ALAN JONES:
Prime Minister, good morning.
PRIME MINISTER:
‘Morning, Alan.
ALAN JONES:
Thank you for your time.
Look, the first bodies from MH17 have arrived back in Australia under Operation Bring Them Home. Family members escorted the bodies from Amsterdam and a funeral, I understand, will be held early this week. How close are we to identifying the other Australians shot down six weeks ago?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well this is something which the Dutch are doing and they’re doing it very professionally and they’re doing it with great respect and dignity for our dead. It’s a slow process, it’s necessarily painstaking. My understanding is that they’re well advanced, but the process of identifying people after an accident – an atrocity – as horrific as this is necessarily slow, Alan, and I gather good progress is being made. I think that the officials have high hopes of being able to identify just about everyone who was on board the aircraft, but I just can’t say how long it is going to take and I can’t say whether everyone’s remains are going to be identified because it’s the nature of this kind of an investigation. The nature of what’s happened just makes it much slower than any of us would like.
ALAN JONES:
Ok. What do we know just about this MH370? It’s vanished and so has news about it.
PRIME MINISTER:
The Deputy Prime Minister, Warren Truss, has been staying in close touch with the Australian victims of the MH370 disappearance and we will shortly begin the most sophisticated and the most thorough underwater search possible of the probable impact zone off the coast of Western Australia. Again, it will be long, again we can’t absolutely guarantee that we are going to find the wreckage, but we are reasonably confident. Certainly, Alan, we are determined to do everything we humanly can to find what’s left of this plane, because otherwise, it will be the Mary Celeste of the 21st century. It will be one of those things people speculate upon, and I think we owe it to the families to do everything we can to provide them with a measure of closure.
ALAN JONES:
Are we picking up the tab for this, though, and why?
PRIME MINISTER:
We are prepared to commit up to $90 million to this search. The Malaysian government has indicated that it will make a very substantial contribution to the costs. So, they’re not going to leave us in the lurch, they are going to make a substantial contribution.
ALAN JONES:
Why are we involved at all?
PRIME MINISTER:
Because it’s in our search and rescue zone, Alan – it’s in our search and rescue zone. I think part of good international citizenship is bearing responsibilities which you reasonably have and when a plane disappears in your area, I think you’re obliged to do what you can to find it, and where appropriate, recover it.
ALAN JONES:
Just back to… well not back to, but as an addendum to this MH17, Mr Putin boasted to a group of Russian youngsters at the weekend, “It’s best not to mess with us,” and then said, “Thank God, I think no one is thinking of unleashing a large scale conflict with Russia. I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.” Is this a threat to the West that Putin is prepared to use nuclear power?
PRIME MINISTER:
It’s another sign of Russia’s bullying behaviour. Now, Russia has been playing its nasty games in Eastern Ukraine for months now. In the last few days they’ve come out into the open. They are now openly violating the sovereignty of Ukraine. They have their own troops and heavy weaponry in Ukraine. It is an invasion – let’s call it for what it is – it is an invasion of Ukraine and it’s absolutely, utterly reprehensible. It is absolutely, utterly unacceptable for large countries to bully small countries, for any country to act in the affairs of the world as if simply might is right. It’s just wrong what’s happening.
ALAN JONES:
Poland’s Foreign Affairs Minister said at the weekend, “If it looks like a war and sounds like a war and kills like a war, it is a war.” Is it a war?
PRIME MINISTER:
There are large numbers of troops involved – Ukrainian regulars, Russian regulars, militias on both sides – there is artillery fire, there are tank movements, there are air strikes. Yes, it’s a war.
ALAN JONES:
It’s a frightening scenario you confront as the leader of Australia. From talking to political leaders around the world, is there universal agreement that allowing Islamic State – though I note your comments in the Parliament yesterday where you said you will not call them the Islamic State because it’s not a state, it’s a death cult – but is there are a view that to allow Islamic State to entrench itself and metastasise across the Middle East, is there a view that would be a political and strategic disaster for the West and the for the people of the region?
PRIME MINISTER:
That’s the point, Alan. It wouldn’t just be a disaster for the West; it would much more be a disaster for the region. I was able to stop in the Gulf on my way back from Europe recently, and I was able to sit down with one of Australia’s friends in that part of the world – an extremely well-connected friend – the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and plainly, the Middle East is just as alarmed by what’s going on as we are in the West, because the first victims of any successful ISIL push will be the existing governments of the Middle East, whether it be the Iraqi government, whether it be the Iranian government, whether it be the Saudi government or the Jordanian government or indeed the Assad regime. Basically, this death cult has it in for everyone and everything that doesn’t strictly conform to their own narrow version of what’s right in the eyes of God.
ALAN JONES:
That being said, are you getting advice, from those to whom you speak that what is so far limited action is unlikely to contain them, let alone begin to roll them back, from the vast advances that they’ve made?
PRIME MINISTER:
What we’ve seen so far is limited but effective US air strikes on the ISIL advance and those air strikes did relieve the siege at Mount Sinjar, they have been effective in relieving the siege at Amreli, and of course Australia was involved in humanitarian air drops to both of those locations. US air strikes have broken the ISIL advance into the Kurdish areas. Air strikes may not roll back their existing conquests, but air strikes can certainly prevent or hinder – very substantially hinder – new conquests and this is why I think that the world should be grateful to President Obama for taking the action that he has. He hasn’t been trigger happy, he hasn’t rushed in, he has been very careful about this and I think that’s to his credit, Alan, because the last thing any of us should want to do is rush into a difficult conflict in the Middle East. By the same token, none of us should want to stand by while an avoidable, preventable genocide takes place, and that’s why I think President Obama’s actions have been wise and just.
