DEAN CLAIRS:
We have the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull joining us for the very first time on our show ever. Great to see you in the West, Mr PM.
PRIME MINISTER:
Great to be here.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
Oh thank you so much for coming in Prime Minister. Now I have to be open, I didn’t vote for you but I have great respect for the office of Prime Minister and had I known you were coming in I would have worn shoes. I simply did not know.
KYMBA CAHILL:
And socks and thongs are the standard.
PRIME MINISTER:
I’ve got to tell you, the socks are very attractive.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
They’re nice and thick and wintry. So we love those.
(Laughter)
PRIME MINISTER:
They appear to be – what do you think, have they been washed recently? There’s no evidence that they haven’t been.
KYMBA CAHILL:
He’s quite a clean man is our Matthew. That’s the only reason he gets away with the socks and thongs combo.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well that’s fantastic, well done.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
Thank you, now before we get to the serious political analysis -
PRIME MINISTER:
I’m glad you washed your socks.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
Oh, I always wash my socks.
DEAN CLAIRS:
Yes.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
It’s a metaphor for life really. Now we should check, are you an Australian citizen? Because we don’t want to waste any time here.
(Laughter)
DEAN CLAIRS:
True.
PRIME MINISTER:
No question about that – absolutely.
KYMBA CAHILL:
Okay.
PRIME MINISTER:
Very Australian.
KYMBA CAHILL:
Good start, now Prime Minister, there were Sydney terror raids on the weekend.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes.
KYMBA CAHILL:
And now of course we’re expecting updated security at our airports, and it’s easy to say: ‘Don’t let the terrorists win - get on with your lives, get out there.’ But there is genuine fear out there. Is this indicative now of how our lives are going to be? Are we getting any closer, do you think, to an attack on our shores?
PRIME MINISTER:
We are constantly vigilant Kymba. We’ve disrupted 13 terrorist plots since 2014 - this one being the latest. We have the best security, police, intelligence services in the world. They work very closely together. They work very closely with international partners.
You see, in the age of the internet, as we all know, borders have been overcome in terms of information so places that we used to think were a long way away – and still are in terms of kilometers – are very close in real time.
KYMBA CAHILL:
Yeah.
PRIME MINISTER:
So we have to be swift, we have to be seamless, we have to constantly upgrading and improving our security services and our whole operation.
See that’s why I always say we don’t ‘set and forget’. We are never complacent. Yes, we’ve got great people but we want them to do even better work.
So the government, I’ve been working very closely on this operation with our security services over the last several days, since last week. This has been a very successful operation so far. It’s not yet completed.
The increased security measures at the airports are a response to that. They’re in response to an increase in the threat level as assessed by ASIO for aviation.
What we will do obviously, is our agencies will review that as the operation is completed, as the investigation is complete.
DEAN CLAIRS:
Malcolm, I know you’re here in the west and you’re going out to the regions, you’re seeing lots of people. Wherever you go, you’ll get asked the question, but what about the cutting up, the dividing of the GST pie? We’re getting hungry we want more in the West.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
We want more!
(Laughter)
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I can understand that, I do.
Look, it is past a joke. As I said last night with Christian Porter in the pub in Mindarie, it doesn’t pass the pub test and it certainly doesn’t pass the test in that pub.
Look, 34 cents in the dollar, 30 cents in the dollar as it was the year before, is just not good enough. It isn’t fair. The formula is not delivering a fair and defensible outcome.
Now I’m the first Prime Minister that has actually recognised that and set out to do something about it.
So the commitment that I made was to get the other states and territories around the table - and I’ve already done this, I have taken up West Australia’s cause at COAG in a way that no other Prime Minister has done before.
DEAN CLAIRS:
True.
PRIME MINISTER:
We’ve got the Productivity Commission looking at this grants formula that, you know, the black box that allocates, determines who gets what, to see whether it’s fit for purpose any longer. What I also said was, - I made this commitment last year - was that when the WA share rose back up naturally to a more defensible level –
DEAN CLAIRS:
Yep.
PRIME MINISTER:
I think the figure we had in mind at that time was coming up to about 75 cents in the dollar by 2019, that would be a good time to set a floor below which no states allocation would fall. The argument for that of course – and this was something that I originally came up in discussions with Colin Barnett when he was the Premier and my other federal colleagues here, Mathias Cormann, Julie and the others – was because you’ve got to try to achieve a political settlement so that the other states don’t feel that they’re losing. You’ve got to try to get to a point where you can set the floor at a point in time when nobody is going to be out of pocket. Because otherwise you’ve got states fighting with each other.
Now I’m not suggesting the politics is straightforward but it’s really important to remember this, and for your listeners to recognise this, I am the first Prime Minister to seek to tackle this. It is very difficult politically.
The Labor Party did nothing about this during all the time they were in government as WA’s share slid, they did nothing about it.
Bill Shorten has attacked me for endeavouring to take this on. The West Australian Members of the Federal Parliament made a submission to the Productivity Commission and it was just waffle. There was no proposal, no actionable proposal in it at all. Because the fact of the matter is the Labor Party is not going to put its prospects on the east coast at risk by trying to strike a fairer deal for Western Australia.
Now what I’m trying to do as Prime Minister of Australia, of all of Australia is make sure that we get a fair deal for the West and persuade the other jurisdictions, the other states and territories that the GST has to be seen to be fair everywhere. It has got to pass the pub test everywhere.
