Radio Interview, 6PR Perth Radio

SUBJECTS: Loud noise in WA/Singapore Air Force activity off WA coast, DVA invoices, Middle East conflict

SPEAKER: In the left corner, federal Labor member for Burt, Matt Keogh, and in the right corner federal Liberal member for Canning, Andrew Hastie. 

HOST, GARY ADSHEAD: And they join us on the line from Canberra. Thanks very much for your time, gentlemen. 

SHADOW MINISTER FOR DEFENCE ANDREW HASTIE: Thanks. Thanks, Gary. Good to be with you. 

MINISTER FOR VETERANS’ AFFAIRS AND DEFENCE PERSONNEL, MATT KEOGH: Great to be with you, Gary. 

GARY ADSHEAD: Matt Keogh, you’ve got inroads to Defence. We need to hear it from you: there was a lot of calls, a lot of texts just before I finished on air yesterday. It was in relation to what some people thought was an earthquake, what some people thought was a bomb going off, what some people thought was an offshore volcano erupting. It just went on and on. Can you please tell us definitively what took place off our coast yesterday? 

MINISTER KEOGH: Well, certainly, Gary, from here in Canberra looking at all of the reports and social media in my own electorate and across particularly the south of Perth, it looks like people have had a pretty, you know, worrying time, sort of feeling what they felt in their houses and as they were out and about, and a pretty unusual experience for us in Perth. But what has occurred here is there’s currently a group of Singaporean Air Force exercises going on off the coast.

That’s an exercise that was well briefed to the people around Bullsbrook where they take off and land from, and people may be aware the Singapore Air Force has been training, doing their initial training, in Perth for their pilots for about the last three decades. So pretty regular occurrence to have the Singaporean Air Force operating out and around Perth and off the coast. And they’re doing an exercise there at the moment with – their F-15 fighter jets. The noise seems to have emanated from one of the aircraft involved in that training exercise off the coast – quite a way off the coast, I might point out. So, I don’t think it was expected that noise would travel as far as it did across Perth and even further inland than Perth. And, of course, not something that happens every day in the Western Australian context. I’m sure for people who live in Newcastle, for example, where our fighter jets are based, they’re probably a bit more used to that sort of activity. So very shocking for a lot of people, but that’s where the noise has emanated from that everyone experienced. 

GARY ADSHEAD: A sonic boom. 

ANDREW HASTIE: So, Matt, was it a sonic boom? What was it? 

MINISTER KEOGH: Well, I don’t think they were tracking for what may necessarily have been a sonic boom. It may well have been, but the noise has come from that activity. So whether it was close to or an actual sonic boom, but something of that nature. 

GARY ADSHEAD: And a sonic boom being what? Is that twice – 

MINISTER KEOGH: So a sonic boom, for those who are not tracking that, is where an object, usually an aircraft – people might remember Concord, for example – travels faster than the speed of sound and that creates a boom effect as the plane moves through the air. And so it’s a noise – what people experienced yesterday was certainly a noise that’s emanated from an aircraft – 

GARY ADSHEAD: And when that happened, you talked about the Concord, I remember – this is a typical sort of Gary story – but I remember I was in – 

MINISTER KEOGH: Everyone loves a Gary story. 

GARY ADSHEAD: I was in Cornwall, folks, when I came out of a pub at about 10 o’clock at night in Cornwall and heard this almighty bang and, like, you know, literally ducked and pooped my pants. And the locals just looked at me and just said, “That’s all right, my bird; that’s just the Concord going over head.” 

ANDREW HASTIE: There you go. 

GARY ADSHEAD: And I was like, “Oh, okay, that’s what a sonic boom sounds like.” So I do know. 

MINISTER KEOGH: I can tell you, Gary, I’ve had this experience when I was a kid. I was at an Air Force open day once up at Pearce when I was a kid and one of the F-111s came down low over us and went past, and it set off every car alarm that was in the – parked on the oval there at RAAF Base Pearce. Yeah, look, it’s pretty intense, and if you’ve not experienced it before, like you experienced it in Cornwall, pretty shocking.  

