Federal election 2022 live updates: O’Connor says PM ‘doesn’t get soft power’ as Dutton defends Solomons response

Q: My question is to Minister Dutton. You said just before that the Solomon Islands Prime Minister has not said a word of criticism for Mr Morrison. But yesterday, Manasseh Sogavare said his Government is being treated like kindergarten students with guns in need of supervision. Clearly, he’s angry. What will your Government do to improve relations?

Peter Dutton:

A couple of points. Firstly, I don’t believe that those criticisms were directed towards Australia, because the relationship that we have with the Solomon Islands is an incredibly important one, and it will continue to be so.

The Prime Minister has literally, and I know that there’s a trendy pile on of Scott Morrison in different parts of the media and around the country at the moment.

But Scott has gone out of his way to form those personal relationships at different fora through bilateral discussions, and he genuinely believes in the family of the Pacific.

And I heard him relay conversations that he’s had with different Pacific Island leaders in National Security Committee discussions.

So I can understand the pressure that Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare is under at the moment, but in Australia, as he said, he finds a good friend.

He finds somebody that is reliable. He’s not suggesting that we can’t provide support to the Solomon Islands. We’ve got ADF and Australian Federal Police on the ground in the Solomon Islands now. And that will continue to be the case.

We haven’t withdrawn effort. We haven’t been asked to withdraw.

We were requested to go there. And the NSC took a decision that we would do exactly that, because we wanted to help a friend.

But China operates by very different rules. And if you want to pre tend that this is a problem of Australia – well, pretend it’s a problem of Japan in the East China Sea, and pretend it’s a problem for India on the land border where the Indian troops have been killed.

And pretend that it’s a problem of the Philippines that are at odds with the Chinese Government at the moment. And pre tend that it’s a problem of Vietnam where their waters are being fished out.

I mean, this is an issue worldwide. Talk to the Sri Lankans where the port has just been taken back because they can’t meet the debt repayments to the Chinese government. We’re living with that reality. And you can dance around the different half sentences and nuance here and the nuance there. Our country face as very uncertain time and now is not a time to risk a change of Government to a weak Government at the next election.

Brendan O’Connor responds:

I think it is fair to say to not comment on certain matters there and we support the Office of the Special Investigator. I do think, though, and it was before Peter’s time. He’s only been in the job for just over 10% of the Government’s term in Defence. And he’s number six.

But in fact, when Linda Reynolds was defence minister, I think it was unfortunate that she chose not to appear with the CDF when the Brereton Report was publicised. I remember being on Insiders about to be interviewed by David Speers and I couldn’t believe it, but there was the CDF taking the guest appearance instead of a minister, instead of Minister Reynolds.

It shows that the Government is willing to walk away from political leadership on that issue and they should not have. I’m not saying that that has happened with Peter, but I do say that it did happen at the time of the Brereton Report was published, publicly.

And I do think that the Government should have stood aside next to the Chief of Defence Force and answered the questions about that matter. Otherwise, to the extent that Peter answered that we can’t talk about the matters until there’s a proper investigation under way, I accept that proposition.

Daniel Hurst asks this question:

To a substantial matter within your portfolio, the implementation of the Brereton reforms much the chief of the Defence Force, General Campbell, said that transparency would be key. And your predecessor, Linda Reynolds, said that it would be there and you haven’t once mentioned it. You approved the Afghanistan reform plan on May 26 last year, but it wasn’t released for more than two months and just quietly posted on the defence website on a Friday.

And FOI documents showed that the CDF warns that retaining the meritorious poses risk to the “Morality of the force and threatens the international reputation of the ADF and its capacity to operate effectively. The action could be perceived by international counterparts as dismissive and a failure to accept accountability.”

Minister – why have you hung the CDF out to dry? And why have you failed to keep the public informed of the important reforms via Parliament?

Peter Dutton.

Daniel from the Guardian – one of my favourite publications.

Hurst:

I’m glad that you read it

Dutton:

I’m being sarcastic, of course

Hurst:

To the substance, it’s an important matter.

Dutton:

You’ve asked your question and I’ll answer it. I have found and I’ve known Angus for many years.

I’ve found him to be an incredibly affective leader. A person with great capability. An affable person. Someone who provides inspiration to many that he’s led over a long period of time.

So don’t dare say that I have undermined him as the chief of the Defence Force. I never have and I never would. So I take that very seriously. And if you have a suggestion that you’d like to substantiate your comment with as to something I’ve said, then you should table it here, today.

And, of course, you can’t.

Hurst:

It’s the FOI.

Dutton:

I’ll answer your question. We have a situation whereas Home Affairs Minister, in response to serious allegations, along with the Attorney-General of the day, we set up the Office of the Special Investigator. We did that on advice from the Australian Federal Police Commissioner, on advice from the CDF and others and looked at all of the advice and we took a decision to set up the OSI.

