Interview with The Project
16 September 2018
HOST: Prime Minister Scott Morrison joins us now. Prime Minister, welcome back to The Project. Why of all days are you announcing this today?
PRIME MINISTER: Over the last three weeks, you can imagine as a new Prime Minister you get a lot of briefings about a lot of things that are up happening. When you saw the figures that I saw in the reports, of what was happening in the aged care sector, you need to move straightaway. I mean, the decisions that you make about your family going into nursing homes, residential aged care and equally for young people with disabilities going and living in residential aged care, these are tough decisions that Australians make. They need to be assured that the quality and the standards are as best as they can be.
I want to be assured about that, I want all Australians to be assured about that. So, I just wouldn't delay it. I said; “Get on with it.”
HOST: The issues though are well-known, they’re well-documented. Members of your own Government have said that description of “crises” are “fear mongering” in the past. We know there is going to be a television expose of the industry, tomorrow. Has that got anything to do with the timing?
PRIME MINISTER: Nothing, I mean the media doesn't explain everything, Hamish. I mean this is a serious issue. Whether there's a crisis or not the Royal Commission will determine that. I want to be assured that the incidences of what I’ve seen, we’ve got a tougher cop on the beat in the aged care sector. There have been unannounced visits, compliance audits. We’ve been putting a lot of resources into that.
What it’s revealing is a rather alarming increase in the non-compliance, the risk factors that are there and we need to get to the bottom of it. And we need to get the politics out of it. I don't want to fight about this issue, I want to fix it.
HOST: Prime Minister, jumping topics now to the Wentworth by-election, you have said that you wanted a woman and the best candidate to run in Wentworth. Could it be that the best candidate is a woman named Kerryn Phelps?
PRIME MINISTER: Not the Liberal candidate and I don't believe she's the best candidate for Wentworth. Because in Wentworth, voting for anyone other than the Liberal candidate which is Dave Sharma, brings Bill Shorten closer to running the country and people’s taxes going up and small businesses not getting support they need. The financial management which has produced the over 100,000 jobs for young people over the last 12 months, all of that will be put at risk.
Now, I’ve known Kerryn over a long period of time, she's been a person committed to many issues over her lifetime but she's not a Liberal, she's standing as an independent because she's not a Liberal. She doesn't support what the Liberal Party does. Our candidate, Dave Sharma, was the best candidate in the field.
Now, I don't recall from wanting to see more women in Parliament and more Liberal women in Parliament and next time, I hope to see that there will be. I will have encouraged Liberal women to step forward and put themselves into the preselection race.
HOST: Prime Minister, I need to ask you about the Fatman Scoop video that you posted. To be honest I thought it was funny, but then you took it down because some people found it a bit … you know, I don’t know. Do you think people are getting a bit too precious about things?
PRIME MINISTER: Look, I think there is a lot of that, but it's my Facebook and social media sites where it was posted. I can't have as Prime Minister, lyrics like that on my site, that doesn't sit with my values. That's why I took it down.
But I thought it was a bit of fun. I thought for many people, that was the first interesting thing they’ve seen come out of Question Time in a long time. If that's how that works, I'm good with that. But you know, hip-hop is not necessarily my thing. I mean I’ve got to back to Run-D.M.C for when I was interested in that sort of stuff.
[Laughter]
I don't even know if they qualify anymore. You know Walk This Way? They did a great track with Aerosmith as you’ll remember. But maybe your listeners can’t remember Aerosmith either, I’m not 100 per cent sure.
HOST: Mate, they can, everything that’s old is new again.
PRIME MINISTER: Excellent.
HOST: We’ve got the Salt-N-Pepa on R&B Fridays Live, are you going to come along and be front row with me? Going [descriptive sound]?
[Laughter]
PRIME MINISTER: Yeah, you won't be getting any Milli Vanilli from me, I can assure you.
[Laughter]
HOST: Prime Minister - or Milli Vanilli whatever you want to be called - thank you very much for your time, we always appreciate it.
PRIME MINISTER: See you guys, all the best.
