3 November 1997
E&OE.........................................................................................................................
SATTLER:
But first to Canberra and to our Prime Minister over there. And with the drug barons reaping multi millions of dollars from Australia’s mainly young addicts, victims dropping dead in the streets here at previously unheard of levels, the latest toll 71 this year. Prime Minister John Howard has announced a major Government assault on the illegal trade, he did that on the weekend. Well Western Australia, as I said, seems to have been left out of the equation. None of these three strike teams, the rapid deployment teams to be formed under the $87 million program will be based here. There is also to be a $6.7 million boost to coastal surveillance, all of this in the Torres Strait between Queensland and Papua New Guinea. The Prime Minister joins me on the line from Canberra as we speak.
Let’s cut to the chase. Federal and West Australian Police Union spokesmen today have each been critical of your failure to fund a strike team in our State and to boost patrols off the north west coast, how are you going to respond to that?
PRIME MINISTER:
I am going to respond to it by saying that on the advice that I got the most dangerously exposed part of our coastline is to be found in the Torres Strait because of its very close proximity to the coastline of another country.
SATTLER:
What are we going to do if they hear of a big drug movement coming into the north west here? How long is it going to take for those strike teams to get there, or one of them at least?
PRIME MINISTER:
Howard, you know as well as I do that the interception of large drug hauls is normally based upon intelligence information which is made available to the law enforcement authorities. You never have a situation where every inch of a coastline of a vast country is covered by patrols, or by police officers or by customs officers. And that the whole experience of law enforcement bodies is that you have to increasingly upgrade the sophistication of your information, your intelligence gathering and your capacity to be informed and to get tip-offs as to when drug hauls are coming in. Now one has to make an assessment of where the additional resources can most appropriately be deployed. Now you said in your introduction that Western Australia is being ignored, Howard that is just wrong.
SATTLER:
Well, as far as the strike teams are concerned we are.
PRIME MINISTER:
But you just take one item of an $87 million strategy and you say Western Australia is being ignored.
SATTLER:
But it is a pretty important ingredient, isn’t it Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER:
The children in Western Australia are going to get an equal shake of those, along with children in other parts of the country. Volunteer organisations operating in Western Australia will be entitled to participate. The benefits of the Signature Programme which we are going to fund, will be of equal benefit to Western Australia as any other part of Australia. You have just lighted it, and I understand why you do it, but you just have lighted it on two particular items and to say because one of them is in the Torres Strait and one of three strike teams is not in Western Australia that in some way we are discriminating against Western Australia.
SATTLER:
But I am taking what is being told to me by Federal Police and local police representatives who say that we really needed a team over here because the key to this is to stop the stuff coming in in the first place.
PRIME MINISTER:
The actual decision as to where those strike teams are going to be located, I am very interested that the West Australian Police Association is asserting where they are going to be, because I have not been formally advised of any decision not to locate them in any particular part....
SATTLER:
But we all know, we know that three are going to be on the eastern sea board?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, it may well be that the advice that is currently available to the Federal Police is that you will get the best return in terms of apprehension from locating them there. I am not an expert in those things any more than any other Prime Minister or Minister is.
SATTLER:
Are you saying that that is not set in concrete? One could be relocated here?
PRIME MINISTER:
What I am saying is I haven’t been given any advice by the Australian Federal Police as to the precise location of those three strike teams.
SATTLER:
Now your opponents are saying you are simply replacing some of the $225 million withdrawn from drug-related programmes during the past two years and that we are still behind the eight ball?
PRIME MINISTER:
We have not taken $225 million from drug-related programmes. That is a figment of somebody’s imagination.
SATTLER:
Well the Federal Police here have had their budget cut back 15 per cent in Western Australia in the past two years?
PRIME MINISTER:
I can only tell you the information that I have been given by the Federal Police, that the budget cutbacks in relation to running costs that were applied to all agencies, they did not have any significant effect at all on the anti-drug operations of the Federal Police. Nobody can argue that every single element of a police force in so efficient that you can’t ever have savings that don’t effect the operational capacity of that particular police force. The amount that was taken out of the whole AFP operation last year was about $8 million not $220, $8 million. And it was so organised in a way that it did not fall upon the anti-drug activities of the Australian Federal Police. And what is more, last year the amount of money spent on customs was $422 million compared with $402 million the previous year.
SATTLER:
You reckon you are boosting their efforts?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yesterday’s statement really boosted the capacity of both Customs and the Australian Federal Police in a major way.
SATTLER:
Now the Opposition has also suggested late last week when we had this flagged to us that the Defence forces could be used in the drugs fight, now why not?
PRIME MINISTER:
I would like them to tell me precisely how they believe the Defence forces can additionally be used. They are from time to time, as I understand it, their advice is enlisted from time to time. The way in which it is enlisted, for reasons I hope your listeners would understand, is not telegraphed to the public at large and I hope you don’t want me to.
SATTLER:
No, I certainly don’t want to give any drug traffickers a break, that is for sure.
