Three leadership contests in one week

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Today the Australian people have voted for Australian values.

Government is always formed in the sensible centre.

But our Liberal Party reflects a range of views from all walks of life.

I think that people are trying to draw bows that are very long and not yet pointed in the right direction.

Young Australians see through that kind of aggressive politics.

They actually want a parliament that's looking to their future.

Welcome to the party room.

I'm Frank Kelly here on Gadigal Land of the Aura Nation in Sydney.

And I'm Mel Clark joining you from Ngunnawal Country here in Canberra.

I'm filling in for PK again.

Thanks for having me back for a second time, Frank.

Well, it's fantastic to have you and I know you've had a busy morning already, Mel, but

the pull of the post-election vortex is particularly strong right now

in this post-election period it's been very very volatile spicy even yes and certainly really fast moving because within minutes of recording this podcast last week with you things went nuclear in Canberra within both the coalition and the Labor front bench and since then we've had leadership battles defections reshuffles recriminations and it ain't over yet so we're going to be joined very shortly by longtime political journalist and columnist Karen Middleton to sort of break a lot of this down.

But Mel, let's get into it.

I've been in this game a long time.

It's not often, Mel, you see three parties holding leadership votes in the one week.

It shows what a historic result that this election has delivered for us and it shows the level of turmoil that there is in political circles right now.

So if we just look at how this week has played out, it started on Monday with the Nationals.

Now, there was a leadership challenge there.

David Littleproud did easily enough fend off Matt Canavan's attempts to take over the leadership, but it's important to note that Matt Canavan was doing that for a reason, that there are divisions in the Nationals, and his challenge reflects that.

We've got a new deputy in Kevin Hogan taking on that role, given Perrin Davey lost her Senate seat for New South Wales.

So Kevin Hogan is the new deputy to help lead the Nationals.

But it really exposed for us a bit about the division around net zero in particular, the target to get to net zero emissions by 2050 and the future of the nuclear policy.

And there's a bit of familiarity with that the next day on Tuesday with the Liberals' leadership election.

They're grappling with exactly the same issue of what is the future of this policy, how committed are they to it, how much do they see it as a factor in their election outcome.

And we had a pretty eventful result on the Tuesday as well, Susan Lee prevailing over Angus Taylor.

Government is always formed in the sensible centre, but our Liberal Party reflects a range of views from all walks of life that are welcome in our party room.

Too close for comfort, really.

Political wisdom would tell us, I reckon, Mel.

You know, those four votes, it was 29 to 25,

those four votes dividing Lee and Taylor don't really suggest, I'll be interested to hear what Karen thinks of this later, don't really suggest the Liberal leadership is a settled thing, you know, especially when you account for the fact that some of those votes came from senators who will be leaving.

They're outgoing.

They'll be gone from June 30th, including Linda Reynolds, Holly Hughes.

And also because there are now three people sitting in the party room, the Liberal Party room, Mel, who've publicly stated they have leadership ambitions.

of the Liberal Party.

Angus Taylor, he contested and lost.

Andrew Hastie, who said in a podcast interview this week that he wants to lead one day.

I'd be foolish to say I don't have a desire to lead.

I do have a desire to lead,

but the timing was all out for personal reasons.

And then there's Senator Jacinta Nabajimpa Price, who took that extraordinary step of quitting the National Party room to stand with the Liberal leadership ticket with Angus Taylor this week, making absolutely no secret that one day, and you've got the feeling it's one day soon, she wants to lead the party.

To be Prime Minister, of course, you'd need to go to the lower house.

Well, there is that, you know, and I know there's a lot of Australians who'd love to see that, but right now, as I said, you know, my focus is the Senate.

And that's just the stated ambition of leadership, Fran.

There's plenty of others in that room that would like to be Prime Minister one day as well.

I think Tim Wilson's probably another one.

And Iga Beaver coming back who wouldn't mind putting his hand up at some point.

Dan Teehan was certainly someone who has been in the mix and could be again if there's another another leadership challenge and there's plenty more who think they could do it.

It shows that.

Let's face it, they all think they can do it, Mel.

