Interview with Chris Ulhmann, Weekend Today Show, Nine Network

CHRIS UHLMANN:

Well, one of the senior Ministers in Government Charles, and that's Peter Dutton. He's standing by in Brisbane. I'm standing by in Canberra. We're waiting for a Prime Minister who at the moment is in Sydney, but after nine this morning, will fly to Canberra to visit the Governor-General and call that election. So Peter Dutton, good morning.

PETER DUTTON:

Good morning Chris.

CHRIS UHLMANN:

So three terms, nine years, three Prime Ministers. Why should your Government be returned?

PETER DUTTON:

Well Chris there’s a lot more work to be done, that's for certain, particularly in the national security space and particularly given the headwinds that we'll see economically over the next few years. It's quite remarkable when you consider that the analysts were predicting during the course of COVID or by the end of COVID, the unemployment rate would be at 15 per cent – it's now at four per cent. We've had the best turnaround in our economic conditions than any time since seven decades ago, which is quite remarkable. This Government has steered us through a very difficult time. I mean this has been a confronting three years for our country. It's been difficult, it's been challenging. Having been in Parliament for 20 years and watched governments of both persuasions, I don't believe that a Labor government could have guided us through the last three years the way in which Scott Morrison and the Coalition has.

CHRIS UHLMANN:

And even if we accept everything that you said and the economy is in good shape, and Australia has done better than most countries when it comes to keeping people alive during the pandemic, and most of the population has been vaccinated, why is it then that your Government is so far behind in the polls, just six weeks out from when we'll have an election?

PETER DUTTON:

Chris, I think the focus starts to sharpen now once the starter's gun is fired. I think people realise that it's a two-horse race. It’s not just expressing a view about you're not happy with this element, or you're not happy with that element of what the Government's done, or with me or Josh or the Prime Minister, whatever it might be.

People realise that we're human and we make mistakes, and the Government has made some mistakes over the course of the last few years, but there was never a playbook for COVID – there was nothing you could dust off from the 1960s or 70s to get every issue right – but we worked through every issue that was confronting our country, and they were many and varied, and that sort of assurance is what we can provide over the course of the next three years as well.

We're worried about China in the Indo-Pacific, we're obviously worried about conflict in Europe and all of the uncertainty that comes with that and, as I say, the inflation rate, which is high in the United States, predictions around interest rates here; we do have some pretty difficult days ahead  and I believe the country will decide that Scott Morrison's better to deal with that.

CHRIS UHLMANN:  

Why would they decide that? Because it's not you, and it's not the Treasurer that people seem to be focusing on. It's the performance of the Prime Minister, and he seems to be, being marked down. The Labor Party has certainly picked up on that. Why is Scott Morrison so unpopular with the electorate? Why do they believe that he's done a bad job?

PETER DUTTON:

Well Chris, again, I think if you look at the pressure the country has been under for the last few years, you can understand that people are upset.

Don't forget that many people have lost their businesses, people have lost their jobs, even with JobKeeper. I mean we saved 700,000 jobs and because of the reaction that we provided to COVID, 44,000 people didn't die who were predicted to die tragically as a result of the COVID influenza. Now, we have worked through all of that, and now it becomes a race between two leaders. Scott Morrison is out there for all to see, and that's the reality of being Prime Minister – you're in the press every day – Anthony Albanese’s been curled up in a little ball, not wanting people to know who he was. I mean first of all, he wanted to tell you that he was going to be Bob Hawke, and then he was going to be John Howard, and then he decided that that wasn’t credible, so he would be like Annastacia Palaszczuk. But the real risk is that what we end up with is actually Anthony Albanese. He’s been the leader of the hard left of the Labor Party for the last two decades.

CHRIS UHLMANN:

Let's just look at the Government's record. You basically have two planks, economic management and national security. We'll come to national security in a minute. On economic management; we're heading towards $1 trillion worth of debt. We have deficits stretching over the horizon. How can you credibly argue now that the Coalition is a better economic manager than Labor?

