EDDIE MCGUIRE:
Good morning Prime Minister. You've got an announcement that’s on the front page of The Herald Sun this morning and the microphone is yours.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well thanks Eddie, yes. We're putting five billion dollars on the table to build the rail to Melbourne Airport. It's been talked about since the 1960s, would you believe? Victorians and all Australians who use Melbourne Airport know that it's needed.
So we're putting five billion dollars on the table and what we're saying to the Victorian Government is, “Work with us as partners”.
We will build it together, we'll own it together, let's do it together and get it built.
So five billion dollars. We’d expect them to match that and we believe there's plenty of opportunity for private sector involvement as well. Let's approach this in an imaginative, city-shaping way to build the best infrastructure for this great city to its airport.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
So Prime Minister can you give us your vision for this? How will this, other than that shuffling people out to the airport who are going over to, you know, go overseas, do whatever they’re doing, how will this become a hub for industry that you're imagining at the moment? We've seen you've been caught in the traffic this morning, so we understand we've got to get that sorted out. But what else can we do? What is the big picture plan that you've got in your mind?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well Eddie, the future for cities is you need to have greater connectivity. You can't keep on building bigger and bigger roads, you know the freeway, you can't keep on widening the freeway. You've got to get people into mass transit and that means light rail, like trams, you've got the best tram system in the world here. But you've got to have fast rail, heavy rail and metro rail. The airport needs that.
Of course it will provide greater connectivity and greater opportunity for transport-oriented development, so denser development around railway stations and so forth all the way out to the airport.
It’s critically important. This is the future of cities.
You're going to have greater density, but you can have greater amenity. You can actually have a more liveable city as long as you've got the right public transport infrastructure.
LUKE DARCY:
Prime Minister, one of our colleagues just exited the studio a man by the name of Chris Judd, who’s a two-time Brownlow Medal winner and a bit of a lateral thinker. He left behind a question for you which is very topical in terms of what you're talking about. Now this is Chris Judd.
CHRIS JUDD - RECORDING:
Just a quick one, Prime Minister does the introduction of autonomous cars in the future make negotiation with Macquarie Airports easier when talking about introducing a train line to the airport?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well that's a good question. I think autonomous vehicles are probably a little further off than many of the enthusiasts imagine. But I think that is something that's coming. The need however, for mass transit, for light rail and trains and buses, is vital.
Look that is the way a big modern city can work, it is that connectivity that you need. Everybody knows that rail to Melbourne Airport is long overdue.
But it takes leadership to get on with it, so what we're saying is: “here’s five billion dollars.” That's a lot of money, that's very serious money. I’m saying to Daniel Andrews, let's build it together.
Let's do it as partners. Set up a, you know, a special authority or special purpose vehicle, joint company, however you want to structure it. But let's do it together.
We’ve put up the money for the business case already. We'll have the results in September. That's a good platform to go forward.
LUKE DARCY:
Just quickly, when you think driverless cars, I mean it's a question that if you put a date on it, when would the Prime Minister think that's going to be a factor in Australia?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well look predictions like this are almost certainly going to be wrong okay? But I would say it will be a little later than the enthusiasts think.
LUKE DARCY:
Within the next decade, within ten years?
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh, yeah. I think they will become a factor within 10 years, but I’ll tell you what my experience is with technology. I’ve found over the years that it tends to take longer than the enthusiasts think for it to pick up. But then once it gets picked up it really accelerates. I'll give you a good example from the newspaper business. The internet became commercial in the mid 90s and a lot of people including me said: “Well, classified ads are doomed in newspapers, everyone will be doing their searches and looking for cars and lost gold fish or whatever online, real estate online”.
But it took a long time. The peak levels of classified ads in newspapers was about 2006. So you find that it takes longer to get started, to really get going and then it takes off.
So that may well be the case with cars.