If you get into politics, chances are you think you can get a Prime Minister.

You've got a baton in a knapsack.

So if you look at how narrow that victory is, the ambition that is there and what is inevitably going to be a really difficult period for the Liberal Party as they assess such an enormous loss and such division over the future direction, it's going to be hard.

It seems like we've got a bit of a sense of how they'll start, having selected Susan Lee.

She's talked about wanting to reposition the party towards the centre, the need to be more attractive to women and younger voters.

But as for the policy approach, we've got zero indication of what that will be.

I think the fact that she's been unwilling to

plant a flag in the ground on any policy ground with her leadership shows just how tenuous her position is.

She can't afford to take a captain's call, so she's not going to.

She's aware that the challenge, as it was for Peter Dutton, in trying to keep the party together, is there for her too.

Yeah, she's not a captain's call type of leader, I don't think, or she hasn't been in the past.

She has been a bit of an attack dog and that to my mind has never really, that style has never really sat well with her.

But now she's going to have to be the leader.

She is going to have to find positions for the party and lead a party on it.

And the first job she's got to do is select a shadow ministry.

And this will tell us a lot because there's 30 people needed for a shadow cabinet, Mel, and there's...

29 people who voted for Susan Lee in the leadership ballot.

So she's going to have to build some bridges there.

But that might not be her biggest challenge, Mel, because she's also got the challenge, it looks like, anyway, of keeping the coalition together.

The Nats have have really got their tails up after another relatively strong performance at this election.

AKA they didn't lose a swag of seats like the Libs did.

So they're feeling emboldened.

They're also absolutely furious about the defection of Senator Nambajimpa Price.

They see that as disloyalty.

They're not in a mood to be quiet.

A couple of them, including Senate leader for the Nats, Bridget McKenzie, and outspoken Matt Canavan, have already said out loud that they wouldn't rule out the idea that the Libs and the Nats might need time apart.

You know, they might need to separate if they don't get their policy positions in line.

And they're, you know, as I say, just furious about the raw ambition that led Senator Nambachimpa Price down the corridor to the Liberal Party room.

You're right.

It shows how complicated this situation is for Susan Lee and David Littleproud.

So we have competing tensions here, right?

So one of the first things they need to do, get that shadow cabinet sorted.

If the parties are working together, that means there should be positions for the Nationals on the front bench.

And the Nats are laying a line in the sand down.

They say they want

a key economic portfolio.

They concede it won't be Treasurer.

But I wonder what they're after.

I think they need to also figure out can they sit together on certain policies like nuclear power, like net zero, which neither party individually has really settled very well.

But they're going to pick a combined cabinet first and who has which leadership positions and which portfolios will influence the policy direction that they haven't actually agreed on yet.

So they haven't got the policy yet.

They'll try and get the personnel.

The personnel will affect the policy direction, which then may change the nature of the relationship of them together.

It's a very chicken and egg kind of scenario.

They need to figure out both at the same time and that's really hard to do.

Yeah.

And the next leadership ballot coming up is this afternoon.

We're recording this on a Thursday morning.

The Greens, Adam Bant, their outgoing leader, finally conceded his seat of Melbourne last week.

But Mel, unlike the leaks and backgrounding that we get from other parties, the Greens have been pretty tight-lipped about this.

You might know the leadership outcome by the time you're listening to the podcast because,

as I say, we're recording this on Thursday morning.

It's happening around lunchtime.

It's a three-way contest in the run-up to the meetings.

South Australian Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, Queensland Senator Larissa Waters and New South Wales Senator Maureen Farooqi.

But they like consensus in the Greens.

They generally don't want a pretty public, ugly leadership spat.

So

my instinct is I think it's very likely that after the shock loss of Adam Bant, they'll go for stability.

The safest choice in that frame would be Queenslander Larissa Waters.

She's currently the Senate leader for the Greens.

She's not necessarily an attacking kind of politician.

It's Queensland where they've got a lot of repair work to do.

They lost two of their lower house seats there, which was a big disappointment to them.

And, you know, she didn't have the profile that Senator Hanson-Young, for instance, had, particularly during this campaign.

