICK MOLLOY:

Yes, agreed.

PETER DUTTON: 

…we swap information, intelligence gather, intelligence exchange, all of that. So it's a pretty broad relationship.

LUKE DARCY:       

And Peter is the tactic involved in us taking Puerto Ricans and the Americans taking those that we have on Manus Island – is that because we don't want to open the doors to near neighbours, quid pro quo situation so that it does look like the door is still shut in Australia for people trying to get here by boat and the same for Puerto Ricans trying to get across into the American border, therefore it's a fair swap, if you like and at the same time trying to keep up those barriers?

PETER DUTTON: 

Well the US doesn't want to create a pull factor from South America.

LUKE DARCY:

Yeah.

PETER DUTTON: 

And we don't want to create a pull factor from our region either. So you've got to get the balance right. And for us, as I say, we bring people in the right way. And Syrians, for example, we've got about nine and a half thousand Syrians who have landed – you know, there are six and a half million Syrians who are displaced in Syria from the civil war there. We've taken more than almost any other country in the world.

MICK MOLLOY:

Peter, I'm hearing around the traps you're about to take a tilt at the top job.

PETER DUTTON: 

This explains the shaved head, Mick. Is this where you're headed? Are you going to say I'm trimming down?

MICK MOLLOY:

Are you ready to go? I mean, let's be honest – the bloke in there at the moment's looking a little lame, it could happen. There's a push, Cory Bernardi's leaving, they're rearranging the furniture, we need someone tougher. Are you putting the hand up? There's a bit of talk, Peter.

PETER DUTTON: 

I picked up a campaigning tip from you this morning actually, Mick. I walked in here and there was a promo board out the front with your old mugshot on there. It's a photo about ten years old, mate, I barely recognised you when I walked in the studio.

I love the way that Peter still calls it a mugshot.

MICK MOLLOY:

Would you canvas that? Is there – what do you have to say to that?

PETER DUTTON: 

Mate, I think the worst thing that we could do at the moment is change leaders so I think we back Malcolm Turnbull. Malcolm Turnbull has I think shown a bit of a fire in the belly in the last couple of weeks which people wanted to see. He's fighting for what he believes in. This big discussion about energy, electricity prices is a huge issue for families and small businesses and we back the leader and I think we can beat Bill Shorten at the next election.

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

Just needs to show a bit of fire in the Party Room occasionally Peter and see how we go.

MICK MOLLOY:

You're looking good. There's a lot of smart money out there Peter, just letting you know.

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

One last one Peter. A lot of people are hearing this for the first time about deportation. Can we get a strong statement out there that this is what happens in this country if you do transgress? I was actually surprised last night Darce, a case that's close to you, the guy who torched your brother's pub was Scottish and it said there that if he gets done, that he could face deportation back to Scotland.

MICK MOLLOY:

Yeah. No issue with this.

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

And the other one I suppose is people who get here when they're two years of age and they get deported back to a country they can't remember. So are you going to come out with a hard and fast line that says this is the benchmark and if this happens you're out?

PETER DUTTON: 

Well Ed, I think that message is getting out there. I mean, the number of cancellations is up by 1400 per cent over the course of the last 12 or 18 months. I mean, we've really ramped up. The number of Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Members, as I say, biggest importers and distributors of ice...

EDDIE MCGUIRE: 

…were you shocked to see Channel Nine do a story the other night saying that you're breaking families up when you're deporting bikie gang members?

PETER DUTTON: 

Well I thought it was a pretty balanced story, but I'm just not sure who they're pitching to in terms of the appeal.

PETER DUTTON: 

I mean, who is the support base for the bikies running drugs out there? But anyway, that was their story.

So look, there are some complex cases where you have a look at – you know, they've got Australian born children at school, so you've got to take into account all of those factors. But I also have to take into account the victims of crime and you know a mother that's been raped or murdered, her children. I mean all of that has to weigh heavily in my mind as well when you look at these individual cases.

But the message should be out there and it's in the papers regularly. Cases that we highlight of people who have had their visas cancelled. And as I say, I think it's a basic obligation – if you come here as a visitor, if you walk into somebody's house, you treat it with respect and the point that you wear out your welcome, expect to go to the airport and be deported.

EDDIE MCGUIRE:

I get the sense Peter Dutton is a very strong leader and we need strong leadership. Great to have you on the show, really appreciate it this morning.

LUKE DARCY:

As I said one of the toughest positions you can have is Immigration and Border Protection Minister.

MICK MOLLOY:

Absolutely.

LUKE DARCY:

Peter thanks very much for joining us on Triple M's Hot Breakfast.

PETER DUTTON:

Thanks, guys.