ALAN JONES:
Now you people have been writing to me and saying, “I want to hear more of the Prime Minister. You don’t have the Prime Minister on enough”, and so I said to the Prime Minister, “well look, we might try and talk to you a bit more often so that people can hear from you on what they’re talking about in the pubs. He’s on the line from I think Mount Gambier? Prime Minister, good morning.
PRIME MINISTER:
‘Morning, Alan, and yes, here I am in beautiful Mount Gambier where the sun is just coming up over the Blue Lake.
ALAN JONES:
Hot, cold, windy, wet, what?
PRIME MINISTER:
It’s a brisk morning. I’ve only been out briefly to walk across to one of the local Jetts Gyms which was pretty full at 5.30, but…
ALAN JONES:
So what time did you get up today?
PRIME MINISTER:
I got up at 5 o’clock. I had a couple of phone calls to make and then just before 5.30 I was in the gym for a while and now, of course, I’m talking to your listeners. Today I’m in Mount Gambier and Adelaide and yesterday I was in Perth and Kalgoorlie. The day before that I was in south-western Western Australia and in Geraldton on Sunday. So, it’s been a pretty busy few days of getting around the countryside talking to people and trying to ensure that the Government and the people are all on the same page.
ALAN JONES:
Good on you. Well look, just a couple of things, and I should say to our listeners we don’t have any discussion about matters that we raise here, but I just made some comments prior to you coming on the line here, because the last time I spoke to you we talked about your push for better labelling of stuff that appears on the shelves at Woolworths and Coles and so on and I suggested to you that it wasn’t the labelling that was the issue but what was in the stuff. We’ve got these two people ill from food poisoning and it’s been established that they ate imported tuna from Thailand at a take away café on George Street. So The Daily Telegraph – Paul Whittaker, who you know, and his people there – sent their journalist to these two Thai canning factories linked to the tuna, sold to the George Street café and, I mean, what they found would turn you off tuna for life. They found canned tins of tuna stacked in warehouses in temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius, piles of rubbish, crates of empty tuna tins, litter on the exterior of the factories and they spoke to some workers who said that, well look, the places where this is defrosted and filleted and canned are smelly and messy.
Your former colleague who’s now no longer with you in the parliament, Alan Cadman – very grassroots bloke – said that foreign imports into this country of foodstuffs should meet the same standards as we expect of our producers. In other words, it should be certificated that X,Y,Z criteria have been met. When are you going to be able to do something about what’s in the can rather than what’s on the label?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, Alan, this is a very fair point. We certainly don’t want anything which is unsafe or unhygienic being sold in our country. Now, I imagine that there are standards in Thailand and indeed in China which, in the case of this tuna and earlier in the case of those berries, weren’t being enforced. So, what we’ve really got to do is make sure that in all of the countries where we are sourcing our food that proper standards are enforced and that’s what I’m determined to do and, as you know, as soon as we realised we had berry problem, FSANZ, the food standards regulator, was looking at it and all of the relevant product was held at the border or it was recalled. So, while we can’t absolutely guarantee that there will never be a problem, we do have pretty vigilant regulators and in this particular case, plainly, there have been problems but the authorities are moving as quickly as they can to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
ALAN JONES:
But see, I mean your father was a dentist. He couldn’t put a shingle up and say, you know, ‘Dick Abbott dentist’ and then go in and do something which was not consistent with proper dental practice.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeah, that’s correct.
ALAN JONES:
So, we constantly ask the Government to do it. Why are Woolworths and Coles and these people able to shove this stuff on the shelves without being able to offer any guarantee about the quality of the product in the packet or in the bottle or in the tin?
PRIME MINISTER:
That, again, is a fair point, Alan, but you see, if a business is selling food which is unsafe, in the end that business is liable and the last thing any of these people would want to do is put themselves at risk of prosecution, put themselves at risk of heavy damages and any business which is responsible for producing or passing on something which is dodgy is in a lot of trouble and…
ALAN JONES:
Well they bought the tuna from somewhere, I mean, they bought the berries from somewhere. This is the point: they just shove it on the shelves.