ALAN JONES:
Yes. You said yesterday in the Parliament you wanted us to be prudent and proportionate and then you made it quite clear that you had no intention, in your words, to commit combat troops on the ground. Rather than stick people on the ground, I mean, the thing here I suppose which is a bit of plus is that this crowd – IS, Islamic State – have no air or navy power, do they? The trouble is, of course, they have now moved themselves into urban areas and that’s the problem, and therefore if you strike them from the air there’s a risk of civilian casualties. How do you coordinate the operations to – it’s an awful word to use – to kill their leadership?
PRIME MINISTER:
You’re right, Alan. These are dire and dreadful things that we are discussing, but sadly, sometimes dire and dreadful measures are necessary in response to the pure evil that we are now seeing across a large swathe of the Middle East thanks to this hideous movement. The difficulty here is that these people do exalt in death; they absolutely revel in killing.
We’ve seen in the century just gone, the most unspeakable things happen, but the atrocities that were committed by the Nazis, by the communists and others, they were ashamed of them, they tried to cover them up. This mob, by contrast, as soon as they’ve done something gruesome and ghastly and unspeakable, they’re advertising it on the internet for all to see which makes them, in my mind, nothing but a death cult and that’s why I think it’s quite proper to respond with extreme force against people like this.
ALAN JONES:
Yes. You said yesterday, I mean, you made that comment yesterday in the Parliament, that it’s understandable, I think your words were, that many Australians will shrink from reaching out to this conflict on the other side of the world, but you said this conflict is reaching out to us.
PRIME MINISTER:
And we’ve got at least 60 Australians, nearly all of them Australian born and bred, who are participating in this conflict as fighters. We’ve seen a number of individual Australians posting the most gruesome images of themselves involved in executions, involved in various barbaric acts. People like this, they have come to hate everyone who doesn’t share their particular predilections about God and religion and a way of life, and this is why they are an absolute menace.
ALAN JONES:
So if those people of ours – and you made that statement in the Parliament yesterday, you said at least 60 Australians are fighting with terrorist groups across Iraq and Syria and they’re supported by about 100 more – if these people are disposed to return to Australia, will you be allowing them to return to Australia, and what will happen when they get here?
PRIME MINISTER:
We can’t stop Australian citizens from returning to our country, but if they have been involved in this kind of activity, our absolute intention is to detain them, to prosecute them, to jail them, to keep them off the streets, because people who will kill without compunction abroad are hardly going to be model citizens at home.
ALAN JONES:
You made that yesterday, you said in your words… the Prime Minister’s words yesterday were, “Around two thirds of Australians who returned from fighting with terrorist groups in Afghanistan a decade ago subsequently became involved in terrorist activities here”.
Just in relation to this Australian C-130 Hercules transport aircraft which has come under fire from Islamic militants during a humanitarian mission over Iraq, what’s the latest on that?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, I have no advice to that effect. I’ve seen the report in the paper and yes, they were flying into an active combat zone, so there may well have been fire in the area, but I’m not advised that they came under direct fire themselves.
ALAN JONES:
Isn’t it true that our military aircraft, nonetheless, are fitted with effective missile counter measures?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look, you would hope that they don’t come under attack.
ALAN JONES:
That’s right.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, those aircraft do have missile counter measures. There’s no perfect counter measure to an attack…
ALAN JONES:
No.
PRIME MINISTER:
… and different kinds of missiles have different capabilities, but we have carefully assessed the risks. Obviously, flying into a war zone, combat zones, air drops, even humanitarian air drops into combat zones are full of risk, but the risks are reasonable given the importance of the missions they’re flying.
ALAN JONES:
PM, is there a risk in justification for action being expressed purely in humanitarian terms? I mean, this really is a war. It’s an attack on our values, on our way of life by people, as you’ve already said this morning here and in the Parliament yesterday, who hate the West. Does your intelligence tell you that there are pockets of Australians being radicalised here and recruited here to join IS?
PRIME MINISTER:
There’s no doubt there are pockets of this kind of activity and that’s why we have an organisation called ASIO – the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation – which works with the state and federal police forces to monitor and deter and disrupt any activity of this nature.
ALAN JONES:
So why then wouldn’t you treat Jihadis in this country the same way as we treat bikie motorcycle gangs? I mean, they are outlawed. Why wouldn’t this lot be another criminal enterprise? Why should these fanatics and extremists, why shouldn’t they be outlawed gangs just like we’ve outlawed motorcycle gangs? Aren’t their prayer halls, the equivalent of the bikies’ chapter club houses?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, Alan, look anyone who is involved in criminal activity, or potential criminal activity – and terrorism is criminal activity of a particularly heinous type – anyone who is involved in this kind of activity, or is plotting this kind of activity, is monitored and disrupted and prosecuted and jailed with all the vigour we can muster. This is why we’ve just put an extra $630 million into our various security agencies, because this is a real threat. It is a very real threat. There were four terrorist plots of considerable potential for mass casualties that have already been uncovered over the last few years and we’re on the job, Alan.
ALAN JONES:
Good on you. After your predecessors, of course, completely wound back funding for that specific purpose. PM, thank you for your time and may I thank you on behalf of millions of Australians for the work that you and your team are doing. It’s much appreciated.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thanks so much, Alan.
[ends]