Michael Sukkar MP

Interview with Andrew Clennell – Sky News Australia

THE HON MICHAEL SUKKAR MP – SHADOW MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES, NDIS, HOUSING AND HOMELESSNESS

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW CLENNELL – SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA

Sunday 10 November, 2024

TOPICS: US Election, Migration, Flight Upgrades, NDIS

E&OE

Andrew Clennell: Joining me live is shadow housing minister, shadow minister for the NDIS as well, Michael Sukkar, Thanks so much for your time. Can I get your reaction to Donald Trump’s victory and does that give you more hope going into next year’s election?

Michael Sukkar: Well, good morning, Andrew. It was obviously a very resounding victory. We heard a lot about a lot of the political issues in America in the lead up to the election and being a divided country. It seems to me as an outsider looking in that they’re not as divided as many were suggesting. Donald Trump quite resoundingly won the popular vote, the Electoral College. It looks like the Republicans have won the House. And of course, it’s been confirmed that they’ve won the Senate. So it seems pretty clear that the agenda that Donald Trump took to the American people has been overwhelmingly endorsed by them. And I think that’s a good sign for the United States, obviously an extraordinarily close ally of ours. And so we wish the best for them and hope that the incoming Trump administration can achieve some of the pretty lofty objectives that they’ve set for themselves.

Andrew Clennell: What about at home, though? What about, you know, inflation and immigration issues here? Do you say, well, this is a bad time for incumbents, this is an opportunity for us?

Michael Sukkar: Well, I think if you look at virtually every metric, Andrew, the United States economy is outperforming the Australian economy. We’ve seen very high and persistent inflation. Core inflation in particular, higher than the United States. We’ve seen our living standards dropping much more quickly than the United States. So I suppose if we look at the electorate in the United States and the cost of living issues that they were dealing with, it’s pretty clear that Australians are dealing with it at a much worse level. And in that respect, I think it sends a very strong message to this government. This government’s been very distracted. Obviously they were distracted for the first 18 months of their term in government with their disastrous voice referendum. They have made terrible economic decisions that have made life worse for Australians. But I don’t think we needed the United States election to emphasise just how important those issues would be. We’ve also seen in the housing area, obviously an area close to my heart, the government bringing in more than a million migrants over two years whilst they’re building fewer houses than we’ve built for many, many years. So you can’t build fewer homes and bring in record levels of migrants without that having an impact on the housing market, on rents, on first home buyers. So I don’t think we should necessarily be surprised that the US election has highlighted that those sorts of issues will be at the front of mind for everybody in democracies, including Australian voters, at the next election.

Andrew Clennell: It’s going to take some pretty radical change to do what you want to do on migration though, isn’t it? Halve the net migration. Very radical change.

Michael Sukkar: Well, I don’t think it’s as radical as many would suggest. I mean, at the end of the day, we’re talking about migration levels that are not dissimilar to the migration levels under John Howard. And I don’t think we can achieve a new normal where we have more than 500,000 migrants per year whilst our housing market can’t keep up while our infrastructure buckles and while the standard of living of Australians goes backwards. Now the Labor Party is obviously happy to accept that. They’re happy to impose those costs on Australians. We’re not. And it starts with the Government of the day stating an objective as to what their migration targets are and what the levels are that they will pursue. And this idea that it’s out of the hands of the Federal government is ridiculous. More than a million migrants in two years, Andrew. You don’t need to be a Rhodes Scholar to work out when we’re building fewer homes – that’s going to massively impact the standard of living of every other Australian. And so we don’t apologise in taking migration levels back to a sustainable and more rebalanced level.

Andrew Clennell: Alright, the getting net migration down towards the early three hundreds a year now, but we have an aging population. We don’t have enough workers in construction. And Scott Morrison sent a lot of the young workers home during the time of the pandemic and then we didn’t take anyone for two years. So are these all factors? In terms of why a higher level of net migration has been required?

Michael Sukkar: Well, the Government’s missed every target that they’ve suggested. So you can’t look at any you can’t look at any projection that they put in place with any seriousness. I mean, they’ve at each level, whether it’s during the budget or MYEFO, their migration levels, they’ve absolutely massively blown out. So we’ve seen that again and again. And so it seems to me that the levels of migration are out of control and the government has no willingness to address them. I think of course COVID was an extraordinary time, but that’s no alibi for this government. Quite frankly, Andrew, the government has to deal with the issues presented at the time. The Government’s not a position where you don’t address emerging issues as they arise. Every government has to do that. And here the Government’s more than entitled to argue that more than a million migrants in two years when we’re building around 300,000 homes, they’re willing to argue that that’s acceptable. We argue it’s not. We argue that that pushes up rents. We’ve seen rents up by 25% since this government’s been in power. We’ve seen fewer homes being built. We see fewer homes being approved. We see fewer home completions, we see fewer first home buyers. On every single metric, housing in this country has disastrously gone backwards. And at the same time, the government’s bringing in record levels of new migrants. So they’re entitled to make the argument as to why those those settings are correct, we’ll argue that they’re wrong and that we should reduce migration to a more sustainable level. And we’ll let the Australian people decide whether Labor’s plan for Big Australia or our plan for a rebalanced and more sustainable migration program is the right way to go. I’m pretty confident that I know who Australia will support.