ANDREW HASTIE: Most Australians would have seen Top Gun, so when Maverick busts the tower, you know, maybe it was a Singaporean fighter pilot busting the tower, so to speak. 

GARY ADSHEAD: Thank you for that, Andrew. Right, now, that’s enough – that’s enough funniness, you two. Let’s get – 

MINISTER KEOGH: We’re in our element talking about this, Gary. 

GARY ADSHEAD: This politics is a very serious business. Now, of course, talking about serious business, the Prime Minister – well, he kind of tried to tell a joke but he was at an agricultural sort of event and he relayed it to the live export trade, and this was it and it didn’t go down that well. Have a listen. 

[Excerpt]

ANTHONY ALBANESE: ... for the natural assets that we have, for the space that we have, which is why when we had dinner, beautiful Australian beef – not the live export; we’ve made sure it was dead – 

[End excerpt] 

GARY ADSHEAD: Bit of nervous laughter there. Come on, then, Matt Keogh, that’s not very funny, is it, given that he’s in front of an agricultural crowd. 

MINISTER KEOGH: Well, he’s talking about – yeah, he was in front of beef producers. In particular, he was talking about the dinner they’d just had, which was clearly very nice, as it would be, because good Australian beef is very nice. And that’s what he was talking about. And as you heard there yeah, there were some – I’m not saying it was the world’s best joke, but clearly people in the room thought it was funny. 

ANDREW HASTIE: It’s very, very valiant effort. 

GARY ADSHEAD: He’s poking the bear, though. 

ANDREW HASTIE: Very valiant of Matt to defend him. I mean, this was David Brent or Michael Scott from the office trying to crack a joke that really fell flat, and it just shows the Prime Minister out of touch with the key constituency. There are many Western Australians who rely upon the live export trade for their source of income and their prosperity, and he was cracking jokes about it. So I think he was out of touch. 

GARY ADSHEAD: Is he missing – I mean, in all seriousness, Matt, I mean, you know that there’s a big protest coming to Canberra. You know that this is an issue that’s resonating hugely in the agriculture sector and in some way the city here in Western Australia. You know that. You know that Mia Davies is saying that’s why she’s gone to run for federal politics because of the live export decision. Why would he poke the bear? Why would he even bother trying that? 

MINISTER KEOGH: Well, I don’t think he was trying to poke that bear. I think he was trying to make a point about the dinner they’d just been served, Gary. 

GARY ADSHEAD: Yeah, but the live export reference was a very strange one. 

ANDREW HASTIE: Yeah, he should stick to governing and not stand-up. 

GARY ADSHEAD: Okay. Just stay there if you would, guys, because I want to change subject completely when we come back. We’ll take a break and be back with Matt Keogh and Andrew Hastie after this. It's 18 minutes to 10. 

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GARY ADSHEAD: All right, guys. Matt Keogh, we’ve got a caller on the line that’s got a question for you. Aaron, how can we help? 

AARON: Yeah, g’day, Gary. Listen, I hope you’re sitting down for this one, mate, but I do want to speak to Matt Keogh regarding the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Now, I’m a lawn mowing contractor who do work on behalf of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, obviously for the veterans. Now, there’s a situation at the moment with a lot of contractors around Australia at the moment who aren’t getting paid for their services that we’ve – you know, we’ve done. Now, I haven’t been paid for four months, right? And there’s contractors I know over east who are owed, you know, up to $6,000. And now I’ve got a friend of mine who’s a local lawn mowing contractor as well who hasn’t been paid for 12, you know, jobs that he’s done. And we just – we just want some answers to find out why we aren’t getting paid for our services. 

GARY ADSHEAD: All right. Any idea, Matt? 

MINISTER KEOGH: Yeah, no, it’s a really great question, and I’m really sorry about the experience that you and some of our contractors around Australia have been experiencing in the last few months. What we saw – a combination of two things: we had a real surge of invoices being submitted, some for historical work as well, in the lead-up to the end of the last financial year. And that’s been compounded by some – a success story really, Gary, because we’ve gotten through this backlog of claims and we’re processing claims a lot more quickly means that a lot more veterans have now come into the system that are eligible to receive these services, invoices for their contractors or for reimbursement to the veteran themselves being submitted, and we’ve got to get back on top of a bit of a backlog that’s arrived in that system. 