PRIME MINISTER:
That’s correct, and one of the reasons why the company which was packaging the berries from China, one of the reasons why they moved so swiftly was because they knew that they, ultimately, had a heavy responsibility. So, in the end, yes, government has got to set proper standards, yes, the standards have got to be policed…
ALAN JONES:
But we’ve got to stop asking government to do everything, haven’t we?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, government can’t do everything. There’s also a responsibility, Alan..
ALAN JONES:
Yes.
PRIME MINISTER:
…on the people who are preparing the food, selling the food…
ALAN JONES:
Absolutely.
PRIME MINISTER:
… and marketing the food to make sure that what they’re doing is right, because no business has a right to poison people in the name of making profit.
ALAN JONES:
That’s it, but at the same time if they do, there’s got to be some framework to deal with them. Now, Dame Marie Bashir’s talking about this because we’re capable of feeding the world and this is what she said on Sunday, Dame Marie Bashir. She said, “The destruction of fertile Australian farmland for mining is a crisis and must stop” – this is consistent with us importing fruit and vegetables and everything from all these other outfits where we can grow it ourselves – she said, “I’ve never been so emphatic or political in my life.” She said fears about foreign ownership of Australian land bring out her nasty side. She said we can help feed the world and she said, “A clarion call to women, we must do something” – this is talking to your wife – “to protect our food producing land and women can make a difference by lobbying the men. Whether they live under the same roof or in the same Parliament we have to take this message. This in a sense is a crisis.” Now, what she’s saying is why are we mining the Liverpool Plains, why are we mining the Darling Downs, why are we mining the Manning River Valley, why are we mining in the Southern Highlands? As Marie Bashir says, this is ridiculous, the destruction of fertile Australian farmland. We’re importing foodstuffs, we can grow it ourselves.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, Alan, I’ve been lucky enough to talk to Dame Marie about these things and I sat with her at the Royal Agricultural Show lunch a couple of years ago and I don’t say she’s nasty on this, I say she’s passionate, and she’s rightly passionate, because the last thing any of us want to do is vandalise the future in the name of a quick buck in the next few years. And so, I’m absolutely with her. I think everyone’s with her and the important thing is to try to ensure that the right areas get mined and the best areas don’t get mined so that they’re available forever – for agricultural production, for horse studs, for vineyards, for all that kind of thing – and I guess the challenge is to try to ensure that our agricultural industries which we want to last for thousands and thousands and thousands of years and our mining industries can continue to co-exist…
ALAN JONES:
Yeah, but hang on. You say everyone’s on Dame Marie Bashir’s side. We’re selling prime agricultural land near where Malcolm Fraser’s property is in Western Victoria to the Qatar. We’re selling dairy farms in Tasmania to the Chinese and we’re doing that in Western Australia as well and now, last week, Larissa Waters in the Parliament moved a motion, a simple motion that the Liverpool Plains – with soil that you can eat – the Liverpool Plains should be quarantined from coal mining and coal seam gas exploration. That was the motion. Immediately, she moved the motion in the Senate. The National Party senators ran for the chamber. They didn’t want to vote either way and the Liberals – yours – and Labor voted together to knock off the motion. Can you think of anything that would pass the pub test better than the notion that the Liverpool Plains should be quarantined from coal mining and coal seam gas exploration? I mean, why does the Senate – your team, Shorten’s team and, of course, the National Party – why do they run away from it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, Alan, look, I wasn’t there and I don’t know the precise terms of the motion but I guess one of the reasons why my guys may well not have wanted to support it is because there have been long existing mines in parts of these places and it is only in recent times that there has been the controversy about the coexistence of mining and agriculture.
ALAN JONES:
You can’t coexist, you know. Once mining takes over agricultural land the land isn’t rehabilitated. You can take a helicopter over the Hunter Valley – it’s a mess.
PRIME MINISTER:
And yet until recently we had the vineyards in one part, we had the horse industry in another part and we had the mining industry in another part. For the best part of two or three decades that worked reasonably well.