Now, that is, as at its head, an eminent legally qualified former judge. It has an investigative capacity. It’s doing its work. And so, we have moved into a different phase. I’m not commenting on investigations.

I’m not commenting on whether a particular investigation is up to a certain stage. Whether somebody is about to be arrested.

Whether somebody has just been cleared. These are proper investigations that are undertaken by the OSI. So it’s not a play thing. It’s not something to be I have the utmost respect for the men and women of the Australian Defence Force, including those within the SAS.

I won’t hang people out to dry, but if people have done the wrong thing, then there’s a process to answer to. But we are following proper process here.

There’s not going to be a situation where leaking information about a particular individual in your publication or any trashy publication or any trashy publication like it. We won’t allow that. We’ll allow them to look it and if there’s sufficient evidence to patrols cute the Navy, we will do it.

Q: A question for both of you. The Defence Department last year was warned by ASPI, its spending on contractors is a, “Looming iceberg” that could eat into the acquisition budget. Both the numbers of contractors and the external workforce have grown by thousands over the last 2-3 years. How will you respond to those warnings that this spending could sap the acquisition budget if you win the election?

Brendan O’Connor:

We’ve already got a broader policy to examine the use of consultants and contractors to see whether they’re efficient.

We know that there’s been a terrible depletion in the department of veteran affairs of’ moving dedicated public servants and putting in place, untrained and often unskilled, not always sensitive labour hire employees to try to do a job that they’re not particularly made for.

We’ve got concerns across the… To be honest, across Government, about the overuse of some of these consultancies, and as I think that Jim Chalmers made clear and Katy Gallagher, that we would be examining the value for money.

We’ve already made a committee insofar as the Department of Veterans’ Affairs is concerned, is to re-dedicate $250 million to renovate that department because it’s in a terrible way. It’s got 60,000 veterans waiting for their matters, their applications to be properly sorted. We need to do better and that’s a very good example of what’s happened under this Government’s watch, I believe.

Peter Dutton:

A couple of points. Firstly, it’s obvious when you take money from defence over forward estimates or into the years that it’s very hard to plan. Because you’ve got a recurrent cost with wages and under Labor spending $10 billion a year less, it does mean that you need to trim numbers. And that’s the impact.

It provides great uncertainty for the workforce, for the forward projections about how programs are going to be delivered, and the like. And as I pointed out before, we have put ourselves in a position where we’ve corrected Labor deprioritising defence, taking money out of the ADF and not only have we stablised, but we’ve increased the spending. And over the forward estimates, we go beyond 2%. And we grow to next year, $48 billion a year.

And by $3 billion or so each year from there. And as I said before, my judgement is that we will need to commit more to defence into the future as well.

I suspect your argument as a journalist from the Canberra Times is not that there should be less jobs in Canberra.

And as Zed Sejelja … pointed out, that if we were to win, it would only be in concert with the minor parties, including the Greens, when Labor was last in power. And the Greens have a definite policy to cut billions of dollars from defence, which would mean at of thousands of jobs from defence and from defence industry being lost, including in places like Canberra. And Zed and his colleagues here are standing firmly against that. And thank goodness for it.

And we should point out that difference. And I think that it is the uncertainty that Labor brings if they’re elected on May a 21. Not just to the department and to people wearing the uniform, but also to the hundred thousand people that now work within defence industry across the country.

Q: The question is mainly for Minister Dutton but I’ll be interested in your views and diminishing transparency around defence decision making. Why is it that the people of Australia have to learn about things like the cancelled armed UK AV contract and cancelled Australian build of the large Pacific support vessel through bureaucrats being grilled during Senate Estimates rather than from the minister responsible?

Peter Dutton:

I’ve been very clear to the Defence Force, to the secretary of my department, to the chief of the Defence Force and the service chiefs.

I’ve been very clear to the Australian people that where we have programs that are not performing, those programs will be terminated.

And I’ve been clear with our industry partners that we value the partnership very much, but we expect in a contracted arrangement for there to be performance. Arrested where people reason performing, then we aren’t going to continue that arrangement.

Now, in the vast majority of cases, we have a successful outcome and the Defence Department, along with our industry partners, are able to deliver capability on time, on budget and enhance the capacity to defend our country.

So I don’t want the problem projects to overshadow the successes that we have and evidenced by what we’ve been able to acquire just over the last couple of years, we have the ability to make announcements, whether it is by the release from me or advice to the department first in a situation where there’s been a decision that’s been leaked and the media has picked it up, or the Opposition has received that through a disaffected party, and that’s put to an official within Senate Estimates before we’re able to make or we’re prepared to make a public announcement. I can’t change that.

I mean, that’s the nature of your business is to try to form relationships with people that will pass you a document or give you a heads up on something.

