: He’s been gracious enough to cede some of his time this morning to the Prime Minister of Australia who’s just called in. Prime Minister, good morning to you.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Good morning. Great to be back in Adelaide.
PENBERTHY: So are you back here today, Mr Albanese?
PRIME MINISTER: I am. I came across last night and spoke at the ACTU congress that’s being held there at the convention centre. And this morning I’ve been at a little coffee shop, Nathaniel’s, which is terrific, in St. Peter’s where we’ve launched our candidate for Sturt, Claire Clutterham. A local councillor and a lawyer, a local mum who’s, I’ve met Ben, her husband and Niamh, she’s a stepmother to Niamh, and we have asked her to be our candidate. Sturt will be one of the critical seats at the next election. And the last election we were successful in Boothby and I’m very, very hopeful of winning Sturt and I think in Claire we have an absolutely outstanding candidate.
PENBERTHY: In order to win Sturt PM, you’re going to have to do it with Green preferences. How do you feel about taking preferences from the party which you united with Peter Dutton yesterday to condemn for anti-Semitism? Would that be something that would leave you a bit uncomfortable? Because the Green candidate who’s running, she’s been doing a terrific job. She helped Labor across the line in the state by-election in Dunstan only a month or so ago. Does that change the complexion of the debate around preferences? What happened yesterday?
PRIME MINISTER: Not at all. What I’m after is a majority Labor Government, and I campaigned for people to vote number one for the Labor Party because I think that one of the great differences is that Claire can be a voice as part of a Labor Government, not someone who will wait for decisions to be made and then decide whether they’ll protest or not, which is what the Green political party really can do, nothing more. I want Claire to be a member of the Government, an incredibly strong South Australian team. When I look around the Cabinet and I see Penny Wong and Don Farrell and Amanda Rishworth and Mark Butler, South Australia punches way above its weight with four Senior Cabinet Ministers. And that’s a good thing. And I think in Claire, she’s someone who I’ve got to know only recently, but she is an amazing candidate and I think she’s certainly future Ministerial material to add power to the South Australian team.
PENBERTHY: Speaking of Cabinet, we don’t want to turn this into a hard interview, too hard an interview, given you were kind enough to ring us. But – if you think Andrew Giles should stick around as Migration Minister, PM, we could do you a favour of showing you our text line here at FiveAA because the guy is as popular as European carp here in South Australia, and I reckon he is nationally too. Are you, are you going to knock him off or are you going to leave him there as Immigration Minister?
PRIME MINISTER: No. Well, we have a Ministry that is working. He inherited, of course, a department that was completely dysfunctional and after ten years of the former government, they’ve left Home Affairs and immigration in a mess. We’ve been busy dealing with that –
PENBERTHY: It’s got better since then has it?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, one of the things that we’ve done, some of the cases that you’ve heard about were ones that you have heard about because the department intervened to cancel visas and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, that was more an employment service for failed Liberal candidates. We’ve dealt with some of the decisions that have been made, to me, lack common sense. We’ve abolished that body that Peter Dutton was still defending and replaced it with the Administrative Review Tribunal that’ll be established to make sure that we have a system that works in the interests in which your listeners would expect it to.
PENBERTHY: So, on the contrary, the message to our listeners is he’s doing a good job.
PRIME MINISTER: It’s a difficult job and it is, we’ve inherited a dysfunctional department.
PENBERTHY: Is he doing a good job?
PRIME MINISTER: He is doing the job that he has been dealt with, including in making decisions of cancelling visas. There were more visas cancelled in our first year than were cancelled, more, almost double the number than were cancelled by the previous government in their last year.
PENBERTHY: To wrap it up where we began, PM, do you reckon you can win Sturt? Your old mate Chris Pyne made it a personal fiefdom under his tenure slipped down to being the most marginal seat in SA.
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I reckon we would never have beaten Christopher Pyne because he’s someone who remains a friend of mine, as I think, you know, despite our political differences, he’s someone who really was a strong representative of the people of Sturt. The current bloke, you know, hasn’t been noticed yet that he’s, that he’s in the show and Sturt needs a strong representative. Claire Clutterham will be that. We can certainly win the seat. The by-election that took place in the state seat that is wholly within Sturt shows that people there are certainly willing to vote Labor. And in Claire, we’re giving them the opportunity of having an outstanding representative who will speak up for them. She’s a proud South Australian her whole life. She’s highly experienced. She got herself elected to the council there at Norwood and she’s someone who I think will be just outstanding.
PENBERTHY: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, thanks very much for chatting to us this morning. We’ll catch you up again soon.
