Radio interview Mix 94.5FM | Prime Minister of Australia
Pete, Host: Good morning to you, Mr Albanese. Welcome to the studio.
Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister: Good morning. Great to be here. Beautiful day here in Perth.
Pete: It’s lovely.
Matt, Host: Isn’t that right?
Prime Minister: It’s always good weather.
Kymba, Host: We like to turn it on, don’t tell too many people. We like that we’re a little bit distant from everybody else. It stops, we don’t just let everybody in.
Prime Minister: We don’t, we don’t. I got a visa to get in though.
Pete: Mr Albanese, can I just say, I went to a lot of trouble to learn a Double Windsor on YouTube yesterday. And I noticed you’re not wearing a tie.
Prime Minister: I’m not. The tie is in the car.
Pete: Right.
Prime Minister: But you needn’t have gone to such trouble. But you know, don’t talk yourself up too much. You were still getting dressed as I came in the studio.
Pete: Can I just show you, I am still sans one shoe.
Kymba: It’s under the chair over there mate.
Prime Minister: You know that doesn’t work on radio.
Matt: You’d be surprised on this show.
Kymba: Mr Albanese, why do you keep the tie in the car? At what point does that come out? Is it to get into the cricket ground or the golf club? Like, what is fancy enough?
Prime Minister: It’ll be on for the TAFE centre I’m going to after this at Bentley.
Kymba: Oh yep, education gets a tie.
Prime Minister: To do more announcements on skills. But I figure a radio interview, no one can see you, obviously something that you –
Pete: This is 2023 radio, though. There are cameras everywhere.
Prime Minister: There are.
Pete: Everywhere.
Prime Minister: You’ve got four cameras here.
Pete: They’re all trained on you.
Prime Minister: No, they’re not. They’re on you, too. Two of them. I’ve got a couple.
Pete: This station knows where it’s bread’s buttered, put it that way.
Prime Minister: But none of them are trained on your feet to see the one shoe.
Pete: They should be.
Prime Minister: I think you’ve got to go with either shoes on or shoes off. I don’t think one shoe on works.
Pete: Shoes off it is. Thank you, Prime Minister.
Kymba: Now, have you enjoyed your time in Perth? You’ve gone up to Karratha.
Prime Minister: Karratha yesterday was awesome. We were up looking at the iron ore show up there with Rio Tinto, the train that we went on, two and a half kilometres long. Just the scale of what happens up there is incredible.
Pete: I know they’re two and a half kilometres long because I’ve sat at one of them at the Midland train line waiting for it to get to the Swan Valley.
Kymba: Actually, we saw you in your high vis shirt with ‘Anthony’ emblazoned, embroidered into the top of the shirt. But, Pete, you had a question about that.
Pete: Yeah, well, where do you keep all those shirts? Because you’d get a lot of merch. You’d have merch thrown at you all over the place. So, do you just get a freshie every time something like that happens? Or do you have a giant wing back at, you know, back at the home in Canberra?
Prime Minister: For it all? Well, I think we gave it back so they can scrub off the ‘Anthony’, take off the embroidering and put on ‘John’ or ‘Pete’.
Kymba: Or they’re about to hire an ‘Anthony’. ‘Anthony’ cannot believe his luck.
Prime Minister: Yeah, it’ll go in there, they have a wardrobe from A to Z, from Anthony to Zorro.
Pete: Love it, Zorro.
Prime Minister: They’re still looking for a Zorro to hire.
Kymba: Look, we know, Albo, you have come here many times, to WA, you always have, even when you’re a Leader of the Opposition, you were here. And you’ve got some difficult stuff to talk about at the moment. I mean, the Voice, obviously, is a big deal that everyone needs to discuss. Now, I’m going to be really honest with you. It feels like a bit of a botched campaign and it’s been confusing in the media, people don’t really know where they stand. And I think that to be fair, we want to do the right thing, like all of us want to do the right thing by our Indigenous culture, by our elders, and we want to do the right thing. But also, the Indigenous community themselves are split. Some of them want to vote Yes, some want to vote No.
Prime Minister: They’re not really, though.
Kymba: We don’t know what to do.