I think Sarah Hanson-Young did a lot of the heavy lifting in this campaign for the Greens.

She doesn't have her breadth of policy experience either.

But I would think she's probably the safest choice.

And the argument in that party room will be about getting back to a more centrist position for the Greens, getting back to the basics, back to the environment, away from the harder-edged positions they've been taking on things like Gaza, on Max Chandler Maith are standing up in front of the CFMEU protest,

less playing hardball on policies that their supporters actually want action on, like housing, like environmental standards.

So I think they'll nut all this out, and you know, my instinct is that they'll go for Larissa Waters.

Let's bring in our guest, hey?

Perfect time to do it.

Karen Middleton, political journalist and columnist, welcome back to the party room.

Thank you very much for having me back.

Karen, it's great to have you back.

You've been watching leadership contests for a long, long time now, but let's start by talking about Labor.

After all, they won.

They were the only party that didn't really need to have a leadership ballot.

Labor's thumping majority

seems to be becoming even more commanding by the day, Karen.

With final counting still underway, right now the government currently seems to hold 93 seats in the House of Reps, which is a massive majority.

And yet, they're still scrapping between themselves this week over the spoils, Karen.

The factions have been flexing their muscles in a way we haven't really seen a lot of in recent years.

Will they never learn, you might ask?

But before we get to that, the Prime Minister did announce a ministry, a front bench, a cabinet.

What do you think of the refresh?

Well,

it was a mixture of sticking with some of the senior people in existing positions and then perhaps rewarding some people who've performed well and bringing in some new talent.

I've changed a range of portfolios around.

I've got people who are, I think, in the best positions and that's across the board.

So

we'll come to that factional fight which involves some of that new talent.

But the likes of Annika Wells, for example, in Queensland, you know, she's seen to have done a good job in the aged care portfolio.

She was also a significant figure in the campaign,

going around and campaigning with a lot of those female candidates.

And, you know, they've rapidly or dramatically increased their numbers in Queensland.

So she's been rewarded with what is effectively a promotion.

I think she's now got communications and sport, but that'll be a challenge for her too, because the whole gambling issue remains unresolved, and that'll be one that she'll have to deal with.

So there are a few interesting promotions like that,

but then there is the sort of ugly side of

ministerial refresh and that's where the faction fighting comes in.

And to your point about it being, you know,

more obvious now, I think this faction stuff goes on all the time.

It's just it's not, we don't always see it quite as dramatically in public.

And Richard Miles has intervened here to ensure that he got two Victorian right members into the ministry rather than just the one where there was a vacancy.

He's advocated for and succeeded in getting Daniel Molino, who's widely respected, got very good economic credentials and seen, if you like, as

the merit promotion, and Sam Ray, who is Richard Marles' factional lieutenant in Victoria.

So he is now in the ministry as well.

And this is at the expense of Mark Dreyfus.

He's the other member of the right who was knocked out to make way for those two.

That's right.

So two long, well, Mark Dreyfus, a very long-term and well-respected Attorney General, dumped, and the science and industry minister, Ed Husick, dumped.

That's right.

Well, there was, you know, one in New South Wales was seen to have to go because of the suggestion that there was over-representation in the cabinet from New South Wales, and one in Victoria had to go because Richard Miles and his faction wanted two promotions.

It's pretty rugged, isn't it?

You know what they say?

If you need a friend in politics, get a dog.

I mean, this is a real

example of that, wasn't it?

There's no loyalty.

Brutal, very brutal, and probably, you know,

creates a bad taste in the public's mind a little bit, maybe less so inside the party because they value

factional strengths.

And people who are in factions looking at their own pathways to promotion would say, oh, well, there's someone

who gets his people a promotion.

What do you make of the way that Ed Husick and Mark Dreyfus have responded in the wake of this?

Because it's been very different approaches.

Mark Dreyfus has kept his own counsel, hasn't spoken, but there's an expectation that he's not going to sit out a term on the backbench given where he is in his career.

On the other hand, you have Ed Husick, who is going to fight on and has begun with some very pointed comments

at his frustration with what's happened.

