More affordable and reliable electricity; Border protection
Prime Minister
AMANDA: He’s on the line now, good morning Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER: Hey Amanda, hey Jonesy.
JONESY: Hello there.
AMANDA : Just a reminder, you’ve lost the last grand final Jonesy.
JONESY: The heart still beats black, white and blue, isn’t that right? And I think Prime Minister – I don’t know if I can call you ScoMo any more?
PRIME MINISTER: Of course you can Jonesy.
JONESY: Is it too over-familiar?
PRIME MINISTER: No, no not at all mate. Always, always –
JONESY: Can I still buy you hot chips at the next game?
PRIME MINISTER: I was counting on it, so was Lily my daughter.
JOESNY: They’re good hot chips.
PRIME MINISTER: They’re very good chips down at Shark Park, I can highly recommend them.
AMANDA: Look, lets move on from the Shark Park if you don’t mind.
[Laughter]
So you’re going to, I mean, who doesn’t want less power bills? How brilliant. But don’t you need more than a big stick? How are you going to do this for us?
PRIME MINISTER: There’s three things we’re doing. The first one is, when you currently go off your discount deal with an energy company and you just basically stay with the same company, typically your price goes up, not down. You know, you don’t even get to stay where you were before. That’s what happens with these deals. So we’re changing what is called the standard offer to a default offer, which means that you don’t get ripped off at the other end of your contract.
The second thing is that the regulations around the electricity market are very complicated and they confuse people. That often means that electricity companies, that lack of clarity and understanding can often leave customers worse off. It can be used to the company’s advantage, so when they’re doing that and when they’re ripping people off on that basis, well, we’ll have some new powers which means we can penalise them. That can go all through to the divestment of their assets, which is a pretty serious power to be used only in pretty extreme circumstances. But they need to know that they just can’t do whatever the hell they like. That they have to operate and give people a fair go.
The third thing we’re doing is we’re supporting more investment in what I call reliable or fair dinkum power, the stuff that works when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. I mean renewables are great and we support those too. But you’ve got to have things that keep the lights on.
AMANDA: Right, one of the things that I imagine though, one of the lessons for the Liberal Party in Wentworth was that people do want a proper climate change policy?
PRIME MINISTER: Well that’s true and we have one. We have one and we met the Kyoto 1 target, we smashed that. The second one, Kyoto 2, we’re going to smash that too. We’ll meet the third one in a canter, so you can have lower electricity prices and you can meet the emissions reduction targets. Our emissions per capita today are the lowest level they’ve been in 28 years. So we are getting emissions down. We are meeting our targets. We need to keep meeting our targets and have the policies to continue to support that. But one of the things, I mean I was out at an ice cream wholesaler this morning here in Canberra, and their power bills are pretty high. But they’ve been doing all they can to use different types of lighting, all these sorts of things to manage their energy consumption. That’s one of the things that’s also helping meet our emissions reductions targets; just common sense. The other thing is technology. You don’t need to subsidise these things any more because they’ve actually become quite cost effective. So governments don’t need to intervene, handing out money in subsidies. What they need to do is keep the big energy companies in line and have the powers to make sure they do the right thing.
JONESY: Can you talk to my kids about power, consuming power and saving it ScoMo?
PRIME MINISTER: So you must do the same thing I do, you run around turning all the lights off after them.
JONESY: Yeah!
[Laughter]
AMANDA: I do that too.
JONESY: It’s unbelievable.
PRIME MINISTER: I don’t know what it is, what is that?
AMANDA: No, we were probably the same when we were kids as well.
JONESY: They’ll have the heater on and the ceiling fan. I said: “What are you doing?”
[Laughter]
AMANDA: Can I ask you this Prime Minister, you said some beautiful words this week when you issued an apology for the victims of institutional sexual abuse. You spoke so eloquently.
PRIME MINISTER: Thank you.
AMANDA: You said that you looked at your own children and you thought: “How could people do this to children?” Which begs the question about children in Nauru, what can we do there?
PRIME MINISTER: Well we have been getting them off now for some time and we’ve got over 200 off and we’re going to keep getting that done. I mean we’re dealing with a problem that we inherited, but I’ll tell you one thing; you don’t get kids off Nauru by putting more on.
AMANDA: But can’t you just take them off? There’s 52 kids there, they need doctors they need mental health. Can’t you just take them –
PRIME MINISER: We’ve already been moving quite a number off, particularly those on medical cases. But this is the thing, if you get the balance wrong on this, then kids get on boats again. I mean I’ve been there, I was there in 2013 when we had to stop these tragedies. Kids were dying in the sea.
Now if kids get back on boats again because they think: “Oh well, everybody can get to Australia now,” I know how the smugglers work. They don’t read Australian newspapers and think, “Oh well, that seems like a fair enough deal”. They will just run that business again and put people at risk. So we’ve got to get this balance carefully right and that’s what we’re doing. We are getting kids off, we’ve closed 17 detention centres. We’ve got about 8,000 kids out of detention in Australia as a Government. So we’ve been getting all this done and we’ll continue to get it done on Nauru as people get placed over in the United States and other areas. So we’ll keep doing it, it is important, I believe it’s important. But I can’t get kids off Nauru by risking policies that will put more kids on Nauru by the boats running again.
AMANDA: Those poor 52 children, sacrificed for the policy.
JONESY: You see what he’s saying.
AMANDA: Of course I see. Of course I see.
JONESY: These are the decisions you’ve got to make.
AMANDA: But 541 of the people on Nauru have been found to be genuine refugees.
PRIME MINISTER: Yeah they’re living on Nauru, like Nauruans do. They’re not in detention on Nauru, they live freely like any of the Nauruans do. But we’re working hard to get those kids off and we have been making a lot of progress. There was just, I think it was about 12 who were moved just the other day, so this continues to happen Amanda and I believe it is an important issue. I mean I have a very close personal understanding of this. I have visited more detention centres, both here and overseas, than probably any other member of the Federal Parliament. So I understand what these things are like. But the kids are not in detention on Nauru and on Manus there are no kids. I mean the Labor Party put kids on Manus Island. They put pregnant women on Manus Island and we put an end to that too.
JONESY: And you were up on the Harbour Bridge with Harry, what was the small talk?
PRIME MINISTER: I was too busy blowing mate, I was blowing when I got to the top there I can tell you.
AMANDA: Oh, you mean puffing.
JONESY: Out of breath.
PRIME MINISTER: I mean I’d never done it before, it’s like, you live in the city your whole life, you don’t do some of the things that visitors do on a regular basis. But that is fair dinkum the best view I have ever seen of Sydney. It is incredible.
JONESY: I thought our relationship between countries had changed a bit. I thought - oh come on -
AMANDA: Just bought him some chips.
PRIME MINISTER: Behave.
JONESY: To welcome him, just a handshake.
AMANDA: That’s your mate right there Prime Minister. You know what you’re getting into with Jonesy.
JONESY: This is what happened when you became Prime Minister, you know, we should be able to still have the bants ScoMo, come on.
[Laughter]
PRIME MINISTER: Black white and blue means Cronulla mate, you leave the blue on the side.
AMANDA: Thank you Scott Morrison.
JONESY: Prime Minister Scott Morrison, it’s always a treat, thank you for joining us.
PRIME MINISTER: Thanks guys, always good to talk to you too. All the best.