Thank you for your time, Prime Minister.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Great to be with you.
BRONTE LANGBROEK, HOST: Very exciting. You, I’m sure, have been told, are going to be playing Albo-bucks on behalf of a listener.
PRIME MINISTER: Yeah. Always a lot of pressure.
LANGBROEK: That’s all right. I imagine there is in the top job.
PRIME MINISTER: Indeed.
LAKEY: Sharon. Albo’s playing on your behalf this morning. You must be pretty excited. You just sit back and watch the Prime Minister do his best work.
SHARON, LISTENER: Oh my God. Thank you so much.
LANGBROEK: You’re very welcome.
SHARON, LISTENER: Go, Albo. You’ve got to get them all right.
PRIME MINISTER: Hey, Sharon, how you going?
SHARON, LISTENER: Good, thank you. The pressure’s on.
LANGBROEK: Oh, my goodness.
LAKEY: All right, guys.
PRIME MINISTER: The pressure’s on.
LAKEY: All right, Prime Minister, you are playing for $1,000 on behalf of Sharon this morning. You’ve got thirty seconds to answer all ten questions. Got to take your first answer, no repeats –
LANGBROEK: Slow down. You’re doing it like Albo’s are regular listener.
LAKEY: Sorry.
PRIME MINISTER: Hang on, hang on. Thirty seconds, ten answers.
LAKEY: Oh yeah, Albo, it’s been done many a time before.
PRIME MINISTER: That’s one every three seconds.
LAKEY: Yes, it is. Your time’s going to start after Bronte gives the first question and all answers must start with the letter P.
PRIME MINISTER: P? That’s not even an easy one.
LANGBROEK: P for Prime Minister. We thought it would come easy to you.
LAKEY: P for Prime Minister. P for Papa. P for Peter Dutton. Seems a little off to me. Ten questions, all going to start. You ready to go, Albo?
PRIME MINISTER: Okay, here we go.
LAKEY: Let’s do it. Okay, 30 seconds on the clock.
LANGBROEK: Albo. Starting with P, name a girl’s name?
PRIME MINISTER: Peta.
LANGBROEK: Something you eat for breakfast?
PRIME MINISTER: Porridge.
LANGBROEK: An animal?
PRIME MINISTER: Possum.
LANGBROEK: A fruit?
PRIME MINISTER: Pear.
LANGBROEK: A sports brand?
PRIME MINISTER: Puma.
LANGBROEK: A vegetable?
PRIME MINISTER: P? Vegetable. Potato.
LANGBROEK: A politician?
PRIME MINISTER: Peter Dutton.
LANGBROEK: A colour?
PRIME MINISTER: Pink.
LANGBROEK: A hobby?
PRIME MINISTER: P Hobby? Painting. Painting. I got there.
LANGBROEK: We did still have one after the buzzer.
LAKEY: Oh nine after the buzzer, just after.
PRIME MINISTER: Give her 900, for goodness sake. I got nine out of ten.
LANGBROEK: Very good for a first timer.
LAKEY: That’s a great effort, Prime Minister. Unfortunately –
PRIME MINISTER: It was P, it’s not easy. You know, you could have picked Q or X or something. Would have been worse.
LANGBROEK: Well, you’d think that, but you never know.
LAKEY: Good try. Hey, P for Prime Minister. Doing pretty good for Queensland at the moment, Albo. We’ll move on. Sharon, unfortunately, no prize for you.
SHARON, LISTENER: Thank you.
LAKEY: The big dog’s lost –
PRIME MINISTER: Sorry, Sharon, I got nine.
SHARON, LISTENER: No, thank you.
PRIME MINISTER: You’d think they’d give you $900, wouldn’t you?
SHARON, LISTENER: Oh, you’d think so, yeah. It’s pretty lousy.
LANGBROEK: Okay. How have we become the enemy in this?
LAKEY: I’d like to bring this up –
PRIME MINISTER: Me and Sharon are united.
LAKEY: Good on you. Hey, P for Prime Minister. Doing good, Albo. We want to chat to you a bit about what’s going on in Queensland regarding the new alumina critical minerals facility. This is very exciting.
PRIME MINISTER: It is indeed. It’s going to be more than doubling in size. It’s going to be the largest purity alumina facility in the world, producing the best quality in the world. 490 jobs during construction, but 200 ongoing jobs. And this is a really important product. It goes into things like led lighting and into lithium ion batteries and into semiconductors. Really high value, and it’ll be produced right there in Queensland with a facility that will be 100 per cent powered by renewable energy. And it will, it’s a part of the transformation that’s going on in Gladstone with really benefiting from the new form of jobs that are coming through as the economy changes. We know that Australia has all of the products that are going to help drive the global economy in this century and we need to make sure that we make more things right here rather than just export the raw materials offshore, see someone else add the jobs and add the value and then import it back. So this is an example of what we can do with a future made in Australia.