What do you make of those two different responses from Ed Husick and Mark Dreyfus?

Well, I guess they're at different ages and stages in their political political careers.

Mark Dreyfus, as you say, the speculation around him is that he is most likely to quit politics as a result of this because, having served as Attorney General several times now, would he want to sit on the backbench for a full term at the age of 68?

Possibly not.

He's had personal tragedy in his life in the last couple of years with the very sad death of his wife.

So he's the one more likely to think, well, I'm going to make a change now.

Whereas Ed Husick is younger and still has ambition in politics.

I think

he's publicly angrier too because he did step out of the ministry to accommodate factional colleagues previously on the understanding that he would come back in.

He came back in and now he's been bounced again.

So there's a bit of bitterness there.

I did wonder when he gave that interview on Insiders on Sunday what approach he would take.

And initially it wasn't clear whether it was going to be the just the gentle needling.

It was gentle needless.

It was very quickly turned into

much harsher.

I think when people look at a Deputy Prime Minister, they expect to see a statesman, not a factional assassin.

There's some strong words.

You're saying Richard Miles has put his own ambition to boost his numbers ahead of the good of the party and the government.

Well, I think a lot of people would draw that.

conclusion.

But it was an interesting tone with which it was delivered.

It wasn't enraged and out of control.

It was a very very deliberate

full frontal attack on Richard Miles.

So that makes for quite an interesting dynamic in that caucus going forward.

Well interesting too because, and I think there's something to this.

He was the most senior and the only Muslim

Labour MP in cabinet and they've dumped him and they dumped him after Labor did better than they feared they might with the support from the Muslim population in particularly Western Sydney seats.

He was the cabinet minister who'd spoken out publicly, you know,

more strongly and clearly than anybody else in Labor in support of Gaza and calling for a stronger condemnation of Israel's behaviour.

Is this risky?

for Labor, dumping this guy who kind of embodied for some perhaps, or that's what certainly people in Western Sydney are suggesting and esteemed community leaders like Jamal Riffey, you know, embodied them and their

concerns?

You'd have to think it is risky.

The senior Labor figures are making the point, of course, that Anne Ali has been promoted into cabinet and she is also Muslim and will be the first Muslim woman in cabinet.

But again, she's from Western Australia, not from Western Sydney.

And you're right that Western Sydney is where there has been that movement of independence with Muslim backgrounds targeting senior Labor figures.

So there is that risky aspect to this demotion, but I think

what you see when you look at what's happened is from the outside, the public might say, well, we don't understand why you've dumped the most senior Jewish figure in the government and

the most senior Muslim figure in the government given all that's been going on.

But inside, factionalism wins.

One of the things that really jumped out at me from Ed Husick was his criticism of the timidity, as he described it, of the first term of Anthony Albanese's leadership.

After 2022, there was a bit of a prolonged honeymoon there for Anthony Albanese.

What do you think is going to happen this time?

Do you think there'll be a prolonged honeymoon?

Do you think there'll be moves to try and capitalise on this big political victory?

What can we expect from Anthony Albanese now?

I don't think you get the same honeymoon with a second victory as you get when your first win.

There's the sort of euphoria within the Labour Party of the victory.

The public have changed governments the first time time around.

So there's generally a

period of, well, let's see what they can do.

We haven't seen them yet.

Now we have seen them for one term and

they didn't win the primary vote solidly.

They weren't people's first choice solidly, were they?

A lot of those seats were won on preferences.

That's how our system works and I personally think it's a good system.

But there's a message in there that I think the public will be watching.

And it was interesting to me, Anthony Albanese's message to the caucus last week was very much trying to manage expectations.

He has a huge backbench now, the biggest as he emphasised ever for Labor in government.

he has to manage their expectations because there will be pressure to do more.

There was a sense from a lot of their traditional constituencies that they didn't do enough.

They will also have a more progressive Senate and a less untidy Senate in terms of who they might have to seek numbers from and support from.

But he is emphasising that they will do what they have promised.

So he doesn't want people to get out over their skis.

He doesn't want them to get ahead of themselves.