Prime Minister: They’re not really. There are a couple of people, just like everyone in the non-Indigenous community doesn’t have the same view. So, overwhelmingly, though, Indigenous Australians have come up with this idea themselves. They want Constitutional recognition. That’s the first thing that it’s about. And the second thing it’s about is really simple too, just an advisory group so that people can listen to what Indigenous people have to say about programs that affect their lives. That is all this is about, so as to get better results. And there is a lot of misinformation out there, but it’s really clear what the question is. The Constitutional change is really straightforward, recognition, listening through a Voice in order to get better results. It won’t change the way that Parliament functions, it won’t have a right of veto. And that’s why it’s such a generous offer from Indigenous Australians. And the disappointing thing is that the No campaign spreading misinformation and then saying basically that, ‘Well, if you don’t know about it’, not ‘get more information’, which is what they should be saying –
Kymba: Yeah, in the campaign booklet, in the referendum booklet, it does say in bold, ‘If you don’t know, vote No.’
Prime Minister: Well, it’s a really negative response. How about find out what the facts are? I think that doesn’t give credit to Australians. And Australians, we’ll set the date on Wednesday, Australians will know. But it really is very, very straightforward. And people should look at the Constitutional change which is there in ‘Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first peoples of Australia’. That’s the recognition bit. And then it just says, ‘?There shall be a body, it may give advice on matters affecting Indigenous people.’ And thirdly, ‘The Parliament will determine the structure and functions and composition of this advisory body, the Voice’. That is all that is before the Australian people. And it would be tragic if we lost the opportunity. It’ll be like, remember with the Apology to the Stolen Generations, it was like ‘No, we can’t apologise because there’ll be all these consequences.’ There weren’t. Marriage equality, ‘We couldn’t have marriage equality because it would ruin straight marriages and it will change everyone’s lives’. It didn’t. This is about just giving a bit of respect to what is three per cent of the population. So, an upside for them with no downside for anyone else.
Pete: So, just quickly, and we’ll have to go to a break, just really quickly, Mr Albanese, but why not just do it then? If that’s the case, why can’t we just do it?
Prime Minister: Because to change the Constitution, Australians have to vote for it. And every other former colony in the world has done this, has recognised its first peoples. Canada did it last century, New Zealand did it in the 19th century. Everyone has done it except for Australia. We’re the standout. And that’s why one of the things that I say is, if not now, when are we going to get around to acknowledging that? When Captain Cook came in 1770, and when Captain Philip came in in 1788 in the First Fleet into Sydney Harbour, that wasn’t when Australia began. We have at least 60,000 years of history that we can be really proud of. And we do celebrate Indigenous Australians. And that’s why it’s important that we do take this opportunity.
Kymba: I suppose that’s the importance of education as well, right? We were all educated on a white man’s story, essentially, and that is now, in recent years, people are going, ‘Well, hang on, we weren’t getting the full story’ and so now that has changed the way people –
Prime Minister: Yeahand it’s like at the beginning of the AFL Grand Final, there’ll be recognition. The Matildas games, every one of the games, there was a Welcome to Country and it was fantastic. It was unifying moments like that. And this is a chance for national unity.
Pete: Mr Albanese, are you happy to hang around for a moment?
Prime Minister: Absolutely.
Kymba: He has to. Look how much effort you’ve gone to, Pete.
Prime Minister: How could I not.
Pete: I’ve bought out the gourmet Twisties and everything!
Pete: We’re currently with Prime Minister, Mr Anthony Albanese, whose been kind enough to stay with us and give us a little more of your time while you’re here in Perth. Thank you very much.
Prime Minister: My pleasure. How could I resist your elegance of your dress there with the tie and the full bit? You’ve gone to such an effort.
Pete: Not the first time I’ve heard that, Prime Minister. Thank you very much.
Kymba: You’re like a gazelle.
Pete: Chameleon, one would say, actually. A gazelle, a chameleon. I might take my tie off.
Prime Minister: But at least now you’ve got your shoes off.
Pete: No, I’ve put my shoes back on because I have a serious question for you.
Prime Minister: Okay, here we go.
