Prime Minister, thank you. When I was leaving the house early this morning, putting on a tie, which I don’t usually do I have to confess. My five year old asked, ‘Dad, why are you putting on a tie?’ I said I’ve got to talk to someone important this morning, I’m doing an interview. He said, ‘Oh yeah, who’s that? Roger Cook?’. Five years old. I said, ‘No, it’s Anthony Albanese’. He shrugged his shoulders, he went, ‘Oh, close’. So, there you go.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Roger will like that.
PARKER: We’re all very happy to see you here, aren’t we? Welcome. We’re glad the Prime Minister’s here. All of us are glad to see you here this week, Prime Minister, I can assure you. You’ve come with two announcements today. I just want to go to each of them in just a little more detail so we understand what they are and how they work. The Westport announcement, this has obviously been a Cook Government priority and McGowan Government priority for some time. You’re joining the party. This is, leading up to budgets, it’s typically when state and federal governments get together on big infrastructure projects. What exactly are you promising?
PRIME MINISTER: What we’re promising is for half of the funding, which is almost, between us and the Cook Government, almost $70 million, to do all of the planning work that’s needed. Now it’s at early stages re approval, but what we need to do is to make sure that you’re not just talking about building a port in isolation, you’re building roads to that port, rail infrastructure, everything that’s needed to make sure it’s a success. Now that’s been spoken about for some time. I recall discussions about the need for increased capacity here in Perth, in particular, when I was the Infrastructure Minister all those years ago. So this is a joint commitment in accordance with the priorities that have been established by Roger’s Government. And before that, Mark McGowan was very supportive of this project as well. For a while there, there was more than a billion dollars of Commonwealth money tied up in a road that the WA Government didn’t want. That’s an example of, I think, federal and state government not working together. One of the things that we’ve been able to achieve with as well, with the Liberal Government in Tasmania, I must say as well, is to stop that nonsense. To sit down and talk about what are the priorities, how do we get things done together? I think it’s a very wise decision that we have here in WA, that you’ve got a Treasurer who also gets infrastructure that, I worked with Rita for a long period of time as well, because that’s the key. But you have to get the planning right, which means that you can then accelerate the delivery of the project.
PARKER: The very large, very expensive, hopefully very useful map that’s going to be developed over the next 10 years. What are the priorities? Where does it start? How do people access it? What information are they going to get first?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, it will take longer than 10 years. This is a major project. Geoscience Australia have some of the best people in the world, this provides them with that certainty of funding going forward. It’s over half a billion dollars over just the next 10 years, and then from then on we have, people will see in the projections there over $100 million every year so that they can map literally every bit of our great country. What that will do is, over a period of time as well, is save money, because you’ll have that certainty there. It will be very useful for business, but useful for communities as well. For planners at every level of government, but also particularly useful for the business sector so that we can identify what it is that we have literally under the ground, under the sea, what’s there. And that enables you as well to look at comparative situations. Where is the best opportunity for investment and what are the resources that we need to extract, what are the resources that we need or the environments we need to protect as well. It’s essentially that scientific tool that is required. It will take a long period of time, it’s extensive. What we’ve done is provide that certainty over the 10 years with $566 million. But as well, that could be accelerated at some stage as well.
PARKER: And a lot of the focus of what you’ve told us this morning is around critical minerals. It’s finding that next generation materials. Your government has spoken a lot about that. You are investing directly in some projects in this state and around the country to facilitate that. Underlying it all it seems to me the theme is geopolitical competition, and you touched on it in your remarks today that this is the way that the world is going. Is it your view that we are seeing, and there was one country you didn’t mention by name, which is China, this state’s largest customer and the source of so much of our prosperity. Do you think that there is an acceleration of geopolitical competition going on? Because certainly people in this space think that there is, and I take for example the Iluka CEO, Tom O’Leary, who said yesterday that he believes that China is weaponising the supply of rare earths. Is all of this activity from your government in this space a bid to protect ourselves from that geopolitical competition?
PRIME MINISTER: Part of the context is the lesson of the pandemic as well. During the pandemic I gave speeches about learning the lessons that our economy needs to be more resilient. It is not desirable that as the world has more and more solar panels on roofs, over 90 per cent are produced in just one country. What that means is that any disruption to trade, it might be through a pandemic, caused disruption of course, means that we’re more vulnerable. But that’s part of the context, the need for more national resilience, for us to be more secure and being able to make more things, be it pharmaceuticals or other products that we need. But there’s a secondary component to our approach here as well, which is this is an enormous opportunity. In the seventies, eighties, nineties, we saw a lot of manufacturing leave this country because of labour. The changes with the ubiquitous nature of new technology, which a discovery in one place is pretty soon used all around the world, means that labour as a proportion of the costs of production is far less than it was 20 years ago. And that will be more so the case with increased use of AI, robotics, the way that technology is changing production. And what that means is that Australia all of a sudden, because transportation costs are a much higher proportion of the cost of production, all of a sudden as well with new energy, particularly the potential that’s there for green hydrogen to be used to produce green steel, green aluminium. All of a sudden Australia finds ourselves at a position of comparative advantage.