So I done want to do the journalists out of business but that’s the reality of it.

But all I would say is that we are spending $270 billion this decade and we need to spend more. And if you look at some of the projects, Loyal Wingman is a project where that has the potential to be a $1 billion a year export. It’s going to be a huge success story, I believe, for Boeing and the partnership we have there. It’s a necessary capability. It’s going to support us and our allies and it’s a huge achievement and I think that we should be and we should be proud of it.

Brendan O’Connor:

Clearly there should be transparency. You don’t get to boast about the red spice while you cancel secretly the Sky Guardian. You shouldn’t be able to boast about building a support vessel and meanwhile, buy a second hand one and hide it in the Canary Islands.

The Government has to be more accountable and transparent in this. The Government should choose things it changes its mind on. There’s litany of examples where the Government has not done what it said it would do, and often promoted things that are new but never mention the things that it’s cancelled. Remember, this Government started with a Defence Minister who is famous for saying, “We can’t build a canoe.” So you wonder whether they actually support sovereign capability.

Peter Dutton:

The last time that you sat around the National Security Committee table, you were responsible for the arrival of some 12,000 people and 184 boats. What do you say to the men and women of the Australian Navy who are still suffering from PTSD today from having pulled those bodies from the water of those women and children who drowned at sea?

Brendan O’Connor:

Well, I firstly obviously have enormous admiration for the Customs and Naval personnel who rescued people at sea, who were going to dangerous situations in high sea stakes.

And I can remember vividly in 2010 and I flew into Christmas island on the day that that unsea-worthy vessel floundered on the rocks of Christmas Island. Our crew went in to tenders and ribs, plucked, retrieved and rescued people out of the water. I was involved with the administrator having to set up a temporary morgue of people. People had arrived, or tried to arrive.

It was a devastating time for those people, for Naval and Customs personnel, who I later on met privately because of their brave actions.

They didn’t have to go in that day. And I assure you, I was aware of it before then.

But even after then, I was very much instrumental in moving and changing he policy of the ALP to take on a more deterrent position in relation to people who leave countries of transition, was was the case of that. Because I do believe that you have to have deterrents.

And frankly, we did try to put some things in place and we’ll never know if they were to work.

But I’ll tell you this, I didn’t join up with the Greens like Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton, to stop us trying to put in place a Malaysian arrangement. They voted with the Greens, not because they thought that the Malaysian arrangement wouldn’t work, they voted with the Greens because they were scared it would.

So they acted in a partisan way back then on this issue. Now, frankly, we did put in offshore processing.

But we do believe that processing should happen, but we put it in place. This Government, and I’ll give it credit, obviously, put in other element that is have provided a deterrence. And Labor supports Operation Sovereign Borders.

…We were looking to try other options as well and frankly, Peter Dutton and other lined up with the Greens and stopped that in the Parliament. That’s the truth of it. That’s what happened because they played base at domestic politics instead of putting the national interest first.

And that’s what we were left with. I will pay tribute to the ability to stop those vessels but can I just say in relation to offshore processing, we need to also process people. It’s a verb. Pursuant to our obligations under the convention. You don’t leave people indefinitely in a hellish hole as has happened

The two debaters can now ask each other a question.

Brendan O’Connor:

Upon reflection, when you think to the comments that you made about it being inconceivable that we would not engage in a war with a nuclear superpower, given an invasion of Taiwan that might involve the United States, do you think on reflection, answering that hypothetical in the affirmative was the right thing to do? And would you say it again?

Peter Dutton:

Well, we have an alliance with the United States. It served us well for decades. The United States has been the underpinning of security in our own region for the last 80 years.

And I know at different times during Labor’s history, including the leadership of Mark Latham, and I think that you voted for Mark, there was talk about breaking the alliance with the United States.

That will never happen under a Coalition Government. We are a population of 25.8 million people.

We have, in many ways, punched above our weight. We are a great and reliable friend and ally, not just in our region, but with the big and mighty within the five eyes context, and beyond that, in the Quad and elsewhere.

So, do I think that we would shirk away from our responsibility to be a good ally with the United States? No, I don’t. And I don’t think that that would be in the interests of our country. I think that you would put us in an incredibly precarious position if Labor again decided to break the alliance with the United States.

I think that that would be a travesty. And I don’t think…

O’Connor:

That’s never happened.

Dutton:

It was spoken about. And the hard left of the Labor Party would break the alliance with the United States tomorrow. You can go through your

O’Connor:

Absurd.

Dutton:

…colleagues one by one who would seek to do that. And this is a time where we need to stand up together. Brendan today hasn’t been able to point out one quote of Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare of criticism of our country.

O’Connor:

You haven’t given me an opportunity. You should ask me that question!

Dutton:

…Not one.