PETER DUTTON:

Well, a couple of points, Chris. Firstly, tens of thousands of businesses would have gone into receivership over the course of COVID, which is what their banks and their solicitors and their accountants were advising them to do because they had contracts that they couldn't fill, they had lease payments, they had loan repayments etc, and people couldn't move because of the lockdowns.

Now, 700,000 people as I say, kept their jobs because of JobKeeper – and that did mean that we went into debt – but we're in a much better economic position today because of the decisions that we've made in the budget. The budget bottom line is $100 billion better off and as I say, the most remarkable turnaround in 70 years. Had Labor been in government over the last three years, you would have had pink batts and school halls, all the unions would have been happy, but it would have been a disaster economically and don't forget, only last week, Jim Chalmers is saying – he would be the treasurer in the Albanese government – that they are very willing to look at tax and increasing the tax beyond the rate that it is at the moment, and that would have a huge…

CHRIS UHLMANN:

…and we can point to literally billions of dollars of waste in your Government as well. Isn't it something that we see with Federal Governments that when you do start to move in a big way, lots of money is wasted? That's true of both parties.

PETER DUTTON:

Chris, when you've got a population of 25 million people and you're dealing with once in a century pandemic, there are going to be difficulties when you're designing programs quickly. We have targeted money in the most efficient way on the advice of Treasury and that has kept people in work; it's kept businesses afloat and it kept confidence going which was incredibly important.

When you see the travesties of, not just pink batts and school halls when Anthony Albanese was deputy prime minister, but also look at the reality of GroceryWatch and FuelWatch…

CHRIS UHLMANN:

Let's move on though, to national security. Can you tell us just you see the assessments every single day. How likely do you believe there is a chance of conflict in our region within the next couple of years?

PETER DUTTON:

I think there is a likelihood Chris, if I’m being very frank. I don't need to embellish here, I don't need to make anything up, I think the world is seeing – even through China's own words, let alone what we see through the intelligence streams – that they are on a course under President Xi, a very different course than they were a few years ago.

Nobody two or three years ago predicted that President Putin was going to go into Ukraine or that there could be a prospect that he would go into Poland or elsewhere in Europe.

So we need to be realistic about the threats within our own region and that's why Australia is standing with our allies, because we can't take for granted the democracy that we've got, our freedom of speech, our adherence to the rule of law and all of those other principles that have stood us well over the course of many decades. We just can't take that for granted, we need to stand up to bullies and we're doing that.

CHRIS UHLMANN:

And the Government is making a lot of course, of the fact that it's tooling up essentially. You're getting missiles, you're getting all sorts of capabilities, but these are all going to take some of them decades. We're not going to see these submarines until 2040 if we see them at all. Even the missiles you were talking about the other day, we won't see those until 2024. So aren't we a long way behind the curve if the threat is as imminent as you say?

PETER DUTTON:

The answer is no, Chris. I mean we have an incredible capability in the Collins Class submarines that are working alongside the British and the American submarines now. There's a lot of work that they undertake in our country's name, which helps to keep us safe, that we don't talk about publicly – so we've got a very significant capability there.

We have acquired missiles, and some of those will be received over the next couple of years, as you say. The submarines I'll have more to say about that later in the year, but that is a very prospective deal, and it will mean a much shorter timeline than has been projected or speculated on over the course of the last couple of months.

The US and the UK get 100 per cent what's going on in the Indo-Pacific. They want additional firepower here; they want the deterrence that we want because all of us together, want to maintain peace and to deter any act of aggression by China or anyone else in the Indo-Pacific over the next few years and decades.

CHRIS UHLMANN:  

Isn't our Defence Department fighting some old wars? My father told me in the 1970s – and he served in the military for 33 years, first in the infantry then in the artillery – he told me the 1970s, if he could see a tank, he could hit it. If he could hit it, he could destroy it. Why are you spending billions of dollars on tanks that will never be deployed and will never be used in the 21st century?

