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Transcripts
August 31, 2025
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ANDREW CLENNELL: Joining me live from Canberra is the Shadow Finance Minister, James Paterson. Thanks for your time, James Paterson. Well, Murray Watt there, he said the march for Australia today was about social disharmony, and he condemned it even before it began. We had Sussan Ley's warning not be so strong yesterday, just talked about concerns about violence occurring today. What's your position?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Andrew, I won't be at the rally today, and I am concerned about some of the material that organisers have posted, which targets Indian Australians in a way that I think is shameful and wrong. And I'm also concerned, as Murray Watt alluded to in his answer, that there will be neo-Nazis present at the rally today, that they'll seek to use it as an opportunity to recruit. I'm sure there will also be Australians who are not neo-Nazis there today who are sincere in their concerns, but I would encourage Australians to avoid protests where it's likely that neo-Nazis are going to be present. I don't think that marching alongside neo-Nazis is conducive to social cohesion in this country. I will make the point, though, that these are not the only protests that have occurred in our country over the last two years that have struck fear in the hearts of some Australians. Many of the pro-Palestinian protests in this country have been deeply distressing to the Jewish community in Australia and have featured the flags, symbols, and logos of listed terrorist organisations. I can't recall an occasion where a government minister pre-emptively or even subsequently condemned those protests, even when pictures of the Ayatollah Khamenei were featured prominently at protests like this. So, I think we should be consistent. Of course, Australians have the right to peacefully protest, but they should be peaceful, they should be lawful, and they should not engage in incitement to violence against any part of our community.
ANDREW CLENNELL: Let's talk about Nauru now. As Shadow Home Affairs Minister, you made a big issue of the handling of NZYQ detainees by the government. Are you happy they have paid Nauru to get these detainees deported now?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, you're right, Andrew. It's been a debacle from start to finish on this government's watch. They have failed at every step of the way to protect the Australian community, and there are still more than 300 violent non-citizen criminals in our community free, many of whom have gone on to offend against Australians who never should have had the opportunity to do so. But we did support legislation on a bipartisan basis in the previous Parliament to set up a scheme like this Nauruan scheme, and we are supportive of removing these people from Australia on two grounds. One, this is an important matter of public safety, and we should always work in a bipartisan way to uphold public safety. But secondly, on a very important matter, principle. These are people who are guests in our country, who are here on visas, who violated the trust of the Australian people by committing heinous crimes, including murder and child sex offences, who under any normal circumstances would have been deported for having done so, but who haven't been able to be deported because of a High Court decision. So the Parliament must take steps to protect the Australian community and uphold border protection and our sovereignty.
ANDREW CLENNELL: So it sounds like you're saying, the Coalition will be passing the legislation to facilitate this, do you think?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, we're still going through our party processes, and I don't want to get ahead of my colleagues, but the principle is clear here. We always seek to be constructive and bipartisan when it comes to matters of public safety and when it comes to a critically important principle of upholding our strong regime of border protection and community safety.
ANDREW CLENNELL: But as I said to Murray Watt, we're paying another country. It almost feels like a bribe to another country to take a whole bunch of crims off us. I mean, how else can you characterise it?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, I agree with Murray Watt. Nauru is a sovereign country. They are capable of making decisions in what they assess to be their own national interest, and we shouldn't be so patronising as to think that we should make those decisions for them or take that agency away from them. This arrangement, which has been entered into, as far as I can tell, is in good faith by the Australian government and agreed on the terms that have been offered by the Nauruan government, and if they're happy to sign on to this deal, then that's a matter for them.
