PM: [AUDIO BREAK] first and foremost, how nice does Phil Hudson look, baby-face Hudson they call him, and a very attractive look indeed. I'm very impressed.
So, I'm glad to be here with Phil, otherwise I would have had to have done five minutes of beard jokes, but I'm glad to be here with Phil to launch the Press Gallery Ball. An unkind person would say this is the only good thing the press gallery does all year, but I wouldn't be such an unkind person, to say that. There's one or two other pieces during the year that aren't bad, and then there's the rest of what you do, but this is a very important coming together for the Canberra community, and very important work for charity, and I think you should be very proud that the past 11 Balls have raised so much money for charity, and I'm sure this year is not going to be any different.
I am intending to make two personal contributions to the Ball. I don't think we've told Phil this.
I will do the traditional auction the Prime Minister for dinner routine, but we, in my office, have also been knitting a blanket. This started on a journey, when at the start of the last campaign we thought we would knit a campaign blanket; that in the office we would all knit squares and we would join them together to be a blanket.
Needless to say, all of my staff have done exactly what they promised, and I am the one who is lagging behind, but I am now two and a half squares into the five squares that I am knitting for the blanket, and when I finish my fifth square it will be whipped up into a whole blanket, where you will be able to see the contributions of the Prime Ministerial staff, as well as me, so we will separately put that up for auction, so if someone is looking for a colourful part of history the campaign blanket is definitely it, so I hope I've spruiked that well enough.
Now, I was going to send Nicola Roxon up here to launch the poster that is going to promote the Ball. There's a couple of problems with that, though: it's got a woman smoking on it; the band is called ‘Martini Club', and the other band is called ‘Boys in the Band', and I thought just the whole theme wasn't going to strike her as quite right, so I've come up to do it myself, and with no further ado, for those who like a martini, for those who like substances that now come in olive green packaging, and for those - olive being, as we know, a drab colour, unless of course, you're talking to the olive producers, in which case it's a very attractive colour - but for everyone who likes a good time and raising money for charity, this is the Ball for you, the 2011 Mid Winter Ball.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
JOURNALIST: Thank you very much. And so tickets, ticket seats, will go up for grabs sometime today. Thank you.
Razor gang got me.
PM: I wondered where Penny Wong had been in the last 24 hours. Righto, now, my mission, I think, is to get out of here, isn't it?
Oh, on what?
JOURNALIST: (inaudible) what would happen when the next boat arrives and there's children on that boat. What rules have you set up for sending children back to Malaysia?
PM: Well, as you've seen from what we've announced so far, there is a commitment between me and the Malaysian Prime Minister to finalise an agreement for 800 people who seek to come to Australia by boat to go to Malaysia. We'll obviously announce full details of all of this arrangement when the agreement is finalised, but we are intending to take a fairly tough approach - a tough approach to ensuring that we send a message to people smugglers right up the pipeline, that the can no longer say to people that they can get them to Australia. If you get on a boat, then the risk you run is that you end up in Malaysia, and I'm not going to put any conditions or caveats on that.
JOURNALIST: Will they be forcibly removed, if necessary?
PM: Well, as the Minister for Immigration said when he went with me to the press conference on Saturday, this is tough policy, and yes, we expect resistance, we expect protests, and no-one should doubt our determination to get this done.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, how sure are you of the Government's legal position? Do you think you might require legislation to hold off on, let's say, a High Court challenge?
PM: We've sought advice, and no, we don't require legislation.
JOURNALIST: (inaudible) getting children out of detention in Australia?
PM: Well, the Minister for Immigration's been continuing to work hard on new arrangements. Those arrangements that we announced some back, and as far as I'm aware that is proceeding on time and working well.
JOURNALIST: (inaudible) a boat gets intercepted, the boat will get escorted to Christmas Island, I take it. Will they be put straight on a plane and out? Will there be any exclusions for people who are sick, infirm, young, close to birth?
PM: We are not, at this stage, dealing with those kinds of details, but I do want to indicate we're going to take a very tough and rigorous approach. There is a message here for people smugglers, and that is you can't say to people you can get them to Australia, that anybody who pays a people smuggler, risks their life on a boat, is running a risk that they end up in Malaysia, where there are many refugees already processed, who have been there for a longer period of time, so they will go to Malaysia, to the back of the queue.
On the interception arrangements, they will be made on the basis of operational requirements.