PETER DUTTON:

Well Chris, as the Chief of the Defence Force would tell you, we could be drawn into a conflict somewhere else in the region, in the world – as we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq. If there was a chemical war attack on a capital city of one of our partners or here in Australia, and there was a decision to go back into the Middle East, then…

CHRIS UHLMANN:

…and in 20 years in Afghanistan, we never deployed one. We never deployed a single one in 20 years of warfare in Afghanistan.

PETER DUTTON:

Well Chris, I mean there's a lot of capability we would have wanted that could never have been ordered under Labor, because they dropped spending in defence to the lowest level since 1938. So yes, there's catch up, and we're doing that.

I mean they never ordered a single ship. And I would love to be commissioning a submarine that Kevin Rudd or Anthony Albanese or Julia Gillard commissioned, of course, but they never commissioned one, not even a dinghy.  There was nothing they commissioned. And so there is catch up. There is investment for us to make, and Australia needs to be in a position of strength, not weakness. Labor always puts us in a position of weakness when they're in power because national security, defence is never their priority.

CHRIS UHLMANN:

On the dinghy that you were talking about famously, years ago, a Coalition defence minister said that in Australia, in South Australia, we couldn't build a canoe. Isn't that still true? And if we're looking to try and build capability here, it will take years longer and cost us billions of dollars more. Do we need to get things from overseas off the shelf as quickly as we can and stop turning defence policy into industry policy?

PETER DUTTON:

Well Chris, there's a combination here. So there's 100,000 people employed across the country at the moment in defence industry and building up that sovereign capability, building the advanced manufacturing and manufacturing here in Australia has been a reality under this Government, and it will continue, but where we need to acquire capability more quickly, or if it's more efficient to do it, then we will buy it from partners like the US or the UK. We've demonstrated that in relation to the missile technology, which we don't hold the IP of in our country, even though we're investing into a sovereign capability for guided weapons and explosive ordinances – a very significant capability and a necessary one because there are capacity constraints even within the US system, to supply some of those missiles and other technologies.

So, it's important for us to get the combination, the balance right, that's what we're doing and it's not true that we can't build ships here. I mean if you look at what's going on in Henderson, in Osbourne with the Offshore Patrol Vessels with the Guardian Class, thousands of jobs in South Australia and WA, and a huge multiplier in the economy.

CHRIS UHLMANN:

Minister, can I just ask you what your red lines are? There's talk, of course, that China might build a military base in the Solomon's. Would you be prepared to blockade the Solomon Islands or any other Pacific Island if the Chinese were trying to move equipment into one of those islands that would allow it to build a military base? Would you stop that physically, stop that from happening?

PETER DUTTON:

Well Chris, you're about ten steps ahead of where we are now. The Solomon Islands have been very clear that they won't allow military base there, but we are concerned that that was essentially the same commitment given by President Xi to President Obama in the South China Sea and we now have 20 points of military presence by the Chinese in the South China Sea. They're butting up against the Japanese in the East China Sea. There are conflicts, as you know, on the land border between China and India, where Indian troops have died at the hands of Chinese troops only in the last three years.

We need to deal with the reality of the situation; that's why I say Australia needs to be in a position of strength. Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong and Brendan O'Connor will never bring the strength needed to the defence portfolio, the national security, the border security of our country that Scott Morrison and I can – and that's the big difference that's on offer at this election.

CHRIS UHLMANN:

Well Peter Dutton, time is almost up, so give us your elevator pitch to the people of Australia. The Prime Minister will shortly call an election. Why should you be returned?

PETER DUTTON:

Well Chris, I think as you've seen over the last three years, we've been able to steer the country through, not perfectly, but steer it through very effectively, some of the most challenging times in our lifetime.

We know that this is about a seat-by-seat fight across the country. We have some great local members and we've got a Prime Minister that's rolled his sleeves up and will fight and do the best for this country. But he's got a credible team around him to be able to deliver on the economic needs of our country, to keep people in jobs, to keep business prospering so that our economy can flourish and to keep our country safe. That's a very important consideration for people to make.

CHRIS UHLMANN:

Well Peter Dutton, that was an Empire State Building elevator that you were in there, but thank you very much for your time. I'm sure we'll speak again.

PETER DUTTON:

Thanks Chris.

[ends]