LIVE

Wed 16 Apr

Australia Institute Live: Day 19 of the 2025 election campaign. As it happened.

Amy Remeikis – Chief Political Analyst

This debate is now closed.

Key posts

The Day's News

20.46 AEST

Q: I want to move on. Let’s turn to the global outlook. And an issue that’s flared in the last couple of days. Mr Dutton, you jumped on reports Russia had asked to base some of its military aircraft in Indonesia. You suggested this would represent a catastrophic failure of the Albanese government for not seeing this and not knowic it was coming. You said the Indonesian President had publicly announced this Russian request when he had not. Indonesia says there won’t be Russian planes based there. Do you admit you got that wrong?

Peter Dutton:

David, the reference I was making was should have been to the President and was in relation to resources from the Prabowa government. What we got from the Indonesian authorities in the reports and the Prime Minister commented on the reports yesterday as well, was the sources inside the government confirm that was the case.

What we have seen the last 12 hours or so is the Russian envoy to Indonesia has confirmed that there have been discussions and obviously there is a concerning closeness in that relationship. And I think the main point here is that the Prime Minister knew nothing of it. Nothing of the concerns. Nothing of the prospect. The found out about it through a news report, similarly to when the Chinese naval ship circumnavigates our country and he doesn’t know all the detail until a Virgin pilot provides the detail.

Richard Marles had said there had been talks. But also – is Australia suppose to know about every conversation countries have with each other?

20.44 AEST

Greg Jericho
Chief Economist

Peter Dutton is pretending that Australia has no role to play in limiting climate change. That is the most cowardly response. Australians should be proud of our environment and angry about what climate change is doing to it.

As Polly Hemming says loudly in her speech at our Climate Integrity summit, historical evidence demonstrates our nation’s outsized role in influencing international norms and policies.

20.43 AEST

Asked about insurance premiums (which are going up because of climate change) Albanese says:

Can I talk about the science? I will be a Prime Minister who backs it up. The science is very clear. It doesn’t mean that every single weather event is because of climate change. It does mean the science told us the events would be more extreme and they’d be more frequent.

That is what we are seeing playing out. Whether it be increased bushfires, flooding, extreme weather events that are having an impact. When we talk about the costs, this is one of the costs. The cost to our economy as well as the cost to our environment and not acting on climate change. Not being a part of the global solution are severe.

Not opening up fossil fuel projects would be one of the things that backs the science, but Labor is still doing that too.

20.42 AEST

Peter Dutton can’t say whether climate change is making weather disasters worse.

Peter Dutton then falls back on the classic Liberal leader answer when it comes to climate change “I am not a scientist”

Asked whether he believes climate is making natural disasters worse, Dutton says:

I think you can see there’s an impact. In my home state you made reference to floods and natural disasters and events and we were out in Thargomindah and that is part of the history of our state of this country.

Q: Is it getting worse?

Dutton:

I’ll leave others to…

Q: What do you think? You’re a Queenslander.

Dutton:

I’ll let scientists pass that judgement.

Q: You’re not willing to say this is climate change happening now?

Dutton:

The Prime Minister refused to make comment in this regard as well the other day, I don’t know because I’m not a scientist and I can’t tell you whether the temperature has risen in Thargomindah because of climate change or the water levels are up. I don’t know. Scientists can provide advice.

What I need to do as the alternate Prime Minister in this country is to put forward our plan about how we’re going to help families. We need to transition and we have spoken about that with our zero emissions technology. (Yet to be invented small modular nuclear reactors)

In relations to power cost, which is an important issue before we move on, the Prime Minister promised $275 reduction per year at the last election and mentions the figure and Chris Bowen was able to give you a straighter answer than what you heard before because power prices have gone up by $1300 and they are making no commitments in this election other than if you vote Labor your electricity and gas prices will go up.

20.38 AEST

Matt Grudnoff
Senior Economist

One thing that hasn’t been properly discussed in this campaign is that if we are going to wait decades for these nuclear power stations then we have to keep old coal fired power stations open for longer. This is really expensive. The NSW government has just entered into an agreement with Origin energy that will cost NSW up to $450 million to keep the Eraring power station open for just an additional 2 years.

20.37 AEST

There’s a reason Dutton isn’t really talking about nuclear

This debate has been one of the longest times Dutton has been forced to talk about the nuclear policy this campaign – as was pointed out by a reporter on the campaign recently, Dutton hasn’t taken them to any potential nuclear sites, hasn’t spoken about it and it hasn’t formed part of the campaign.

And there is one very simple reason for it.

Voters don’t like it.

It is tanking in the polls, and the research and focus groups. They don’t like it. Not in Victoria, not in WA, not in NSW, Victoria, South Australia, NT, the ACT or even Queensland.

What voters do like though – is the idea of an “energy mix” which you may have noticed Dutton talks about non-stop at the same time as saying that Labor has a “renewables only” plan (which is not true).

But that’s why you’re not hearing about nuclear – it is not popular. And they can’t drop it, because that would be too embarrassing (especially since the work from home policy was dropped) so they’ll stick with it, knowing it will never become a reality, but they also won’t go out of their way to make it a campaign issue.

20.32 AEST

A reminder – small modular reactors aren’t really a thing

Greg Jericho
Chief Economist

Peter Dutton suggesting small modular reactors are possible.

Yeah. Nah. Fortunately we do have a photo of the one that is working. It’s in Siberia – it’s an old nuclear-powered icebreaker hooked up to a small town’s power supply. Every other picture of a small nuclear reactor is a “designers rendition of proposed plant” because they don’t exist.

20.31 AEST

Oh Dolly. Dutton is trying to explain the nuclear policy

Peter Dutton says he wants to have this debate among adults, and yet he sounds like the conspiracy theorist everyone avoids at the party going from group to group talking at them while they stare at the wall and wonder how many of them can pretend to go to the bathroom at one time.

Dutton says he is comfortable there is enough water, and he’s not sure what tech it will be, but he’ll get to that and all these other countries are saying they need it, but he leaves out there is already nuclear there which is different to what he is proposing in Australia. He doesn’t address the cost, or the fact that the states don’t want it. Not just the Labor states, but all of them.

20.26 AEST

Fact Check: Do we have one of the highest per capita number of public servants?

Matt Grudnoff
Senior Economist

Peter Dutton has again claimed Australia has per capita one of the highest numbers of public servants in the world.

This is not true. Here are the other developed (OECD) countries. We are not one of the highest. We’re not even above average.

20.26 AEST

For GOD’S SAKE WE NOW HAVE THE NDIS

Greg Jericho
Chief Economist

Big spending? Just to repeat ourselves form the last leaders debate and the Treasurer’s debate and well every other day.. the govt is not a big spending govt, it is just that we now have the NDIS!!

Also the suggestion that a surplus would be good right now is ludicrous – it would like mean unemployment would rise to near 5% and we would definitely be in a recession.

The economy is weak, the government needs to keep the economy afloat. This is uncontroversial, except when journalists think they are being economists

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