Prime Minister – Transcript – Interview with Paul Murray, Sky News

PAUL MURRAY: Prime Minister, nice to see you.

PRIME MINISTER: Thanks, Paul. Good to see you, too.

MURRAY: Labor is going with an overtly small target where they have a fistful of policies. Yet today, Albo couldn’t remember one of them.

PRIME MINISTER: Yeah, well he’s only had three years, look, and this is the challenge. I mean, he spent three years having a crack at me every day. This is his day has started, he gets up, what’s something I can have a crack at Scomo about for today? Goes out, says it, goes back. Every single day, he’s just got up and had a crack at me about how he could, you know, say how the game could be played on the Monday after the game, every single weekend. And, you know, after all this time, I would have thought this deep into the campaign, they would have had some clear plans. And the few plans that they have, he’d know what they are. And I think what we’re seeing as people look at this campaign, and it is a choice he wants to make in a referendum about me, as you know. But it is a choice. And people are looking in there going, I can’t see it in this guy.

MURRAY: Yeah.

PRIME MINISTER: I can’t see it in that other guy from Labor. I can’t see it in Anthony Albanese.

MURRAY: Well and it extends to also it’s like their whole strategy was to come up with half of a bandaid so that they could say they had a solution, right. When they talk about the NBN, best case scenario, one and a half million homes, when they talk about rewiring the nation, $20 billion for a $1 trillion problem.

PRIME MINISTER: No. I don’t think you’d get very fast rail for a $200 billion program and here’s the money for a feasibility study, maybe. Plans require careful consideration. They require thinking things through. And when you’ve been managing particularly things in the middle of a pandemic, design of your policy, thinking things through, counts even 10 times more. And I think that’s where the clear difference is emerging. I mean, I know that not everybody agrees with everything I’ve done, but I know there are people watching this program right now who don’t like some of the things that I’ve done as Prime Minister and perhaps earlier. But they do now, I think things through. They do know I work diligently on the policy detail. They do know that I seek to fully understand the problems I’m seeking to solve. And, you know, as we, if we sat here three years ago, as we were chatting about, we didn’t know what was coming in terms of the pandemic.

MURRAY: Correct.

PRIME MINISTER: And but it did. Could you imagine if the country had chosen Bill Shorten three years ago and put $387 billion of taxes on the Australian economy and then the pandemic hit? I mean, that’s the thing about elections. You never know what’s coming. And so you have got to look at the characters who are putting themselves up. The Prime Minister that the alternative and go which one of these do you really think can hack it? Which one do you really think is up to it? You don’t have to like them. And perhaps you do. And plenty do. Plenty don’t. It’s sort of not the point. The point is, can they do it?

MURRAY: Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, I mean, when we talk about one of the policies that, you know, that they thought was the big game changer for this week, which was Albo Bank, right? I’ll own 40 per cent of your house and whenever you sell it I’ll get more than I put in. And then Richard Marles comes out and was able to sort of push through the fog of COVID to say that if you inherit a property but you wouldn’t have qualified for the initial amount, you’ve got to hand them back $380,000.

PRIME MINISTER: Well, the one that amazed me even more was that if you if you if you go to that bank and the Government owns 40 per cent of your house – let’s just sort of reflect on that for a second. His policy is not for you to on your house, his policy is for him to own your house and the Government, and not only own it, but make money off it. So you’ll pay all the outgoings, you’ll do the repairs and maintenance, and any time you want to do some home improvements, you’ve got to check with Canberra. They’ll have to have a desk at Bunnings where they decide whether this one counts as something that you get the benefit of or he gets to free ride on. But if your income goes up, your household income, you and your partner –

MURRAY: You get a promotion.