ALAN JONES:
There is a proposal now, Anglo American have come back three times to the Baird Government who want to mine on the edge of the Darley and Coolmore studs; Rio Tinto want to mine, knock out the little community of Bulga; AGL are mining in the Manning River Valley for God’s sake in Gloucester. Pru Goward, you know well, Southern Highlands, Posco South Korea want to mine an open cut coal mine in the Southern Highlands. It is unbelievable!
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, this is where the good planning rules should make sure that the only places that get mined are places that are not, as you say, prime agricultural land. If there is a minimalist way of mining let’s do it that way. I mean underground…
ALAN JONES:
But I am asking you to exert your influence on these things because you agree with Marie Bashir. You know that our future, we have a massive agriculture future just as we have had a massive agricultural past.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, and this is the challenge is to find the right balance and this is where good people need to sit down with each other and just say, look, how can we ensure that our vineyards, our studs, our farms continue to flourish and where possible, and I stress where possible, we mine but in ways that don’t damage all these things that are so vital for our long term future. You are absolutely right, Alan, sooner or later the minerals will be gone but we want the food production to be available for as long as humanity…
ALAN JONES:
Absolutely. Good on you. Well done.
PRIME MINISTER:
…that is the challenge.
ALAN JONES:
Exactly. Excellent. Well done. Look, every day seems to be sort of a ‘bash up Tony Abbott day’. You made some comments yesterday which I would have thought are perfectly reasonable. The West Australian Government is going to close near half of its remote communities – 274 remote communities and close half of them. You said it wasn’t unreasonable, if the cost of providing services such as schools outweighs the benefit. You said, “What we can’t do is endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have.” You said if people choose to live in areas where there are no schools or jobs there’s a limit to what they can expect the Government to provide. Well, you have been called ‘racist’ – ‘emphatically racist’ – a chorus of criticism: you’re ‘completely out of touch’. I think you’re the person, aren’t you, that’s lived with these Aboriginal communities and helped to teach them. You have been criticised for what seemed to be fairly obvious observations.
PRIME MINISTER:
That’s right, I was stating a general principle. And look, some people support what the West Australian Government is doing, some people oppose it, but the general principle, Alan, is that you and I as Australians are free to go and do whatever we reasonably want to do in our country, but if you or I chose to live in a very remote place, to what extent is the taxpayer obliged to subsidise our services and I think this is a very real question.
Now, we all know that what we need to see in these remote indigenous places is the kids going to school, the adults going to work and communities safe and secure, but it is incredibly difficult for these kids to go to school – and there’s only a half a dozen of them – and getting teachers there is all but impossible. But similarly, it’s very difficult for the adults to get a proper job if there’s no employment within hundreds of miles and this is where we have to be a little bit realistic.
ALAN JONES:
Good on you, game set and match on all of that. Just one more thing before we go and again you were bashed up but you simply said a couple of days ago, you, we, were simply tired of being lectured to by the United Nations. Here we are, you have stopped the boats, you have stopped the human tragedy that Kevin Rudd unleashed and the United Nations are now telling you, you are in breach of our international obligations because of the violence in offshore processing centres.
PRIME MINISTER:
I think it is ‘torture’ no less, that we were accused of inflicting on people. Well, this is really bizarre, Alan, absolutely bizarre. You would think the UN would be saying, well, good on Australia for actually stopping the boats and stopping the drownings at sea.
ALAN JONES:
I’m laughing because this is why they hate you, you see. I am laughing. I mean you are talking the pub talk, that’s why they hate you. You will never be loved. You will never be loved. You have got those socialists upset.
PRIME MINISTER:
And Alan, it seems that the UN Rapporteur didn’t even bother getting a response from the Australian Government or didn’t bother getting a proper response for the Australian Government. Went to the usual suspects, the usual human rights activists, accepted everything that they said as gospel truth and now we have got what is supposed to be a reputable body criticising the Australian Government for doing the right thing.
ALAN JONES:
You are doing the wrong thing because what you should do is open the flood gates, reinvigorate the people smugglers, invite more to drown on the way here, encourage fakes to destroy their papers, claim refugee places and you will be very, very popular. We will talk again soon. The listeners want to hear from you. Good luck today in Mount Gambier.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thank you so much, Alan.
[ends]