GARY ADSHEAD: It’s embarrassing, though, isn’t it? I mean, when you sort of talk about a contract – It’s not good at all.

MINISTER KEOGH: I will say – I will say, as I understand it there’s two ways these invoices are – so, there’s a couple of things. There’s two ways that these invoices are processed. One is through an online portal. Those claims are now back up to 90 per cent or 89 per cent being processed within 20 days. The remainder is what we call manual processing where either the veteran or the service provider emails in their invoice. Those do take longer to process. As we have moved through the backlog on the portal, we’re now able to allocate the staff to be able to get through that hard copy or that manual processing, and we’re hoping to have it right down in the next couple of weeks back much closer to a more normal BAU system. 

I am aware of a few contractors where their invoices are from prior to June, and we are trying to follow them up because they haven’t – at least the ones that the Department is aware of at this stage haven’t had the correct information submitted with them around the veterans – there’s a number that they need to submit with the invoice to match it up to get them paid. So, we’re trying to follow those up, so I don’t know if that’s what’s occurred in this scenario we’re talking about.

GARY ADSHEAD: Do you know what category you’re in out of all of that, Aaron? Do you have an idea of which one of those you might be in terms of either, you know – 

AARON: Yeah, no, what I’ve normally been doing is submitting an invoice. I always submit the TRN, the claim number and everything like that with the client address, the name and everything. Now, I received an email the other day – during the week saying that we are now to use this login portal. 

MINISTER KEOGH: The portal.

AARON: Yeah, so my next invoice – because I actually mowed this customer yesterday and so this invoice that I will write up will go through the new PUP portal system. But the other three outstanding invoices were from the old invoice where I’d just write an invoice and send it, you know, to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. But I’ve always made sure that his TRN claim number and the other information was always written down with his name, address and the date mowed and all of my, you know, information, ABN number and everything like that, has always been on my invoice. So, yeah. 

MINISTER KEOGH: So my understanding is from the – and I discussed this with Secretary of the Department just this week because, well, it is something I’ve been tracking and aware of. Most of those manually submitted claims should be dealt with in the next couple of weeks. And, yes, we have written to all of the providers to get them to move across to this new PUP, the portal, to – because the processing of it is so much quicker and less resource intensive, to make sure that we don’t have these sorts of backlogs arrive.

But, as I said, we’ve been a victim of our own success. We’ve got a lot more veterans accessing the system because we’ve processed that backlog of claims. We’re making sure the systems work more efficiently. That’s what the portal is about. We did have a rush of claims – of invoices come in end of financial year, which caught us a bit on the back hop, and we’re getting back on top of it now. And I do apologise to any of the contractors that have been caught up in that, because they do provide a very important service to support our veterans. 

GARY ADSHEAD: Well, Aaron, you can’t get better than taking your issue straight to the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs. So hopefully we might come back or you come back to us in a couple of weeks if this is not being resolved, but thanks very much for calling through, and thanks for explaining that, Minister. 

Okay, can I just turn now to the issue of the visas. Of course, there’s a lot of controversy. It’s been a pretty sort of nasty debate that’s gone on in the chamber. It’s led to allegations of racism on behalf of one of the Teals, of course, Zali Steggall labelling a racist of Peter Dutton. Was it a mistake, Matt Keogh, to grant tourist visas to people fleeing a war zone without perhaps the sort of checks and balances that are needed? Or do you say they happened? 

MINISTER KEOGH: Well, the first thing I’d say is, of course, you know, national security and community safety is our number one priority, as it is for any government. Now, it’s not uncommon, actually, for tourism visas to be utilised in this type of scenario where you have people that you’re trying to support getting out of an effective war zone but where it’s not a case of necessarily fitting the persecution criteria in a different visa category. So it’s not uncommon, and the previous government has done this as well. 