PRIME MINISTER: $120,000, a job promotion, your small business has a good year, you have got to sell your house. I mean, I don’t understand the point of that policy. I don’t even understand the point of that requirement. And it just says to me they didn’t think it through. They just didn’t think it through. And we saw that when they were last in Government with the pink batts and all of that chaos. Look, they focus on the politics of a problem, but they tried to even do that when it came to border protection when they were in Government, they just couldn’t solve it. So, yeah, being in Government means you have to actually solve problems, be able to think things through and actually get things that work. And that’s why we came through the pandemic, because we did things that worked.

MURRAY: One of their ideas is the one that you really think is a bad idea, the wrong way to do it.

PRIME MINISTER: Well, I got to say, the fact that they haven’t come up with any. I mean, this is the problem. I remember in the first debate you were there and he was talking about how Labor was the great party of huge ideas. And, you know, and look, Medicare, of course, yep, NDIS, fine. I mean, I did point out that it was a Liberal Government that always had to work out how to pay for all these big ideas because they never get to that bit. Yeah they, oh the big statement. But when it comes to well, how do I do it? How do we pay for it? Well, John Howard had to work that out and we’ve had to work out how to pay for the NDIS and, and we have. But where are they? I mean this is a guy who’s spent the last three years trying to be invisible and he’s still trying to do it now with the human shield of Shadow Ministers he puts up every single day. And when the human shield goes, well we see what happens. And this is just the campaign. I mean, this, we’re just over three weeks of the campaign. Didn’t know what the unemployment rate was. Didn’t know what the cash rate was. Didn’t even know what his own NDIS policy, one of – he doesn’t have to remember too many of them, because they haven’t been too many of them. And that’s just the campaign. Could you imagine three years of that? Of this guy sitting there with everything we’re dealing with?

MURRAY: And then imagine a scenario where, you know, the Greens are the co-pilot. I mean, yesterday yesterday we saw the footage of Lydia Thorpe screaming at police officers, about 12 people who were in a special type of immigration detention because that either broken the law or that accused of breaking the law from things as serious as sexual assault to anything that takes you to be in jail for 12 months. She’s top of the ticket in Victoria and their number one preference. What does it say about who’s coming with this mob if they win?

PRIME MINISTER: It’s an absolute carnival of chaos. And then you throw in other cross-bench Independents. See, he’s not particularly strong to start with. But then you throw him in in a Parliament where he’s dealing with the teal Independents, so-called Independents. You got the Greens, let alone the unions and the factions in his own Government. I don’t know who’s going to be running that show. I can tell you, it takes a lot of strength to be a Prime Minister, particularly in very difficult times.

MURRAY: You take this bunch of polls, they say this is going to happen. You take this bunch of polls, that’s going to happen. Dennis Shanahan, I think quite deftly points out that no-one has ever won from Opposition if they’re not the preferred Prime Minister. You’re the preferred Prime Minister by some margin right the way around the country. But what do you see that those polls don’t tell us when we get them every week?

PRIME MINISTER: Australians, they’re they’re sizing us up and they haven’t made their decision yet. And this election’s a little different to many I’ve been involved in. And, you know, we’ve come through a pandemic where people have rightly been focussed on their own lives, their own challenges, and that’s been really difficult, and it hasn’t been great, and I understand that. But as you get closer to the election and they know they have to make a decision, then they will make a choice between, I think what is best for the Australian economy and their job and their family, the economy that they will live in, that will determine their choices, how their business runs, the strength of their job, how they save for their retirement, what they’re able to earn. And a Labor Opposition that we know does not have the strength to actually make the difficult decisions, whether it be on national security or our economy. And they’ll make a choice. And they won’t make a choice like it’s you know Married at First Sight or something like that. That’s all that’s all fun and that’s all a lot of fun. But Australians take the elections very seriously and I think as yet, they’re yet to make up their mind. And I think these last couple of weeks will be very important. And that’s why every single day I will just keep reminding Australians about the important choice they have, because the choice they make, just like three years ago, could you imagine if they’d chosen Bill Shorten? I wouldn’t want three years from now people having lived three years under Anthony Albanese, what with whatever’s coming next.