WIL ANDERSON:
Prime Minister, can I ask you this one? The problem with this story is, like you said, it's been something that people in Melbourne have been talking about for since the 1960s. This is the ‘Aqua Man’ movie, Melbourne's great white whale, the idea that there's going to be a rail link to the airport.
Do you think, is this just a big announcement or is this a thing that you actually think will happen?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well of course it will happen. We’ve got five billion dollars to make it happen.
WIL ANDERSON:
But they need 10 or 15?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well that’s right. That’s right and the state government has expressed their strong support for it. Daniel Andrews said only recently how important the project was.
So we're prepared to build it in partnership with him and so we'd expect him to match that and we can get on and do it together. We've just cut him a cheque for two billion dollars remember, for buying him out of Snowy Hydro.
So he's got a bit of, he's got a bit of money to walk around with to put into a railway.
[Laughter]
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
Well, you didn’t give it to him.
PRIME MINISTER:
No, no well that’s right, we gave it to him in return for his share in Snowy Hydro. No that’s true Eddie! Good point.
[Laughter]
So he sold us his share in a slightly used hydro-electric scheme, which we are going to expand by the way, to increase its capacity massively with Snowy Hydro 2.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
We've got your colleague Matthew Guy coming up in the next hour. He was scheduled to come on today and he's coming into the studio. If he wins the election, the state election at the end of this year in November, is this a poison pill, possibly, for him, in that it's going to suck up all the infrastructure money in Victoria for a considerable period of time? That this becomes the project at the expense of others?
PRIME MINISTER:
No, Matthew is really enthusiastic about it. Like everyone in Melbourne he knows that this is something that has to be built. I mean, Eddie you cannot keep on kicking this can down the road forever.
We know that a rail line has to be built to the airport. There's a speech in the Victorian Parliament from 1964 about the need to get it done, before they’d even built the Tullamarine Airport.
It is obvious that it has to be done and you've got to start now. You can’t build it in a week. You can't build it in a year. It's going to take years to build this, to plan it and build it.
But if you don't start you'll never do it. So that's what leadership is about.
Now you've got to have resources and we have got - because we're bringing the budget back into balance, because we’ve got the Commonwealth’s finances under control again - what we are able to do is put this $5 billion investment on the table and get on with it.
LUKE DARCY:
Be nice to see day where we had a bipartisan approach to infrastructure. We have all the big issues, we've churned through money here in this state by not building East-West, then the next day we do want to build it. I hope this is the day forward in that being the case.
I just want to change tack quickly and ask you about Donald Trump who you've got a relationship with. Overnight he’s threatened to send missiles to Syria and keeps alluding to the fact that he might fire the special investigator Robert Mueller. What do you think would happen if that was the case, if the President decided to sack the independent investigator? What comes as a result of that, Prime Minister?
PRIME MINISTER:
I'll leave that to the political commentators, I don't do political commentary on Australia, let alone on the United States.
But I just want to say with respect to Syria and leaving aside tweets and so forth, very seriously there, 49 people were killed in a shocking chemical attack in Douma in Syria.
We have sought to support, as have other nations, this being condemned and investigated by the United Nations Security Council. Russia has vetoed that. The Syrian regime is of course supported by Russia. We call on Russia to use its enormous influence in Syria to ensure that this is investigated, those who have been responsible are brought to justice.
And that this use of chemical warfare, whether it's in Syria or on a park bench in Salisbury in England, is a shocking violation of international law and an affront to humanity.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
Donald Trump, the President of the United States said today, it’s the worst that relations have been with Russia since and including the Cold War. That's a terrible state of affairs to be in in 2018 isn’t it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it's a very strong judgment. I think what he's doing there is calling on his counterpart in Russia, President Putin to stop this disruption of the international order and bring to an end these offences against international law and humanity. In particular, this use of chemical weapons and the nerve agent used in the UK recently against the Scripals. Just recently the expulsion of a number of Russian diplomats around the world and of course now this shocking chemical attack by the Syrian regime in Douma.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
Could I just pivot back to the announcement today?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeah.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
Just to finish on as we’re heading towards the 8 o’clock news Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER:
A lot of people stuck in the traffic will be very interested in this.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
Very much so. Now there’s a number of different ideas that have been put on the table. There's four different ones, with rail lines out to Broadmeadows, Craigieburn we could put a spur in, which you spoke about has been on the table since 1964. I mentioned earlier standing in 1969 I reckon at the Jacana Station. My dad pointed at the airport which you could see it etc. etc. So we've all been through that.