GARY ADSHEAD: All right. Well, can I just jump in, Abul Rizvi, who’s obviously on the front of The Australian this morning, he’s a former Deputy Immigration Secretary. He’s questioning whether you’ve gone about this in a minimalist way and a different way than perhaps previously. 

MINISTER KEOGH: Well, the key – and this is the key thing that we’ve been very clear about: the way we administer the visa processing system from a security point of view and from a vetting point of view is always based on the advice that we get from our security agencies, including ASIO, and that is exactly what the previous government did as well. So I can’t comment on those person’s comments. That’s really something the Minister for Home Affairs would have to address. But security is always paramount. We continue to, as the previous government did, take the advice of our security agencies and act on that basis and take that into account with visas being issued. 

The other thing that’s actually really important also is to look at what’s really happened here. So there’s been a lot of focus on 2,900 visas being issued. 7,000 visas were refused, and there’s only 1,300 people that are actually in Australia on these visas because months ago the border was actually closed and no-one can get out of Gaza anyway, so – 

GARY ADSHEAD: Andrew? Andrew, I mean – 

MINISTER KEOGH: And the final thing, Gary, that I think is also really important to remember is just like under the previous government people that are here on visas, any visas, are always under constant review and can be reviewed by security agencies if there is anything that might arise that needs to be taken account of, even once they’ve arrived in Australia. So, we take this responsibility very seriously. And I don’t think it’s helpful for others to try and undermine the work of our security agencies when we, like the previous government, act consistently with the advice and systems put in place by those security agencies. 

GARY ADSHEAD: All right, well, Andrew Hastie, I mean, is it a humanitarian or is it a mistake to let – 

ANDREW HASTIE: Gary, I think what the Prime Minister has done is he has opened a hole in our border security to satisfy domestic concerns. And let’s take it right back here – we are a generous nation. We have a generous migration program. But there are protocols involved. There are identity checks, there are security checks before people can come to this country. Now, Gaza is still a Hamas stronghold. Hamas is a listed terrorist organisation, and this government issued 3,000 visas without doing the necessary identity and security vetting. 

The last time we took in a large group of people from a war-torn area was in 2015 when the former Coalition government gave visas to 12,000 Syrians and Iraqis who fled Islamic State. They were all checked for identity and security concerns before they were brought here. This government has issued 3,000 or so tourist visas to people from Gaza without doing the checks. And the people who have to absorb that risk is the Australian community. So this government has failed on the most basic thing, which is to enforce our border policy and to go through the processes and procedures to ensure the Australian community is safe.

That’s why we’re making an issue of this. And we’re right to ask questions, because many people feel very strongly about this and have concerns. Instead, you have people like Zali Steggall and others calling Peter Dutton racist. Peter is a big man and he can take that sort of abuse. He is just doing his job as the Opposition Leader in ensuring that the government is doing its job, which we have discovered it’s not, in keeping the Australian people safe with a strong border policy. 

GARY ADSHEAD: But, Andrew, wouldn’t that tell you, though, that they’ve taken advice from ASIO and other agencies in relation to how they go about this process? 

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, this is where the Prime Minister misrepresented what Mike Burgess said. People have come in on a tourist visa and they’re only checked by ASIO if they get flagged for issues. What they should have done is ensured that every single person coming from Gaza has had identity and security checks because Hamas, as you know, is a listed terrorist organisation. Its charter is committed to the destruction of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. There is large, unfortunately, widespread support for Hamas within Gaza itself. And so, it’s just sensible and prudent for the government to make sure that the people we’re bringing here are actually people who will uphold Australian values. 

MINISTER KEOGH: Gary, we have a division. But we have applied the same rules that the previous government applied to people who lived in Gaza when they were in power, and Hamas has been in power in Gaza for many, many years and we’ve done exactly the same thing the previous government did to the same group of people in the same conditions. So, I think it’s a bit duplicitous for them to run this argument now. 

ANDREW HASTIE: People we’ve got to go for a division. – 

GARY ADSHEAD: Okay, yes.

ANDREW HASTIE: Gary, Peter Dutton is standing up for the Australian people and our border security. That’s what matters – Australians’ security comes first. Thank you and goodbye.

END