Andrew Clennell: Just briefly on that. Are you saying then that to some extent at least this election is a referendum on a big Australia?

Michael Sukkar: I think so. I think there’s no doubt that Labor by stealth has put forward their plans, very famously outlined by Kevin Rudd. But we know it runs through the veins of the Labor Party, their plans for a big Australia, their inability to get our migration system under control. I mean we saw it in the last Labor government, their inability to secure our borders and they said Operation Sovereign Borders would never work. Obviously it did work. It will ultimately take a Coalition government to clean up the mess of the Labor Party. But I think very clearly they have an agenda for a very big Australia for huge levels of migration, unsustainable levels of migration, and we believe in a balanced migration program. I’m a product of migration, Andrew. My family is a migrant family, so I’m a huge supporter of migration, but it’s got to be planned migration and it’s got to be in our best interests as a country. And I think most Australians I think are forming the view that this government has very different priorities of of what we’ve seen more than a million migrants in two years.

Andrew Clennell: What do you make of the prospects for the PM of a trip this week to APEC and the G20 now when Joe Biden will be there and there’s no Harris administration?

Michael Sukkar: Well, look, as as a government, as a member of Parliament, we always wish our Prime Minister the best when representing our country overseas. I mean that with all sincerity. In the end, the Prime Minister, when representing a country, you want to be able to achieve good things for our country. I hope the Prime Minister’s more judicious in his remarks than remarks we’ve seen emerge in recent days, where he was in a really inappropriate way as a senior shadow minister at the time, quite personally and viscerally critical of Donald Trump. So I hope he can exercise better judgment in representing Australia in those forums. And in the end, the United States and Australia alliance transcends leaders, it transcends political parties and we all have to do everything we can to ensure that the values that we hold dear as liberal democracies, you know who value freedom, that we are able to work together in that close way. So of course we wish the Prime Minister the best and hope that he can do a little bit better than he’s done in the past.

Andrew Clennell: I wanted to ask now the shadow transport Minister, Bridget McKenzie, belatedly declaring 16 flight upgrades. Why should she stay on the frontbench? What’s the point of parliamentary standards?

Michael Sukkar: Well, she’s declared them now, Andrew, obviously. I think the sort of furor that has erupted around the Prime Minister in the wake of revelations we saw out of Qantas, really focussed on two things in my mind. They focussed on ministers, in his case, the transport minister soliciting upgrades, actively soliciting upgrades, asking for upgrades, asking for favours, should we say, of Qantas.

Andrew Clennell: What’s what’s the evidence? What’s the evidence of that? What’s the evidence of that?

Michael Sukkar: But that was the allegation. I think you and I can agree that that’s what set off this furor. So that was the the first point. Secondly, it was what set off this furor was the fact that it was the minister who had responsibility for Qantas, for whom he was soliciting those upgrades directly from, and that he was the person who was making decisions in relation to their industry, in relation to their business and in relation to a number of aspects or the regulatory environment that impacted the business for whom he was asking those favours. So I think those are the two sort of key characteristics. But of course you’ve got to declare any of these sorts of upgrades. I think as the Health Minister just said in the interview before me, more often than not, these occur through no request. You’re just upgraded. And the right thing to do is to declare them. Bridget’s done that now. She apologised for the oversight, but she was never the minister who had responsibility for Qantas.

Andrew Clennell: Michael Sukkar, she’s shadow transport. She’s shadow transport. How do you forget? How do you forget to declare 16 flight upgrades and how do you then get away with it? How does anyone forget to declare 16 flight upgrades? Has she got amnesia or something?

Michael Sukkar: Well, I mean, she it was clearly an oversight and she’s rectified that now. She wrote to the airlines and asked for a full accounting. I mean, the truth is, Andrew, when you’re catching hundreds and hundreds of flights, you know, these things can happen, but it’s not acceptable. And she’s fixed the oversight and she’s declared them, I think no one could argue that Bridget McKenzie has not been pretty tough in the way that she has dealt with a lot of the issues in the industry. But again, she didn’t solicit them and she wasn’t the minister with oversight over the industry. And that’s two very, very different situations between what the prime Minister’s alleged to have done.

Andrew Clennell: Let me ask finally, Michael Sukkar, the Opposition appears, well, you’re going to the election promising tax cuts, I believe, but also promising to rein back spending is one of those areas in which you will do that the NDIS? Are you planning further cuts, further tightening of the NDIS instead of policy you’ll look to take to the election?

Michael Sukkar: Well look, We will outline in good time before the election the full suite of policies will take. I think it is fair to say that if you look at what the Government has done, that there has been a lot of very sloppy, sloppy spending that has kept inflation high, which has kept interest rates high. But we’ll in a holistic way, Andrew, make very clear to Australians what our plan is to get the economy, get Australia back on track, to put downward pressure on inflation, which will in turn put downward pressure on interest rates because that’s the key thing that’s really killing Australian families at the moment. Labor seems to be fiddling while Rome burns. We’ll have a very persuasive set of policies to take to the election and to put in front of the Australian people, including ensuring that government spending is appropriate.

Andrew Clennell: Michael Sukkar, thanks so much for your time.

Michael Sukkar: Thank you, Andrew.

ENDS