DEAN CLAIRS:
Everywhere – nationwide.
PRIME MINISTER:
It has got to pass the pub test in Hobart, in Sydney, in Brisbane, in Perth, in Mandurah, in Broome. It has got to pass the pub test everywhere and at the moment, as you know, I believe it does not.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
Prime Minister will you be meeting with Premier Mark McGowan?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes – I will be seeing him later in the week.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
And chatting MetroNet stuff?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, yes, I certainly will be. And we are putting a lot of money into MetroNet already, just under $800 million already and I am open to more investment here.
The point that I have raised with Mark and with the other premiers is that if we can find opportunities for us to co-invest as opposed to simply making grants so that we can have an ownership interest, an investment interest in economic infrastructure then we can do a lot more.
See some of the big projects we’ve got underway elsewhere in Australia – Snowy Hydro 2.0, the Western Sydney Airport, the Inland Rail – are examples of projects where we are investing.
DEAN CLAIRS:
Yeah.
PRIME MINISTER:
So in other words, yes we spend the money but I can put an asset on the other side of the balance sheet and that enables us to do a lot more.
I want us to invest more in infrastructure in Western Australia and so what I’m saying to Mark is: ‘You’ve got to come up with some great ideas. Let’s work as partners. Yes, you’re Labor, I’m Liberal – all that stuff. We’ve got all that off our chest. Let’s focus on getting a great outcome for Western Australia.’
If he, I heard he or maybe it was Ben Wyatt was trying to channel Jerry Maguire and was saying -
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
Show me the money!
(Laughter)
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, you know, but I mean that doesn’t really help.
DEAN CLAIRS:
No.
PRIME MINISTER:
That’s a one-liner. What we need, what Australians want their leaders to do, is to work together.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
Oh desperate for it.
PRIME MINISTER:
Correct. Now, I’m doing that.
You know, we’ve got a new concept, completely new concept in cities. And when I say cities this can apply to regions as well. We’ve called it City Deals. And for the first time we’re setting up agreements with state and local governments where we work together on a particular city, part of a city, and we say: ‘Right we are going to coordinate our investment. We’re going to agree on what we want to achieve – greater accessibility to recreation, to schools, to jobs, to housing affordability. Agree on your objectives and then coordinate your investment.’
So we’ve already got a City Deal in Townsville, in Launceston and in Western Sydney and what I’ve offered to Mark McGowan is to do one in Perth. What we would aim to do then is work as a team – instead of the attitude being from the state side how much money can we get out of the Feds?
DEAN CLAIRS:
Right.
PRIME MINISTER:
You know in a sort of zero sum approach, to work to say: ‘Let’s look as partners how we’re going to maximise the amenity for the people of Perth’, because at the end of the day your listeners don’t care whether a particular piece of economic infrastructure is owned by the state government, the federal government – they want it to be built. Isn’t that right?
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
Yes, it is.
PRIME MINISTER:
They want it to be built and delivered.
DEAN CLAIRS:
True.
PRIME MINISTER:
And that’s my commitment. We’ve got to be more creative in these tough fiscal times, you know where dollars are scarce. We’ve got to be more creative and more imaginative in the way we invest our money.
DEAN CLAIRS:
Mr Prime Minister, before you go – are you aware of a friend of ours by the name of Lawrence Mooney? He loves walking around the country talking about my Lucy, Sangiovese and Christopher Pyne!
(Laughter)
PRIME MINISTER:
I have heard of this fellow. He sounds very entertaining.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
He’s pretty good.
DEAN CLAIRS:
We call him ‘Big Mal’.
PRIME MINISTER:
‘Big Mal’? Is he ‘Big Mal’?
DEAN CLAIRS:
We had to start calling him that because we were calling him Prime Minister and people were getting very confused.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
They were!
DEAN CLAIRS:
Some of the satire was –
PRIME MINISTER:
They used to call Malcolm Fraser ‘Big Mal’ – gee he was a big guy.
DEAN CLAIRS:
He was a big man.
PRIME MINISTER:
He was a ‘Big Mal’.
KYMBA CAHILL:
We had to explain today that you were completely legitimate and not Lawrence Mooney.
(Laughter)
PRIME MINISTER:
If he’s saying warm and affectionate things about Lucy, that’s good.
KYMBA CAHILL:
He’s always warm! He’s always warm about Lucy.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
He’s on message.
KYMBA CAHILL:
Last week he solved your housing affordability crisis by just telling everybody to stop complaining and go out and buy a house.
(LAUGHTER)
DEAN CLAIRS:
In Point Piper I should mention.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I can tell you it is interesting how important of course transport is to housing affordability. That is absolutely critical. That is one of the points I raised in the letter I’ve sent Mark McGowan about this. It is vitally important to make sure that as you expand your urban transport net that you also increase density around railway stations and near transport hubs because that way you can get a better mix of housing at different levels of affordability for families at different stages.
DEAN CLAIRS:
Yeah.
PRIME MINISTER:
You know from singles through to couples with lots of kids to people who retire.
DEAN CLAIRS:
You’re off to Mandurah today and I know you’re doing Busselton and Broome over the next few days – enjoy our wonderful weather.
(LAUGHTER)
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, it’s looking a bit dark in the skies there – anyway, it’s good to be with you.
DEAN CLAIRS:
Good to see you.
MATT DYKTYNSKI:
Thank you for coming in.
KYMBA CAHILL:
Thank you.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thanks very much.
[ENDS]