Pete: I’ve even written it out, it’s that serious a question. But cost of living at the moment is rough for a lot of people, particularly a lot of people listening to this station. Now, I get free market economy. As a society, we’ve benefited very well from that. But right now, when you’ve got people deciding between things like paying rent and buying groceries or fuelling their car, and then you hear things like Woolies, Coles and Qantas posting the profits they’re posting at the moment, it’s a very hard pill to swallow. So, what do you make of something like that? Do you think it’s wrong? Do you think that’s just the way things are? Or is there even a way to solve this issue and sort of hand something back to the country through these corporations to ease the burden on people out there?
Prime Minister: Well, people are doing it tough. And what the Government’s doing is doing what we can to put downward pressure on inflation to deal with cost of living. So, we’re doing three things. One is relief, so 1.2 million families are benefiting from cheaper child care. We put in cheaper medicines on January 1 and cheaper medicines further come in on September 1, where you’ll be able to get 60-day dispensing rather than 30 day. We’ve got a plan to increase housing supply, which is a major factor in people’s rents going up. We’ve got fee-free TAFE. After this I’m going to Bentley TAFE and we’ll be announcing there that we’ve exceeded the 19,000 fee-free places that we allocated for WA this year and another 300,000 allocated nationally from next year. But that is making a big difference. So, we’re doing that. Second thing we’re doing is to bank the surplus. So, we turned a $78 billion deficit under the former Government into a $20 billion around about, we haven’t got the final figures yet, surplus, so that takes pressure off inflation. And the third thing we’re doing is things like National Reconstruction Fund, so support for new industries, as well as support for skills so as to deal with those issues that are putting pressure on costs going up as well.
Kymba: But this is their choice, like, week to week, like, they’re all great things, there’s some incentives there, there’s some things to work towards with education and stuff. But week to week, I mean, a $1.62 billion profit for Woolworths.
Prime Minister: Yeah, it’s huge.
Kymba: The shareholders are laughing all the way to their second yachts and other people can’t get cereal for their kids. I mean, it’s a significant issue. Do we need a government supermarket? Like what, something’s got to stop these people and I dare say people in the Government have probably got a bunch of Wesfarmers shares.
Prime Minister: Yeah, well, I don’t have any shares.
Kymba: That’s good to hear.
Prime Minister: It is. No, never held a share because of those issues. But I recognise people are doing it tough and I think that people are responding through competition where they have to shop around for bargains. I get that. And you can’t, though, just wave a magic wand and nationalise the retail industry.
Kymba: We could create the government supermarket, we can call it Albo’s.
Matt: That’s a great idea. I’d shop at Albo’s.
Kymba: Packets of Tam Tams, just slight rip offs of products that we know.
Prime Minister: A slight variation perhaps.
Matt: You wouldn’t call Tim Tims?
Kymba: Tim Tims, either way.
Prime Minister: No one would notice if we did that. Look, I think, you know, there are pressures and there’s public pressure on the big supermarkets as well, to do the right thing.
Kymba: I don’t want to say that I suggested rioting in the streets last week, but I may or may not have.
Prime Minister: Well, we don’t want to see that either. But we do want businesses to do the right thing by people because we know that they are doing it really tough out there and the costs of everyday items feed in to the inflation rate. The good news is that it would appear from all the figures, have been heading in the right direction, that inflation is headed down. And that means less pressure on interest rates from the Reserve Bank as well, which is independent of government. But we’re doing what we can to provide that immediate assistance. Energy Price Relief Plan, $3 billion we put into that as well. And working with state and territory governments to try to make a difference. The Medicare Urgent Care Clinics, meaning, I opened one at Rockingham during the last visit a few weeks ago. And that means that people can go there, see a doctor for free, get the healthcare they need as well, when they need it. All they need is their Medicare card, not a credit card. That makes a difference as well. So, there’s no single solution. We have to work right across government and to pitch up as well to the private sector to do the right thing.
Pete: Sorry, I’ve missed everything you just said because I just can’t stop thinking about Albo’s special buyers on the weekend. Prime Minister, thank you very much for joining us here this morning. There’s so much that we could cover off, but we do appreciate your time. We know you’ve got to get off to your next appointment. Welcome to WA. Enjoy yourself while you’re here. And we’ll no doubt catch up with you next time.
Prime Minister: Great to be here.