PRIME MINISTER:
So what did he say Eddie? “One day young Eddie, there’ll be a train line to the airport”.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
He did. I asked him why there were so many platforms of the Jacana Station. He said: “See straight across that valley? See the airport over there?” Remember that was being built at that stage because it wasn’t open until 1970. He said: “There’s going to be a railway line right through here. This is where it’s going to come through”.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well we’re going to prove your Dad right. It may not be on precisely that route because we've obviously got -
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
There’s a few others.
PRIME MINISTER:
We’ve got plenty of options.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
Is there a sky rail type of opportunity to go up the freeway, for example? Are we going to look at it a little bit imaginatively? Because, as you know better than anyone Prime Minister - and you've travelled the world, you're probably the most travelled Prime Minister we've had as far as international cities are concerned, you've seen the skyline of New York, you've seen the subways in New York and Paris and London etc. - if you dig, it’ll cost it’ll cost you a fortune. Is there any innovative way we can get this done, do you think? A new way?
PRIME MINISTER:
We're certainly going to approach it in a very innovative and imaginative way and we should. You've got to look at rail infrastructure as not simply a means of getting people from a to b, but as a means of shaping a city and improving and enhancing the liveability of the city.
So just looking at it as a transport engineer might, saying: “What is the you know the fastest and cheapest alignment?” You've got to do more than that and use it as a way of enhancing, creating communities and making communities more liveable.
So I think every option will be looked at. I notice that a sky rail of the kind you described has not been one of the options that is being canvassed today.
WIL ANDERSON:
Do you think this will happen? This is what I really want to know.
PRIME MINISTER:
There’s five billion reasons why I think it’ll happen.
WIL ANDERSON:
I know Prime Minister, but the problem is that over the last sixty years, everybody has said that this is going to happen. It comes up every second year, but –
PRIME MINITSER:
No one has put this sort of money on the table. Look, the reason why it hasn't happened is because governments have not been prepared to make the investment. Now, that's what we're doing. We're prepared to make the investment. There it is, $5 billion.
We will do this as a partner with the Victorian government. We'll work together, you said on a bipartisan basis. Look, this project will go on for many years and there may well be changes of government.
So the important thing is this should transcend politics. Melbourne needs a rail line to the airport. We all know that.
It takes leadership to get on, make the investment and build it. It will require a lot of co-operation and imagination and innovation to ensure it happens and that's what I'm committed to do.
LUKE DARCY:
Prime Minister always a happy day when you roll into town with $5 billion in your pocket.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
I like it.
LUKE DARCY:
I don’t know you’d be anything but well received today. We appreciate you coming in to join us this morning.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thanks very much.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
Thanks very much for us Prime Minister. We appreciate the fact that you come into Triple M to speak to us whenever you’ve got these big announcements.
PRIME MINISTER:
It's great to be here.
EDDIE MCGUIRE:
Thank you Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, 5 billion dollars on the table to get a rail system that will have an airport link.
WIL ANDERSON:
Let’s put it on Winx. Let’s get the five billion, we put it on Winx.
LUKE DARCY:
Double it, double it.
WIL ANDERSON:
You can’t double it on Winx’s odds, but we could get –
LUKE DARCY:
You might be able to organise that, better odds.
WIL ANDERSON:
What do you reckon PM, could we whack it on Winx?
PRIME MINISTER:
Ah not my five billion dollars.
[Laughter]
If you’ve got a lazy five of your own, that’s a matter for you.
[ENDS]