And he'll have to manage those tensions and will be very interesting to watch.

I noticed that in an interview that the Prime Minister gave to the Nine Papers, he's talked about

his brand of governing and he's called it progressive patriotism.

And, you know, he says, the big Labour reforms that you've already seen and we promised during the election spoke of ad nauseum, housing, Medicare, childcare, growing the economy through the care economy, and this language about doing things the Australian way in brackets, otherwise not copying Trump.

He says we can be a microcosm for the world.

So he's talking a big game and he's got this new paradigm, which I don't know, Karen, I'd never heard of before.

Maybe you have.

Progressive patriotism.

That's right.

Yeah, it's not a phrase I've heard before.

There was one big example in the previous term where they did do something that they hadn't said they would do.

In fact, they said they would do the opposite, and that was their changes and their embracing of the tax cuts that the Morrison government had enacted.

Labor initially had said they weren't going to embrace them.

They recast them, and that was a success for Labor, I think.

So there's an argument that you know you can change direction, you can do something you haven't necessarily foreshadowed, but you can only do it if you make a very careful calculation about what the public's appetite for that will be.

And that will dictate the kinds of areas in which they do that.

And I think if you do this progressive patriotism thing, if you look at what they focused on in the election campaign, they centered their whole re-election pitch around health very strongly.

Health is something that affects all Australians.

So in fact, it was a unifying subject, a unifying theme.

What they will be looking at doing under the banner of this new heading, progressive patriotism, will be things that will have popular support, will affect all Australians and will be unifying and not divisive.

Now, the thing that maybe doesn't fit into that category is the superannuation plans and taxing unrealised capital gains.

That's targeting one particular group at the top end.

It'll be fascinating to see how they manage that because they are still sticking to that policy position.

Well, but that's a message they can sell as

a generational equity move.

And I think a challenge for them is, yeah, it's great to hold up the Medicare card every week every day during the election campaign, but these are hard changes to make.

They can take a long time.

So, you know, people's expectations on Medicare, on health, on

housing, you know, that they, people are desperate for change and desperate for more action here, but it's long, hard grind.

to do it.

So that's always a challenge for a government, isn't it?

Yeah, and that's the managing expectations thing again.

And while the Senate can be an advantage for them in its more streamlined arrangement with Greens in balance of power.

It won't be as easy to pick off other groups and blame them for obstruction if things don't get through.

The government, I'm sure, is very happy to be able to point the finger at the Greens if the Greens say no and the Greens have a challenge in what they, given what's happened, what they will block and what they will endorse.

But yeah, the Senate is different, so the arguments will have to be different too.

Labor really has to figure out its tactics.

It has to figure out how quickly it wants to move, but it knows which direction it wants to head.

If we compare that to the Liberal Party, it's a very different question because they now need to figure out what their policies are before they even get to the question of how to go about implementing them or how to sell them to the public.

They're pretty much starting from scratch.

So we've had Susan Lee elected with this narrow victory.

She's said that everything is on the table when it comes to policy.

The biggest question obviously is the one around will the party remain committed to net zero zero emissions by 2050 and is nuclear power part of the plan to get there.

Now, all Susan Lee would say in her press conference is that we need to reduce emissions and beyond that everything else was on the table.

I think even some of the Nationals were surprised the Liberals were willing to put even a commitment to Paris or a 2050 target would be on the table.

How does Susan Lee go about finding the right landing point for not not just the Liberals but the coalition as a whole on this?

Well, she's in a super tricky spot because she's got to where she is because of the state of the party.

We saw from the vote result the other day and from the defection of Senator Jacinta Nampanjimpa Price that the right

is not

has not necessarily accepted the verdict of the people, doesn't necessarily believe that the election result is a vote against nuclear power or even a vote against some of the ideological positions that may have been pushed harder from the right.

So she's got a right that is not falling into line automatically just by virtue of that vote having taken place and that defection having taken place.

She's got a deputy who was the chief advocate for nuclear power.

She's very awkward if it were to try and move away.

Yeah, and she's got a history of changing her own position on things for what some might suggest is expedient reasons.

