Interview with Laura Jayes, AM Agenda
15 February 2024
LAURA JAYES: Let's go straight to the Shadow Finance Minister Jane Hume on this. We had Tanya Plibersek on the program in the last hour. You heard some of her comments there. She also went on to say that the Opposition is just hammering this issue in question time because you think it plays for you well politically, and you don't want to talk about tax cuts.
JANE HUME: I did hear a snippet of Ms. Plibersek's interview with you there, Laura. That was a combination of both defensive and incoherent. You know, quite frankly, what we've discovered in estimates this week is a profound incompetence, and lack of due process and attention given to what Home Affairs portfolio's number one job is, which is to keep Australians safe. We now know that the Attorney General was briefed on the chances of the High Court challenge failing. We know now that the Prime Minister was kept up to date with this process. We heard that from PM&C on Monday. Now we hear that Minister Giles himself had three appointments in August, September and October, on this very issue that he didn't bother to turn up to. The reason why he didn't turn up to them was because he was out campaigning on the voice. In fact, in one of those meetings, he was creating a video about the voice in London, for people in England. I mean, quite frankly, not only as this man had his eye off the ball, his priorities are clearly all wrong. I think this is a profound failure of process, but it's also a profound failure of both Minister Giles and Minister O'Neil here. At some stage, something's gotta give. Labor can only play the defensive game for so long.
LAURA JAYES: Well, the argument here from perhaps curiously, from the Prime Minister, and others is that perhaps Peter Dutton was too soft, by allowing this principle or this test case to stay in Australia when he should have been deported. Is there an argument there?
JANE HUME: I think it is extraordinary that the Government could point to Peter Dutton and say that this is his fault. At some point, they're going to have to acknowledge that they're in charge, they sit on the Treasury benches and they run the Home Affairs and the Attorney-General's portfolio.
LAURA JAYES: It is quite unusual for Labor to be arguing that Peter Dutton was too much of a softie.
JANE HUME: It's unbelievable. It's quite extraordinary. Not only that, but Clare O'Neill stood up and said, 'If I had my way, if I had the powers, the legal powers to keep these people in prison, I would use them'. Well, we gave them to her, we gave them to her last Christmas. Now we hear that they haven't bothered to do even one single preventive detention order. Now, that's extraordinary. It's quite fine for the Prime Minister to say in December, that it was urgent for Treasury and Finance to come up with cost of living relief, which essentially was the nudge nudge wink wink, please reverse stage three tax cuts and have Treasury and Finance ostensibly working on that all summer. But they didn't bother getting anybody to work out a way to keep even one of these criminal detainees back in prison and keeping Australians safe. I think that speaks to the priorities of this government.
LAURA JAYES: Well, let's talk about the priority that should be front of mind for everyone today, and that is Victoria up to 300,000 people, businesses, homes still without power this morning. Yes, there are fires burning. Yes, the cleanup is underway. But if we could get to the underlying issue here, these homes and businesses look like not being reconnected for days. It could even be weeks after that. What is going on with the energy system in Victoria? Is this a failure of coal? Is this a failure of renewables? Or is it both?
JANE HUME: Well, it's a very good question. First and foremost, let's just get a sense of the scale of this problem. One in five households in Victoria were without power yesterday. As of this morning, it was one in ten so this is a massive failure of our electricity system. Now the government cannot control the weather, there will always be weather events that is for certain. What a government can control, however, is our energy framework and we can have an energy framework and an energy system that is resilient to changes in the weather, rather than entirely reliant on it.
LAURA JAYES: What are you talking about there? Exactly. How could this have been prevented?
JANE HUME: Well, we know that Loy Yang went down. It was one coal fired power station that went down. We also know that gas and hydro kicked in to try and support the renewable energy reliant grid that we have in Victoria, and clearly was incapable of doing that. We know that gas supply in Victoria has been diminished because of the policies of both the Victorian and now, the federal government as well. Unless we have those gas supplies to support our energy grid with baseload power, particularly in times like this when there is an unreliable weather event, well we're going to face more of these events in the future. Think about who it is at suffering. We talk about households in the dark and trying to get the kids ready to school by candlelight, all of that sort of stuff. And that is terrible. But what about those businesses that went in today and found out that the security systems didn't work anymore. That they couldn't turn on the computers, or that if you run a restaurant that your fridges have shut down and all of your inventory has now gone bad. There is an enormous, an enormous financial cost, economic cost to this failure of government policy.
LAURA JAYES: Yep, thinking about all the florists on Valentine's Day as well, without power, their biggest day of the year, Jane, we'll leave it there for the moment. We'll speak to you soon.