PARKER: Only if that green energy is cheap though, and affordable.
PRIME MINISTER: That’s right.
PARKER: At the moment we do not have cheap energy prices in this country. We once did, globally speaking, now we do not. Which seems remarkably counterintuitive, given that we are blessed with both traditional petrochemical forms of energy and we aspire to be an emerging energy superpower with sun, wind and everything else.
PRIME MINISTER: That’s true. But the cheapest form of new energy, we know, is renewables. We have the space to be able to produce, I know Simon from Rio is going to talk this morning. They just signed a really substantial deal for renewables in Gladstone, in Central Queensland as well. You had the potential of green hydrogen being produced by clean energy – solar, wind, being able to be used to then power advanced manufacturing. And the thing about green hydrogen as well is that it is going to be more important to co-locate, if you like, the production of the energy to its use. Which means there will be an advantage here potentially to make green steel, green aluminium. And that will put Australia, if we get this right the next decade can set us up for decades ahead as well. What we do today, when this is really the action moment. Because the world is responding similarly. And if we just stand still or we go through the position of saying, ‘No, we won’t do anything, we’ll have a nuclear reactor’, even though we won’t be able to say where they’re going to go, and no one will finance it, and it’s the most expensive form, the world will just go past us. But we have to seize the opportunities which are there, which is why my team, the economic team, Jim Chalmers, Katy Gallagher, along with Chris Bowen, Ed Husic, Madeleine King in critical minerals, are so determined to, where we can, to value add. Exporting our resources will still be really important into the future. We’re not saying it’s either or, we’re saying though, let’s not miss the opportunity that we have now to seize what’s there. Which is the potential for us to have an extraordinary comparative advantage, and the states that are best positioned to gain from that are WA and Queensland, are our traditional resources states.
PARKER: Which is probably where the next election’s going to be won as well. Happy coincidence, perhaps. Please keep the questions coming through on Slido, there’s obviously impossible to get to all of them, but what I can see in the screen in front of me is some themes coming through. So I will get to those in due course. I do want to talk, and it goes to my earlier question about China and geopolitical competition and sort of, reshoring that seems to be going on globally. The pointy end of all of this is the work that the Australian Navy is doing right at the moment in the Yellow Sea. We had an incident on Saturday night which your Defence Minister, Richard Marles spoke to my colleague, Andrew Probyn about it on Nine News earlier this week. That is that Chinese military planes fired off flares in front of an Australian helicopter. Very dangerous, could have killed Australian service people. Last night the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said these words, I want to get your reaction to them. The spokesman said that Australia’s warships and aircraft deliberately approached China’s airspace under the guise of implementing United Nations Security Council resolutions, causing trouble and provocation, endangering China’s maritime and air security. Did we do that?
PRIME MINISTER: I stand by the comments that the Defence Minister made in calling out this behaviour as unprofessional and unacceptable, and the comments that I made as well. And I did see those comments, and I noted that what’s not said but when you look at the comments, they say approaching. So, it’s a confirmation that Australia, this chopper, was in international airspace. We were in international waters, international airspace, upholding international law through the UN sanctions that have been imposed on North Korea.
PARKER: Do you agree with that characterisation, that that’s the way that our armed forces are behaving? That we’re deliberately approaching China’s airspace and that they’re causing trouble and provocation and endangering China’s maritime air security?
PRIME MINISTER: No, I don’t. And those words in themselves are a confirmation that we weren’t in Chinese airspace. They are confirmation that we were behaving as we should have, as good international citizens. And there shouldn’t be a risk to Australian Defence Force personnel while we’re undertaking that work. I’ve been very clear that where we disagree with China we’ll say so, we’ll call it out. We’ll cooperate wherever we can, and we’ll continue to engage, and we’ve done that with this incident.
PARKER: Will you raise this directly with President Xi when you next meet, inaudible
PRIME MINISTER: Yes, we raise things through appropriate channels at every opportunity. And we’ll do so –
PARKER: This is the Chinese accusing us of being reckless and irresponsible international citizens.
PRIME MINISTER: But the contradiction is there in the statement themselves, where they confirm that we weren’t in their airspace, or indeed in international airspace. I’m not sure that the statement that was made by the Chinese government advances their position. I think it confirms ours.
PARKER: I want to return to more domestic matters. In addition to the resources industry, this room is full of people across all parts of the West Australian economy, and one of the things that Business News as a publication has done so well is connect with and support and tell the stories of West Australian small and medium business right across the economy. So in resources, but also in other parts of the economy. And there will be many people here today who would have heard your words about making the Australian business environment more competitive, cut red tape, easier to get things through, approvals. With respect, I’ve heard every state and national leader say that for the twenty years that I’ve been in journalism, and yet if I was to poll the room today, I think I know what I would get in response about the operating environment over the next twenty years. How can you assure or what message can you deliver to those people today who are out there risking their own capital, their family’s capital, who are responsible for the mortgages of maybe a dozen or maybe 15 dozen employees, that the inflation environment that they are in, the difficulty that they have in trying to meet rising costs and while keeping business running, that you are able to take that challenge materially and make their lives easier.