She's made a defence of that and I thought her press conference was impressive, the way she handled a range of issues, including the situation with her own mother, who is

in end of life care.

I thought she handled all of that extremely well.

But that is the moment where she gets...

you know, clear air to do that.

From now on, it gets more complicated as she tries to fix a position and pull people in behind her.

She wants to unify the party, but she also has acknowledged there needs to be debate within the party, and that is one of the criticisms of where Peter Dutton took the party.

He was praised for unification, but it came at the expense of the rigorous internal debate and policy formulation.

And that is where things will get hard.

Yeah, policy was a black box, so many of them said afterwards.

They had no input into it.

I mean, the test will be on what she delivers.

You know, she's got the best chance of hanging on to a leadership and keeping that party, let alone the coalition together, if she can deliver.

And one of the big tests, and this is one of her own tests from the past, is

getting more female support, getting more women into their party, getting more women elected and getting a bigger share of the female vote.

You know, she has promised to do this.

She promised to do it after the last election.

She's previously called

for a 40% target to boost female representation.

It didn't happen.

It wasn't particularly obvious to me that she was leading a big campaign for it to happen.

As leader, will this be her test?

Well, just being the leader sends a message and gives them...

Sure, but that's not enough, is it?

No, no, but I think it might activate women in the Liberal Party a bit more.

Certainly, you could see from the faces of female members of

the party room as they left.

There's not many in there, Karen.

Not indeed.

And you made the point before that some of the senators who may have supported her will be gone by July.

And on top of that, you know, the count isn't over in some of those seats that have been claimed by the Liberals.

But the ones who were there were very buoyant after that party room meeting.

They were clearly historic and we should acknowledge that.

That's right.

And so the real question now is who gets activated by her elevation and how much are they prepared to put into her success?

And equally, who...

who prioritises other things ahead of her success and the party's success at this point.

And there's another complication here because, as much as Susan LeLee has this big challenge of reforming the parliamentary party,

setting policy agendas, what also really needs reform and is influenced by who the leader is is the party structure.

Now, this can kind of be boring behind-the-scenes stuff, but it's actually really crucial because the source of a lot of the problems for the Liberal Party is the fact that, as a political outfit, its membership base is so eroded.

Its numbers are very small, skewed very much to to older male members.

You certainly see particular interest groups engage in the political process, which skews then who the membership is, who they pre-select as candidates, which makes it not necessarily the environment for a broad-based participation, which is what they ultimately need if they are going to be a successful party of government.

Now, trying to change those structures is really difficult, partly because the Liberal Party is set up as a federated structure.

The state branches have a lot of power.

It's not as centralised as, say, the Labor Party is.

And the people who are in charge at a state level are very hard to move or shift or change their minds at times.

So it's a difficult task for Susan Lee, I think, of both trying to reform the policy position and outlook of those in parliament, but also acknowledge that it's hard to make progress without dealing with the Liberal Party as a whole.

Well, if you want to talk about factionalism, let's look at the Liberal Party.

She inherits.

We don't have factions in the Liberal Party.

Didn't I hear a leader say that once, Karen?

I think Malcolm Turnbull basically belled the cat on that one point.

I think everyone laughed when he said that.

Yes, look at what she's inherited.

You're right about Mill, about the Federated Party and the different state divisions being very powerful.

They need to get their act together in order to support their federal leader and ensure that the Liberal Party looks like a unified party, even

notwithstanding these divisional separations in time for the next federal election.

Yeah and to ensure the Liberal Party looks like modern Australia.

Karen it's great to have you with us on the party room as always thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much Karen.

Thank you.

We'll move to questions without notice.

We'll give the call to the Leader of the Opposition.

Thank you very much Mr Speaker.

My question is to the Prime Minister.

Order.

Well the bells are ringing which means it's time for question time here on the party room and this week's question, first question, comes from Tanya.

Hi PK and Fran, Tanya on Iroganji Country in the far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt.

At the start of the campaign and even before it we heard Labor making promises about Medicare and other things and the coalition simply said me too.