ANDREW CLENNELL: Let's move now to the other historic national security story of the week, that's the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador and attacks on our soil. I reported information during the week that the government was briefed along the way that the authorities were looking at possible Iranian involvement here, as is standard practice in government during these investigations. Bearing that in mind, are there any actions the government should have taken earlier in your view?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: You're right, Andrew, that would be utterly standard practice. Prior to reaching the threshold analytically to make a public attribution, ASIO would often brief the government of the building intelligence picture that they believe that Iran was linked to or likely responsible for these attacks. So the government has probably known for many months, if not longer, that this was a possibility. And, of course, it was confirmed officially last week on Monday. And they clearly were prepared for that because they had pre-prepared to remove our diplomats from Iran as one response. We've been supportive of the actions that they've taken, but obviously, we think it should have happened earlier. And, as you know, in my former portfolio in the previous Parliament, I repeatedly called on the government to do this, starting as early as January 2023. And many of my colleagues also made similar calls, including Senator Claire Chandler, Simon Birmingham, Julian Lesser and others. So we think that there were sufficient grounds to take the action of expelling the ambassador and listing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation for the best part of two years, as a matter of fact, over two years now, and we're disappointed it's taken the government as long as it has.
ANDREW CLENNELL: I knew that you called on prescribing the guard, not expelling the Ambassador. Why at that time would you have wanted the Ambassador expelled?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, we think it's been very clear for some time that the bilateral relationship between Australia and Iran is not in Australia's national interest. And particularly the behaviour of the Ambassador since the 7th of October 2023, the Hamas terrorist attacks, has gone well beyond the bounds of normal diplomatic behaviour. We think he has been responsible for the vilification of the Australian Jewish community. We think he has deliberately stoked community tension. He's deliberately undermined social cohesion. And the slap on the wrist that he's previously received by being called into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has not been a sufficiently strong response. We feel particularly vindicated now that we know that Iran was sponsoring terrorist attacks on Australian soil. But even without knowing that, since February 2023, the former Minister for Home Affairs, Clare O'Neil, had publicly attributed acts of foreign interference by Iran in Australia's democracy. That in itself was sufficient grounds to expel diplomats and to list the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. And that is one of the reasons why we've so aggressively pursued this issue in the previous Parliament.
ANDREW CLENNELL: What practical difference would it have made if the government had prescribed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard? Do you think it would have prevented attacks? What practical differences would that make?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: It's a fair question, Andrew. We list terrorist organisations in this country for two reasons primarily. One is to send a very strong signal, as a matter of policy of the Australian government, that we don't approve of the activities of these organisations and as an act of solidarity with our like-minded partners when they do the same. But the second reason is we do intend them to be a deterrent for people getting involved with these organisations or cooperating with these organisations. In fact, we list terrorist organisations that do not currently have any activities on Australian soil as terrorist organisations to send a message to the Australian community that, for example, recruiting for them, raising money for them or expressing support for them is not a good idea and you shouldn't do it. So we can never say with certainty that listing the IRGC would have prevented these attacks, but it could have sent a strong deterrent message to the people who've clearly aided their activities here on our soil, and it may have prevented them from doing so.
ANDREW CLENNELL: Has your argument on this been weakened by Andrew Hastie saying during the week that he wanted this group prescribed when he was in government?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I don't think so, Andrew. I replaced Andrew Hastie as chair of the PJCIS when he was promoted to the Assistant Minister for Defence. And on my watch in the last 14 months of the Morrison government, we listed for the first time Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organisations in their entirety. Previously, they'd only been listed as their militant wings, not the whole organisation. And that was an act of political leadership. We didn't wait for a recommendation from an intelligence agency. We saw a problem, we conducted an inquiry, and we made a recommendation, and the government subsequently adopted our recommendations. Now, those were two of Iran's most deadly and formidable proxies at the time. And had the government been re-elected, and were I to be the Intelligence Committee Chair again, I did plan to pursue the IRGC listing as the next logical step. In the end, we lost that election, and so instead I pursued it from opposition, and we're pleased that the government has now done so. But it shouldn't have taken this long, particularly because we offered them the bipartisan support they needed to change the law on no less than three occasions in correspondence in the previous term. And they said to us at the time it couldn't be done, and it should not be done because it would damage our bilateral relationship, and I think we now know how naive that was.
