RUBY:

Jason, hi! It's Ruby here.

JASON:

Ruby, it's great to finally hear your voice and see you in person.

RUBY:

It's so nice to be back, and I'm really excited to work with you. I've been admiring your journalism for a long time, and I'm looking forward to this.

JASON:

Well, I've been a devoted listener, and it's great to be working with you.

RUBY:

Thank you. So, let's get started.

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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones – back from maternity leave – and this is 7am.

One thing that has surprised people this year is how often Peter Dutton has been able to wrong foot Labor. According to staffers, a key part of this is the fact that Dutton is from Queensland and no Liberal leader has ever come from the state.

With Queensland going to an election in October, the state campaign is now a testing ground for a new kind of politics Dutton is planning to bring to the federal campaign.

Today, special correspondent for The Saturday Paper Jason Koutsoukis, on how Dutton plans to make youth crime an election issue and whether Australia is ready to look more like Queensland.

That’s coming up. It’s Monday the 15th July.

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RUBY:

Jason, this week you've been looking into the way events in Queensland are informing Peter Dutton's vision for his party and for the country. Queensland is right now in the middle of an election campaign so tell me what the election is being fought on.

JASON:

So the Queensland election will be on October 26th.

Audio Excerpt – David Crisafulli:

“Ladies and gentlemen, this election is for our state. This election is for Queenslanders.”

JASON:

And the state opposition leader, David Crisafulli, has identified four key issues that he intends to fight this election on. Cost of living crisis, a health crisis, the housing crisis and what the Liberal National Party in Queensland is calling the youth crime crisis.

Audio Excerpt – David Crisafulli:

“Friends, the youth crime crisis has changed the way Queenslanders live their life. Our faith in the safety of our community has been shaken.”

JASON:

So, youth crime has become a huge issue in Queensland, and the narrative has kind of been built around a number of quite serious, very high profile crimes committed by minors in Queensland in the past few years. In February this year, a 70 year old great grandmother named Vyleen White was allegedly attacked by a group of five teenagers in a supermarket carpark and stabbed to death while she was shopping with a six year old girl. There was also the case of Emma Lovell, a 41 year old woman who was stabbed after a violent home invasion on Boxing Day in 2022. And a year earlier, a 17 year old boy driving a stolen car ran over a couple and killed them and the woman was pregnant at the time.

So I think those three crimes have created a lot of community concern. It's something that David Crissafuli has quite successfully latched onto at the LNP state convention last weekend.

Audio Excerpt – David Crisafulli:

“The youth crime crisis keeps getting worse under Labor…”

JASON:

This was very much a focus of both his address to the party faithful and Peter Dutton's address the day before.

Audio Excerpt – David Crisafulli:

“When a young person turns 18, they stop offending. They know that depending on which side of 18 they are, there will be different consequences.”

JASON:

And David Crisafulli unveiled a policy. This is, I guess, one of his marquee policies as we head towards the election that youth offenders committing adult crimes should receive adult equivalent sentences.

Audio Excerpt – David Crisafulli:

“Today I announce we will restore consequences for actions for young criminals. Adult crime, adult time.

JASON:

He's calling it adult time for adult crime.

While Queenslanders believe that the majority of crime is being committed by children, that isn't borne out in the facts. And the main thing that's making the community unsafe is domestic violence. And this is men harming women and children in their homes. But instead of focusing on that issue, both parties in Queensland are running on youth crime. This is a really crucial state election campaign, not just for Queenslanders but for the Liberal Party because if David Crisafulli wins, as expected, he'll be the first mainland Liberal premier in the country. And I'm sure that, if David Crisafulli wins, it's going to give Peter Dutton a lot of confidence as we go to a federal election expected around May next year.

RUBY:

Okay, so Peter Dutton was famously a police officer before he became a politician, so being tough on crime is very much part of his rhetoric, it always has been. Can you tell me specifically about some of the things that we've heard from him in the past about youth crime?

JASON:

Well, I think right from the moment that that Peter Dutton entered parliament, federal parliament, in 2001, crime, law and order have been staples of his public comments.

Audio Excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“I often say to people that as a police officer, I've seen the best and the worst that society has to offer.”

JASON:

He also didn't hesitate to speak out on more, kind of, state-based crime issues. In 2018, the death of a South Sudanese teenager in Melbourne's CBD was, according to Peter Dutton, indicative of a major law and order problem in Victoria. He also said that Victorians were too frightened to go out to restaurants because of the problems surrounding African gang violence.

Audio Excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“You know, people are scared to go to restaurants of a night time because they're followed home by these gangs. Home invasions and cars are stolen and we just need to call it for what it is. Of course, it's African gang violence.”

JASON:

In May, he announced a couple of initiatives. One of those was, he criminalised, you know, showing off crimes on social media.

Audio Excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“We want to give the eSafety commissioner the power to pull the content down so that the videos or the photos can be pulled down. Secondly, we want to make it an offence to post them, and we want to stop people using social media as a penalty.”

JASON:

He also said that he would keep the age of criminal responsibility at ten years old.

Audio Excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“If children of that age, who are 10 or 12 years of age, were stealing cars and involved in crime, if they know and they can work out pretty quickly, if there's no penalty that they're facing, then they're just encouraged to continue that life of crime and that’s not what you want.”