LANGBROEK: We like it. 490 jobs during construction, 200 ongoing in Gladstone. One of our favourite things.
LAKEY: We love new jobs. Albo, I’m going to press play on your man Teddy Swims and more with you next. We’ve got more questions to ask, really, regarding HECs debt that I’m still struggling to pay off at the moment. Parliamentary question time. The citizenship, of course, by the French national slash Aussie hero to beat. Will you stick around, Albo?
PRIME MINISTER: Yeah, sure.
LAKEY: Bronte and Lakey still with the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, who really flexed his muscles during Alpha-bucks just before, aka Albo bucks. Just going down with nine out of ten. Thanks for still joining us, Prime Minister. Little question about the HECs debt straight off the bat, and this is a personal one, but I know a lot of our listeners, you know, a little bit frustrated with trying to pay off this university debt that from what I believe used to be one per cent and now it’s up near like credit card rates. Is this a little unfair that the younger generation are having to sort of pay all this back. I mean, what’s the incentive to go to university anymore?
PRIME MINISTER: Yeah, I think there’s a range of areas where we need to do much better with the younger generation basically, and HECs is one of them. We’ve received a review of that. You know, the system’s been in place for some time. What we’ve done is we’re developing a universities accord, essentially with all of the universities across the board. And what that has said is that the system can be made simpler and be made fairer. The idea of HECs is a good one. It’s one that has led to a massive expansion, the number of people being able to do university degrees. But we’re examining the recommendations and we’ll be making announcements pretty soon on that. We, of course, have a budget coming up. We have as well, we’ve introduced fee free TAFE that benefited over 300,000 people last year. So that’s making an enormous difference in the vet sector. But we know for uni students, we want to encourage more people to go to university and more people to get a TAFE qualification as well because that will be so important for the jobs that will be available in the future.
LANGBROEK: We’ll wait and hear about that. Something that obviously has dominated this week, Prime Minister, is the massacre that happened in Bondi Junction on Saturday. We loved seeing you talk about Damien Guerot, also known as Bollard Man, the French national looking at hopefully becoming an Aussie citizen. Has there been an update on his visa status? We know you said he can stay in Australia as long as he likes.
PRIME MINISTER: Indeed he’s, I’ve spoken with the Minister again just last night. He’s permanent residential visa will be approved today.
LANGBROEK: Oh, fantastic.
PRIME MINISTER: Breaking news.
LANGBROEK: Good to know.
LAKEY: Great news. Heard it here first.
PRIME MINISTER: That guy, I mean, the footage was just extraordinary. He could have very easily, you know, walked away, walked left, walked right, walked backwards. He chose to stand at the top of those escalators with this bloke, the perpetrator coming up with a big knife, armed with a knife. And what an extraordinary act of bravery. And I noticed overnight as well, President Macron, my friend, the President of France, has also made a statement praising him and being so proud of what this Frenchman has done across the other side of the world.
LAKEY: Yeah, it was great to see and great to hear that he’s getting rewarded for those efforts. Hey, before we let you go, Albo, we do a thing every Thursday called Safe Space Weirdos Club. This is where we admit to weird things we do in the privacy of our own home. I’ve admitted to many weird things like secretly sniffing my fingernails. What other things? Pretending that I’m Christina Aguilera when I’m in the shower. Like saying weird words and floundering around like a salmon for 5 seconds just to burn off excess fuel on the bed. Probably nothing quite as weird as that, Albo. But is there anything you sort of do? You look yourself in the mirror every day, say you’ve got this Albo?
LANGBROEK: When you’re at the Lodge, any weird safe space?
PRIME MINISTER: The weirdest thing that I used to do at my home in Marrickville is, I’ve got one of those grapevines, essentially, that doesn’t actually produce grapes, but stuff flows down, a whole lot of the leaves across the, under the deck, at the back. And during the fall season, they gather up every hour and I will sweep it like six times a day if I’m home. Even though, and Jodie, I had never noticed how weird that was until Jodie was like, what are you doing? You’ve done it four times today and you’re doing it again.
LANGBROEK: And she still accepted your marriage proposal, which we should say congratulations as well.
PRIME MINISTER: Thank you very much. Well, she knows that I’ll be neat around the house.
LANGBROEK: Yes, true.
LAKEY: Very true.
PRIME MINISTER: So, it’s weird, but it is a bit of a plus, is my argument.
LAKEY: Absolutely. Well done, Prime Minister, thanks for taking the time this morning. It ain’t easy being in the top job, but Queensland thanks you for these new jobs that are coming along the way, and a pretty good shot at Alpha-bucks as well. Thanks for joining us, mate.
PRIME MINISTER: Thanks very much, guys. I’m going to go into training next time and get that ten per cent improvement.