ANDREW CLENNELL: In terms of your Finance portfolio, we had a concerning inflation figure out during the week, it is ticking up. What do you think this means for interest rates going forward?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Andrew, this is just one month's of data, and the monthly data can sometimes be noisy, and it is possible that the primary cause of this is the timing of payments of energy rebates. But it does hint at an underlying problem, and if it will be repeated in subsequent monthly prints, that would be really concerning. Because I presume it is not the plan of the Albanese government, nor state governments, to continue to pay people's electricity bills in perpetuity. And so at some point, if those subsidies are unwound, we will see a big jump in electricity prices. It was 13.1% on an annualised basis in this monthly print. That has been masking, those subsidies have been masking really shocking mismanagement of our energy system under the Albanese government that Australians are ultimately going to have to pay for. So, if this were repeated, it could mean that interest rates would not fall any further, and I know a lot of Australians will be very distressed by that because they're counting on many subsequent cuts of interest rates that may not materialise.
ANDREW CLENNELL: What can the government do to address the inflation problem further? Can they look to cut the growth of the NDIS even more than they've flagged?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, the government has flagged that they are intending to have further reforms to the NDIS to get that rate of growth under control, and we look forward to them actually specifying how they're going to do that in some detail, and we'll consider whether we can support that based on that detail. But overall, yes, government spending does play an important part in contributing to the inflation problem and, therefore, interest rates. And on this government's watch this financial year, government spending will be the highest as a proportion of the economy since 1986, outside a pandemic period. And that is what has happened on Jim Chalmers' and Katy Gallagher's watch. They've allowed spending to get completely out of control. In their last budget, it increased by 6% in real terms, when the economy is only growing by about 2%. So they do need to show fiscal discipline. They do need to get that growth under control. Otherwise, it is contributing to higher interest rates than we would otherwise have.
ANDREW CLENNELL: Seven MPs spoke in the party room during the week, calling for a debate immediately on climate policy. How concerning is this in terms of keeping the Coalition together?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I'm not concerned, Andrew. It is perfectly normal, particularly after a very significant electoral defeat, as we've just experienced, to genuinely and sincerely examine all of our policy positions, and that's why they're all up for review, and our climate and emissions reduction targets are part of that. I think we can go through this process in a constructive way that airs the debate internally, as we're proud and happy to have, and lands on a position that is both economically sustainable and supportable, but also that is politically viable as well, and we'll go through that process. But whatever we do, that shouldn't obscure what the government is actually doing because they are in power and their decisions do have an impact on Australians' living standards, and right now we have a trifecta of failure from this government.
ANDREW CLENNELL: All right, but hang on, I just want to pull you up on something there. What does politically viable mean? Is it politically viable to keep backing net zero, or politically unviable to abandon it?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I don't want to disappoint you or your viewers, Andrew, but I'm a member of the Shadow Cabinet and I have an opportunity to have my say through internal party processes. So I'm not going to air all of my views on your program this morning, except for those principles that I've outlined. I mean, we are competing in elections to win government, to form government. We have to have positions that are politically viable, that are supportable in the community, but also we are guided by Australia's national interest. I don't want to do anything that harms our national interest. And I am concerned about this government's watch that that is exactly what's happening. Emissions are flat, prices are up, and stability is down. That is a trifecta of failure on this government's watch.
ANDREW CLENNELL: Alright, the environmental legislation that Murray Watt is proposing, do you think the Coalition will support that?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: It entirely depends on the approach that the government tries to take to this issue in this term. In the previous term under Tanya Plibersek, it was very clearly dictated by environmental ideology and a “nature-positive” agenda, which the government appears to have abandoned. And it was clear that the government preferred to do a deal in the previous term with the Greens and all that flows from that rather than with the Coalition. Now, Murray Watt is striking a different tone so far in this term. He seems more inclined to cooperate with the Coalition, but we won't be able to make any decisions about whether we can support this until we see the details. You asked him some very straightforward questions about the design of this, which he was unable to answer, like whether or not a minister will have a role in this, and, you know, exactly the powers of a federal EPA and exactly the relationship between the state and federal government. So we look forward to seeing what the Minister proposes, but we are prepared to be constructive if they land in a sensible place.
ANDREW CLENNELL: James Paterson, thanks for your time.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Thanks, Andrew.
ENDS