JASON:

You know, when we talk about Peter Dutton, we don't just say that he was a former police officer. It's always somehow that he's a former Queensland copper. And I think that does also remind us that Peter Dutton is the first leader of the federal coalition who wasn't from Sydney or Melbourne, and I think his Queensland identity is really starting to show in the way that he is leading the federal coalition in the policy directions that he's taking them on.

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RUBY:

Jason, Peter Dutton, we all know, began his working life as a police officer in Queensland. He's now the first federal coalition leader who doesn't come from either Sydney or Melbourne. So how should we think about this? How does being from Queensland impact the way that Dutton works and what he focuses on?

JASON:

Well, I think, Ruby, the thing about being a leader of the federal coalition from Melbourne or Sydney means you're probably more in tune with some of the Liberal Party's biggest traditional supporters, and that is corporate Australia. But being from Queensland means it gives you more licence to follow policies that aren't necessarily the sort of things that the big business would want. The most prominent anti-business establishment platform that Peter Dutton spoke from was his opposition to the voice referendum last year.

Audio Excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“I think there are debates that corporate Australia should be involved in. And at the moment, I don't think they're paying, you know, due consideration to the views of their workforce, to the views of the community.”

JASON:

Corporate Australia was very much behind the voice referendum, the yes campaign, and Peter Dutton was, diametrically opposed to the voice. And Peter Dutton's no campaign and the substantial victory that the no campaign had, I think that gave him the confidence to say, well, I can go against what corporate Australia wants and campaigns for and still win. And he's used that experience to pursue other things that big business doesn't like. One policy that he announced jus, this month was this idea that, if supermarkets like Coles and Woolies and Wesfarmers, which owns the Bunnings hardware franchise, if they're getting too powerful and misusing their market power, then Peter Dutton is saying he's going to force them to divest some of their businesses and this idea that the government would intervene into the market and force a company to sell off parts of its business does go against what the Liberal Party stands for. Peter Dutton's plan for incorporating nuclear energy into our national energy mix is also raising eyebrows inside the Liberal Party because Peter Dutton is saying that he's not going to leave it to the market to provide nuclear power. He's going to, not only intervene into the market, but the Commonwealth would own the whole nuclear power supply chain.

Audio Excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“I don't want the lights to go out. I want there to be reliable power. I want pensioners to be able to pay their bills and turn the air conditioning on to get through winter. I want to make sure that businesses can grow here, not close and move to Malaysia or somewhere else”

JASON:

Peter Dutton wants people to see him as someone who is aligned with the interests of small business, not big business. And the more that he does that, Peter Dutton believes, the more chance he has of becoming prime minister next year.

RUBY:

Right so it sounds like, at least at this moment in time, this approach of ignoring some of the corporate agenda is working for Dutton. I suppose the question is how far he can take this, given the factions within his own party and the desires of the traditional base of the coalition.

JASON:

Well, so the kinds of policies that Peter Dutton has been pursuing has left some long term observers of Liberal Party politics, like Judith Brett, she was a professor of politics at La Trobe University, she's spent much of her life researching the Liberal Party. She says that she doesn't really know what the Liberal Party stands for anymore, like what are the Liberal Party's core beliefs. In her view, the Liberal Party is one of the great Australian political parties. It's a party that is there to really serve the national interest and she doesn't understand why the moderate faction of the Liberal Party - these are people like Simon Birmingham and Jane Hume - are letting Peter Dutton take the Liberal Party off course, then it shows that they must be completely powerless inside the party room, and that their failure to stand up for what are the Liberal Party's core beliefs is really a symptom of the weakness of a sensible centre inside the Liberal Party at the moment.

RUBY:

So if we talk a little bit more about if and when the coalition might get into government, do you think that this law and order agenda will translate on a national level? Can Peter Dutton win a federal election by promising to be tough on crime?

JASON:

I mean, it's a really good question because when Peter Dutton is talking about youth crime, he's signalling to young parents and parents in outer suburban areas that he's concerned about the issues that they're concerned about, and showing that he's in sync with what, you know, their concerns are.

Peter Dutton has 21 seats in Queensland, so he's got Queensland locked up pretty well. But he also needs to really win some of those inner suburban seats, the ones that are held by the so-called teals. This is seats like Kooyong in Melbourne, Wentworth in Sydney, Curtin over in Perth. There's a lot of fund managers who live in those seats. And right now, I don't think Peter Dutton is giving them a lot of reason to vote for him. And at some point, the Liberal Party will have to win back those voters if they're going to get into government.

RUBY:

Jason, thank you so much for your time.

JASON:

Thanks, Ruby. It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you.

RUBY:

Likewise.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Donald Trump has been rushed from a stage at a political rally in Pennsylvania, in what is being investigated as an assassination attempt. Two people are dead, including a suspected gunman.

In video and photo footage from the event, the former president can be seen with blood on his face. As he was escorted off the stage by secret service, Trump held his fist in the air.

President Biden has condemned the attack, saying “there’s no place in America for this kind of violence”.

And…

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said there is “no legitimate place in the Labor movement” for John Setka.

Setka announced his immediate resignation as the secretary of the Victorian branch of the CFMEU late on Friday, over explosive reports from the Nine newspapers that senior bikie figures and criminals have infiltrated the union.

The Victorian opposition has called for an urgent investigation into the CFMEU.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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