Interview with Sunrise
5 February 2020
DAVID KOCH: Prime Minister, thanks for joining us. Royal Commissions cost a lot of money, take a fair bit of time. We've had these inquests into bushfires before. How will this be different?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, first of all, it’ll be very, very swift. This will be done by the end of August. It will, first of all, look at all the previous royal commissions and draw an audit of all the recommendations of those and what's got done and what hasn't done been done. And there's already been a lot of work done on that. So they’ll be able to move on that, I think, very quickly. The second thing that it'll be doing is it'll be looking in a very focused way about how and on what trigger the Federal Government can actually, on its own initiative, actually put its own resources, Defence Force personnel and others and get them in there on the ground. We went from under 890 Defence Force Reserve and full-time Defence Force personnel to 6,500 in the matter of just a week or so because of the initiative we took. Now, we need to know better at what point we can do that in the future. And the other thing it's going to do is look at the resilience and preparedness, which is things like hazard reduction, land clearing laws, managing native vegetation, where you can clear trees on the sides of roads so that they don’t get shut down for a month like we saw down in Victoria. Practical things so we can get it ready for the next season.
KOCH: Ok. Because you are very conscious of states rights during this. That seemed to be your mistake. Sort of everyone was looking for you and the Federal Government just to bring a concerted effort.
PRIME MINISTER: Well, there was already, as I said, 890 or so Defence Force personnel involved-
KOCH: It took a while though.
PRIME MINISTER: We could only act in response to a request. In the week we made the decision, Victoria had not even made a state of disaster declaration. That had occurred, I think, on the Thursday. The defence forces were called out on the Saturday. So I think in these events, sometimes these timelines get blurred. Now, when we had a state of disaster of emergency in two states, which was later that week, by the Saturday we called them out and we already had that in motion that week. So it's a significant thing and it pushed our constitution to the very edge.
KOCH: Yeah. So whether you should wait and just do it yourself, I suppose is a question which this commission-
PRIME MINISTER: Well, we don't have the authority to do that.
KOCH: Hopefully this Commission will look at it. Look, a distraction yesterday from this week, which was really well-intentioned, this tribute to the heroes. A distraction was the Nationals, a leadership spill. They’re sort of becoming your Achilles heel, aren’t they, in the Coalition? What's your message to Michael McCormack to actually get on the front foot?
PRIME MINISTER: We are great partners with the Nationals and I want to say the Nationals leader Michael has already apologised, yesterday for that. It was dealt with early. But we are very focused on the things that matter to Australians, including our Nationals colleagues and particularly on the drought as far as they're concerned. But today, we're announcing a standing effective royal commission into veterans suicide and veterans suicide prevention. This goes well beyond a royal commission. This is something that we've considered very carefully and Darren Chester, the Nationals minister, has led that portfolio and worked together with me and we put this together and we've announced it today. 42 veterans and Defence Force personnel, they committed suicide in the last national figures we've had. And this requires ongoing vigilance and that's what this initiative is delivering.
KOCH: Yeah, it is a great initiative that one. While we've got you, the Coronavirus is taking up a lot of bandwidth, not only in the media, but also within government on how to fight this. Some of our neighbours in the Asian region aren't being as vigilant as we are. Is that a concern for you?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, we took early action and we have, we were one of the first to put this ban in on the travel coming into Australia. We were acting as if it were a global issue long before the WHO actually declared it one. And we had put those arrangements in place, which means we are containing the impacts in Australia right now. But the issues that we're looking at every day, and the National Security Committee met again yesterday on this issue as we are looking at this every day and the broader spread of the virus and how that occurs in mainland China. But more broadly throughout the world, obviously, are the next things that we're watching closely. Right now that hasn't presented an issue. But as we've noticed on this virus over the last few weeks, every day there's another element. I can confirm that those Australians were uplifted as part of the New Zealand flight overnight and they'll be heading back to Auckland and the Australians who are on that flight will head back to Christmas Island. And we're also putting in place another flight to get into Wuhan. But I want to stress this very carefully - no one can count on there being a third flight. And nor can they necessarily count, and I should say not count, on there being flights of that nature into mainland China. There are still flights coming out of mainland China. Qantas is still running flights, I understand, to the 9th of February. So people should not assume that we would be in a position to put flights into mainland China at a later time.
KOCH: Ok, all right. That's very clear advice for people who are umming and ahing there. Prime Minister, thanks for joining us.
PRIME MINISTER: Thanks a lot, David.
