‍DR ANNE WEBSTER MP

SHADOW MINISTER FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND TERRITORIES
SHADOW MINISTER FOR REGIONAL COMMUNICATIONS

FEDERAL MEMBER FOR MALLEE

TOPICS:

Prime Minister’s office, Newspoll, Coalition policies, climate risk assessment, energy affordability.

Kenny  

And let's catch up with Anne Webster, who's the Shadow Minister for Regional Development. She joins us live from Mildura in north western Victoria. Good to speak to you. Anne, first up, do you think that Anthony Albanese should have taken a stand and kept his office open, rather than caving into these radicals?

Webster  

Well, I absolutely think he is a weak Prime Minister, and the fact is that he has left his staff to either work at home or close the office and pretend it will all go away when it clearly won't. I think this is direct result of his stand after October 7, I believe he should have done more, and to simply put your security team there, I don't think that would have been a permanent arrangement. It wouldn't have worked, because he's in and out, you know, constantly, so his staff would have been left there in an arrangement that just was not going to work for their safety. He should have done more,

Kenny

and no doubt he should have done more. Now, when it comes to this polling – it’s dire polling for the Coalition, a long way from the election, of course, but record low polling. Do you believe it can get any worse?

Webster  

Well, I certainly hope not, obviously being on the shadow front bench, I am, you know, as concerned as every Coalition voter is.  We want to see our votes pick up, and I believe strong, bold, courageous policy is absolutely what we need to be putting forward. It's early in the term. I understand that. I know in The Nationals party room, we are working hard. I'm certainly developing policies. I know my colleagues are as well. We've recently had a Nationals policy day where all MPs and senators got together and worked on policies to develop over this period of time. I think the error that we made in the last parliament was that we did not bring policies to the public early enough to market them, to bounce them off the public and understand what the public was saying.

Kenny  

Now you've got the option. Now there's no policies. We're going to run out of time. I think it's a mistake to go from policies too late to scrapping all of them. Really, the existing policy should have stayed, except for a couple you might want to review. Well, we'll come back to that discussion. But before we run out of time, I do want to get your thoughts on Chris Bowen and this climate risk assessment report today. Are you convinced by the by the stories of fear and doom here?

Webster

No. And my favourite topic, Chris, thank you for the opportunity to speak about, Chris Bowen. I think it's actually outrageous that he would seek to manipulate the population with what is actually old research. This has been known, and let's go back to the 1980s when the Maldives and Kiribati were said to be going to be drowning by now, and that populations would need to be moved. It hasn't happened. The islands have actually grown. The population has grown. So, I think we need to take all these warnings and cautions from Chris Bowen with a grain of salt. The fact is that unless we have affordable energy, our country, our country will never get back into manufacturing in the way that we should. We are a strong country. We should be using our natural resources, and we should be taking this fight to Chris Bowen every day.

Kenny

Yeah, well said Anne, thanks for joining us. Anne Webster, there, live from Mildura in Victoria's Mallee.

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