Now that the coalition have lost the election can we hope that they will pass those policies when they come to the House and the Senate or now that they no longer have Peter Dutton as a leader do they have a get out of jail free card?

What a great question to throw at Tanya.

Well, I think I've got some news for Tanya that she might not be terribly pleased to hear.

But with Susan Lee now at the top and saying every policy is on the table, I don't think there is certainty that the Liberal Party will necessarily stand by those election commitments.

Now, I think some of them they probably will.

You know, some of the matched policies, things like the Bruce Highway, where they matched Labor's commitment, I'm sure they'll still want to support that.

But when it comes to Medicare, if they want to make other promises around spending, they might not necessarily come to the party with the same enthusiasm that they did in the election campaign.

What do you think, Fran?

Yeah, I think a little differently.

I think they'd be mad to not accept the Medicare increase in spending.

Wasn't it $8 billion or something?

$1.50, I think, to increase the Medicare rebates and to try and beef up bulk billing.

I wouldn't expect that they wouldn't match those things or they try and block those things when they come in the you know the post-budget bills.

But there will be other things that they will take issue with because we know we've already talked about some of them and there will probably be some kind of climate policy.

There will be points of difference and that's not unusual.

But I think it would be high risk for them to not immediately wave through things like the Medicare spending when they've said that they would.

But other issues like we saw before, before, you know, Anthony Albanese famously badged the Coalition and the Greens, the noelition.

I don't know that they want to be the noelition quite so emphatically this time.

Our next question comes from John.

Hi, PK and Fran.

This is John from the Gold Coast.

Love the podcast.

I just want to ask about the AUKUS submarine deal.

There's been a lot of discussion of that over the last few years and, you know, the cost of about $360 billion Australian dollars.

But as I understand it, there is no absolute guarantee that we will get the submarines.

I believe Richard Miles took a check for a billion dollars to Mar-a-Lago or to the White House to see Donald Trump.

The question I have is:

what happens if we don't get the submarines?

Do we get our money back?

Thanks.

Very happy to get a question on AUKUS because this is one of the biggest spending initiatives that Australian politics has ever seen.

And what happens with the money and the hardware is certainly one that we're all going to be watching closely.

Just the first thing we'll say is that check that Richard Miles took over to the US, it was $500 million for Anne, I think that was.

$500 million, I think.

So about 800 million Australians.

So, you know, getting close to a billion, that's for sure.

It's a lot of money.

And we just handed it over.

So this is money to support the development of the construction provision of Virginia-class submarines in the US, because ultimately that's the production line that we're planning to acquire submarines from.

So it's meant to help speed up their production, which will ultimately help us get our submarines sooner.

On the question of what happens if we don't get the submarines.

And John's right to point out that there's not an ironclad guarantee you get these submarines.

There's provisions within the details of what's been agreed.

I haven't got the exact wording in front of me, but it effectively says

when the US gets to a certain point, then submarines will be made available to Australia.

So there's a bit of nervous concern about, well, what if the US hasn't managed to produce enough submarines in enough time?

Are they really going to want to hand them over to us in the timeframe we expect?

But all the assurances from the US have been

things will be on track.

But

because of that, I don't think it's going to come to a question of getting our money back, frankly, because this is just a tiny fraction of what we're investing.

The $500 million will

be but a drop in the ocean compared to all of the other money we're spending around acquiring them.

So setting up facilities here in Australia to contribute to their construction, to then have them operate from here, the staff that will be need to be involved in not just manning the submarines but maintaining them, developing a whole industry around this

if there's a problem with us getting the submarines the 500 million dollars we've already handed over is going to be the least of our concerns in money sunk into this project yeah i can tell you one thing for free john i don't think we're going to get that money back and that's not even the end of the money for the um for assisting the us to get their submarine building program on track.

That's currently 4.78 billion US we're on the hook for for trying to beef up the submarine industry capacity in the US.

So, as I say, a mere down payment.

All right.

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All right, that's it for the party room this week.

But David Spears will be back in your feeds on the Politics Now feed for Insiders on Background on Saturday.

Always a good listen, that one.

See you later, Fran.

See you, Mel.