And I think that when you look at who has changed in the region, it is China. And as I’ve said before, I want to make sure that we can have a normalised relationship, but we’re not going to seed our democracy or we’re not going to be in a position where we don’t question human rights abuses.

We are a country that stand up for our values and we’re not going to deviate from that. And that’s the strength of the Coalition and that is the choice that people have to make at this election between a weak Government led by Anthony Albanese, who will take money away from defence, or a proven track record of the Morrison Government of supporting the men and women of the ADF and investing in a record way to keep our country safe.

Q: Do you think that China will change given that the world is moving towards a tougher stance?

Peter Dutton:

My assessment is no. I think if you look at the relationship between China and Russia, at a time when the rest of the world is applying sanctions in a unified way, or condemning Russia for the acts of aggression, China is forming this unbreakable bond.

When you look at the amassing of nuclear weapons, militarisation in the South China Sea and also looking at what’s at the shared land border at the hands of Chinese troops in the last few years, I think it’s deeply concerning and it’s heading in one direction.

And that’s why we do need to be strong, not weak, as Labor were when they were first in government. And we need to make sure that we stand with our allies, and that’s been the basis of the Aukus agreement, so that we can project that strength.

I want nothing more than a normalised relationship with China. We have an incredible diaspora community here. Wonderful Australians who worked hard, they’ve educated their children [are] law abiding and a huge part of the migration to the country. But the direction of the Chinese government at the moment, including in our own region, is alarming and we should be realistic about it.

Updated at 23.35 EDT

Brendan O’Connor rebuts that:

I don’t agree with the conspiracy theory that there’s a benefit for China given the position that Labor has taken in relation to China and its changed conduct. If I’m allowed to finish Peter, you just had your go.

As I just said from the outset, we know China has changed. We know it’s now more assertive, more aggressive, more coercive.

And in fact, Penny Wong, who has just been verballed by Peter, made that clear in contributions last year where she outlined the significant shift that’s happened in the region.

And as Dennis Richardson said, an eminent, or probably the most eminent former head of security agencies, there’s many agencies as we all know, said that it is not in this country’s interest for a political party to attack the other major political party on the basis of appeasing China – particularly when it’s untrue.

Q: Where would relations with China be different under Labor compared to the government?

O’Connor:

I think that we’ve been saying now for some time, we’ve agreed with the government.

When I’ve been asked questions about am I blaming the government for the changed behaviour of China, I’ve made it unequivocally clear that it is not the Australian government or Australia that’s changed its behaviour.

It is China. It has become aggressive, assertive and coercive and it’s using and applying methods of operation that we would not operate under those same forms of behaviour.

I’ve made that very clear. Anthony Albanese has made that very clear. Penny Wong has made that very clear. I think that the reality is, yes, you will see China involve itself in our matters from time to time improperly. But that doesn’t mean that it wants one over the other, and of course, it suits Peter’s purposes to suggest otherwise.

Updated at 23.32 EDT

Q: You [Peter Dutton] and Mr Morrison say that Labor are about appeasing China. What do you mean by that? How would they appease China? And you said in parliament, the CCP wants Labor to win. Why do you think that?

Peter Dutton:

Well, Andrew, I’m looking forward to Brendan’s response to my answer.

Brendan O’Connor:

I have got a response!

Dutton:

Give him two minutes!

I think Andrew, we are dealing with the reality of a new China.

And I think that Australians should be wide-eyed about this. I think that people should be under no illusion.

There’s no need to embellish the intelligence we’re reading. There’s no need to pretend it is something that is happening.

The fact is that every like-minded country has drawn a similar conclusion about the direction of China.

Now there’s no doubt in my mind that the Chinese Communist Party would like to see a change of government at the May 21 election. No question at all.

And I think that there’s evidence of that on the WeChat activity, which is a Communist Party dominated and influenced platform. The interference with the prime minister’s own WeChat page there.

The way in which editors of Chinese language newspapers in our country have been lent on, I think is further evidence. And other elements, obviously, that I can’t go into publicly.

So I stand by that statement. Believe it very strongly.

And in relation to the appeasement element – I think that if you look at all of the language of Penny Wong.

Penny Wong believes that she can go to Beijing on a charm offensive and she could change the direction of China under President Xi. President Xi, of course, would be laughing under his breath as he was entertaining his dear friend in Beijing and only if she was able to wind back some of the acts of aggression from the Morrison government, from signing Aukus, to acquiring missile capability, that the conversation could continue.

And they continue to buy time.

I’ve been open and frank in my commentary because I want to see our country stay safe. I want to see our region continue the prosperity. I want to see people in countries that surround us that aren’t as wealthy as we are lifted from poverty and we can only do that if we’ve got security and peace in our region. And that’s at the heart of everything we’re trying to do to defend our nation.

Updated at 23.29 EDT