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I’ll make two points. One is that we’ve walked the walk, not just talked the talk when it comes to approvals and speeding them up. We’ve put $100 million there to make sure that that has happened. And we’ve consulted extensively with business and listened about issues such as environmental approvals. Making sure we want to protect the environment, but we don’t want it to be a hindrance for there to be where things should be approved, they should be approved faster. The second issue –
PARKER: There’s enormous concern, just on that point, apologies for interrupting, but there’s enormous concern about the Nature Positive Laws, for want of a better term, that your Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is running through. I think there’s a very strong feeling among West Australian businesses that the engagement on that is not on the level that they would like. There’s a kind of a misunderstanding of priorities. Are you concerned about that process?
PRIME MINISTER: No, I’m not, because what we’ve done is we’ve put in the first stage, which has gone through. We’ve put it in three stages if you like, so that we’re having proper consultation processes there. We’ve listened to what the business community, including the business community here have said, and we’ve responded to it. I think that, everyone in Western Australia who own a business knows that they want good environmental outcomes, because that gives the social license to operate. But we also need to make sure that there’s not bureaucracy for its own sake. And some of the duplication, for example that is there, is one of the things we want to work through in a cooperative way between the Commonwealth and state government, but also working with the business sector. I think we’ve made it very clear that we’re engaged on that issue. And on the inflation front, I’ll make this point. We inherited a trillion dollars of debt from the former government, inflation peaked in the March 2022 quarter at 2.1% in just one quarter. The inflation rate now is 3.6. It was anticipated in MYEFO at the end of last year that it would be 3.75 at the end of this financial year. So we’re ahead of where we were going to be. And part of what we have done is twofold, one, make sure that any cost of living support that we’ve given is targeted and is not putting pressure on inflation. So it would have been really easy for us to sit back and not change the tax cuts. It was a gutsy call, that wasn’t welcomed by everyone in the first 24 hours.
PARKER: There’s a particular phrase that you used when we last caught up about that decision, the secondary sandwich. A good reflection on if you’re going to digest the sandwich.
PRIME MINISTER: We did a, family audience you know, its early in the morning, it’s breakfast. We, it was a big call, but it’s the right thing to do to make sure that we gave support to every taxpayer across the board, by making sure that it delivered without adding to, so we deliberately had, it was $106 billion we made it $107. Basically the same amount, so we weren’t adding to what was anticipated to be injected in the economy. And as well, it will increase workforce participation that counteracts any impact, any stimulatory impact of the fact that people, low and middle income earners have a higher propensity to consume, than higher earners who can just save and pocket the amount that they would have received under the Morrison Government’s cuts. That was the right thing to do. The targeting of cheaper childcare, the energy price relief that we’ve had, fee free TAFE have all been measures that have assisted with the cost of living but have also assisted on pushing down inflation. And next week’s budget, you’ll see the same thing. We turned a $78 billion deficit, what was anticipated by the former government, into a $22 billion surplus. A $100 billion turnaround. We’re hopeful that next Tuesday you might see another surplus. We’ll see where that all lands in six days’ time. But we have been very focused on making sure the fiscal policy work with monetary policy.
PARKER: Our time is, sadly, nearly over. I’ve just put together just two very quick ones. We are used to the states having strong representation in Cabinet, in the ERC. I think everyone in this room respects Madeleine King and the work that she has done, as well as West Australians in the outer Ministry. Are there any prospects that she comes into the ERC in the heart of decision making, because it’s been a very long time since Western Australia across both sides of politics, Western Australia hasn’t had a representative right as part of decision making in a national government.
PRIME MINISTER: Part of what occurred over a period of time, we didn’t have enough representatives. We always had quality of the Labor representatives from WA but we didn’t have quantity. That’s changed and we now have increased numbers of Western Australians at every level of the government, and that seniority will rise. One of the great benefits that I think last time around, that we had wasn’t just that we won four seats in the House of Representatives and an additional Senate seat. It’s the quality of the people who won. That’s why I have real confidence that we’ll hold all of our seats here in Western Australia that we previously won at the election. But that also we have some prospects in some other seats as well. You’ve seen a big turnaround, the WA Liberal Party had really senior members in the government. There’s Coleman and Julie Bishop and many others. Michael Keenan, they were front and centre. That’s not the case now. The Coalition are dominated in one state, and I think they’ve forgotten about the others. This is my 20th visit to Western Australia as Prime Minister –
PARKER: I was talking to my breakfast companion, and I knew we would get the number –
PRIME MINISTER: Well I committed. I’m not two years in yet. I’ve delivered on that commitment as I will deliver on every single commitment I make to Western
Australians.
PARKER: I can see Simon Trott circling, and we’re all out here, so I’m not going to hand you a stunt to sign, okay? I’m not going to do that. I’m not getting a tattoo. But we’ve got the GST right?
PRIME MINISTER: All good. That was fun –
PARKER: That’s all we need from you –
PRIME MINISTER: It worked in the speech. They normally have to ask a few times-
PARKER: We could prefer, I think. Prime Minister, thank you so much. We appreciate you coming.