PRIME MINISTER:
Those sort of statements from the Opposition are negative, carping and destructive. I am amazed that on an issue like an anti-drugs campaign that the Opposition is playing such a political game. When Bob Hawke launched the anti-AIDS strategy in the mid-1980s the then Opposition didn’t nark, and they didn’t carp and they didn’t criticise, they didn’t try to take the political points. We actually tried to run a bipartisan campaign on that. We actually put the national interest ahead of the Party interest. And I would say to Kim Beazley, and I would say to Bob Carr and I would say to all the other Labor Party leaders around the country, the Australian public wants us to put our political differences aside on drugs, they want us to work together to the common good. All I have heard from Beazley and Carr over the last few days is nit-picking, political point scoring. I haven’t had a constructive suggestion. Beazley and his crowd were in power for 13 years, the drug menace didn’t arrive in Australia in March of 1996 when we were elected. I don’t pretend that I have got all of the answers, but I have made a sincere effort to make a dent, I have made a sincere attempt to improve the situation. It is not only in law enforcement, it is also education, it is also rehabilitation and I would say to Mr Beazley, put your political hammer aside and come on board and try and adopt a constructive approach.
SATTLER:
Prime Minister, last week on the programme I talked to a fellow called Richard Basham, he is an expert on Asian crime and he is a member of the NSW Police Commissioner’s Advisory Group. He gave us some pretty chilling information about some pretty heavy weight Asian criminals slipping through the net and getting into Australia, getting involved in drugs here and repatriating money back to places like Hong Kong. Now some other serious allegations were made about some of these people getting the stamp to come here from Consulates and Embassies overseas. Is that something that you want investigated? If that is the case, that is pretty serious stuff and that is part of this programme we have got here.
PRIME MINISTER:
If that has happened can I say to Mr Basham, was that the man’s name?
SATTLER:
That is his name.
PRIME MINISTER:
Would he please make that information available to the Australian Federal Police and if he feels that the information is not being properly investigated could he make it available to the Minister for Justice, Senator Vanstone, who is the Minister responsible for Federal Police. I have no way of knowing, as you will appreciate.
SATTLER:
It just seemed to me this is part of the fight if what he told me is true.
PRIME MINISTER:
Without having the thing investigated it is impossible for me to say whether it is true or false.
SATTLER:
I would have thought the NSW Police Commissioner would be sending that on to Canberra too?
PRIME MINISTER:
One would assume so. I am not the Police Commissioner, I don’t have access to operational matters.
SATTLER:
I wouldn’t ask you if you weren’t the bloke who announced the campaign on the weekend.
PRIME MINISTER:
I don’t have personal knowledge of allegations like that. Really, if you have got an allegation, if somebody has got an allegation like that well, they take it to the police authorities, if the police don’t investigate it then I think what you do is you make it available to the Justice Minister or the Attorney-General.
SATTLER:
Can I ask you a couple of questions. Now you can answer them just as an individual if you like? Do you believe in capital punishment for non-user drug traffickers, the Mr Bigs of this problem?
PRIME MINISTER:
I personally don’t support capital punishment on pragmatic grounds. The pragmatic ground is that the law can sometimes make a mistake and you can’t bring somebody back after they have been hung.
SATTLER:
What about an increased sentence for those convicted of trafficking? Should they be increased or are you happy with them in Australia at the moment?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well they are very heavy, but I don’t care how heavy they are.
SATTLER:
Life, would that do?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look it depends what particular crime. What I say on these things is taken down and I would want to know precisely what the question is. If you are asking me generally do I favour heavy sentences, the answer is yes.
SATTLER:
Now Australia has just offered somewhere around $1.3 billion to bail out the Thai economy, the place from which most of the heroin that certainly comes to Western Australia can be sourced. A question that was asked last week is, why didn’t we insist when we were coming to that arrangement that it may be they respond by helping us and may be we help them through a United Nations peacekeeping force, whatever you like, we could participate in getting into that Golden Triangle and getting rid of all those drugs?
PRIME MINISTER:
Thailand itself has, certainly some of the drugs do come through Thailand.
SATTLER:
Well heaps of it actually.
PRIME MINISTER:
Certainly it does. The decision to help the IMF bail out of the Thai economy, like the contribution we have made to the IMF bail out of Indonesia is something that is in Australia’s interest.
SATTLER:
What I mean is, this is a threat to Australia, we are trying to help them, why don’t they help us?
PRIME MINISTER:
I don’t think it is as simple as that because the capacity of the, the only way that you could really effectively, I think stop the drug traffic coming through those countries would be the use of armed forces of another country.
SATTLER:
That is what I am suggesting. Because I am suggesting, and in fact you’ve said that virtually on the weekend, we have got a war going on here, a war for our kids.
PRIME MINISTER:
That raises a whole lot of other considerations and I don’t know if it is quite as easy and simplistic as the question suggests.
SATTLER:
Just on a sort of, a side issue, but may be not, the polls are saying that your side’s popularity has slipped below Labor, what do you put that down to?
PRIME MINISTER:
I think it is a combination of things. I think we have taken, obviously some punishment over the nursing home decision because I think that has been misunderstood.
SATTLER:
Badly sold too I would have said?
PRIME MINISTER:
Whenever something is criticised it is always said that it is badly sold, perhaps that is true. But it is one of those decisions where the Opposition has played a very political game. I understand they do that in these things. And I might remind you that when they introduced accommodation bonds for hostels some years ago, we didn’t run a campaign of opposition. It is very easy to run a fear campaign on something like that. I believe that once the full ramifications of it are understood, people won’t feel as threatened and I think there will be a different view taken on it.
SATTLER:
Prime Minister, once again I appreciate your time today.
PRIME MINISTER:
Okay then.
SATTLER:
Prime Minister John Howard from Canberra on his release on the weekend of his anti-drug strategy.
[Ends]