Speaker 1: From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM.
Speaker 1: While Peter Dutton's electorate raced for Cyclone Alfred, the Opposition leader,
Speaker 1: it flew to Sydney to attend a twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars ahead dinner at Justin Hamm's for close mansion. It
Speaker 1: was a choice that's been criticized by some in the
Speaker 1: media and the government, with claims it shows where Dutton's
Speaker 1: priorities and loyalties lie. But as Labour sets about to
Speaker 1: raise money in similar ways, it raises questions about who
Speaker 1: has the ear of our leaders and what Australia's wealthiest
Speaker 1: people are getting in return for their donations. Today, special
Speaker 1: correspondent for Saturday Paper, Jason kottsukus from Peter Dutton, Anthony
Speaker 1: Albanezi and the billionaires they caught.
Speaker 2: It's Friday, March twenty.
Speaker 1: Eight, So Jason, I was hoping we could go back
Speaker 1: to early March when then tropical Cyclone Alfred was bearing
Speaker 1: down on Brisbane and the Gold Coast, which is obviously
Speaker 1: Peter Dutton's electorate. But tell me what Peter Dutton was
Speaker 1: doing while that was happening.
Speaker 3: So on Tuesday of that week, this is March fourth,
Speaker 3: when most of the country believed that this was going
Speaker 3: to be a catastrophic weather event for southern Queensland and
Speaker 3: northern New South Wales.
Speaker 4: Here at Kedrin, the Emergency Management Center, there's already a
Speaker 4: very significant effort underway from emergency services and so.
Speaker 3: Painted Upton started the day in Brisbane getting a briefing
Speaker 3: on the cyclone.
Speaker 4: This is a very serious event and people need to
Speaker 4: heed the words and the advice of the Premier very
Speaker 4: carefully and act accordingly.
Speaker 3: But then in the afternoon he flew down to Sydney
Speaker 3: to attend a fundraiser at the harbourside mansion of Maryvale
Speaker 3: owner Justin Hempt. The event was attended by around twenty
Speaker 3: guests were each asked to stump up around twenty five
Speaker 3: thousand dollars to the Liberal Party's campaign, and that event
Speaker 3: raised about half a million dollars.
Speaker 4: It wasn't a party, it was a fundraising dinner and
Speaker 4: the Prime Minister really doing them around the country at
Speaker 4: the moment.
Speaker 3: At the time, Peter Dutton defended attending that event.
Speaker 4: I think people who were using that for political advantage
Speaker 4: in the time of a natural disaster. Frankly, that's a
Speaker 4: poor reflection on them than it is on me.
Speaker 3: But given the fear and anxiety in Queensland at this
Speaker 3: impending natural disaster, the fundraiser became a flashpoint for criticism,
Speaker 3: with some people even comparing it to Scott Morrison's famous
Speaker 3: Black Summer blunder when he left Australia and went to
Speaker 3: Hawaii on a family holiday while the country burned. And
Speaker 3: of course the Labor Party took full advantage of this,
Speaker 3: with Queensland Labor Senator Murraywash tweeting out that we now
Speaker 3: know how much Peter Dutton raised for the Liberals money
Speaker 3: bags while he's community was packing sandbags.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was really pounced upon, wasn't it.
Speaker 1: Because you have someone with a natural disaster in their backyard,
Speaker 1: leaving town, going to Sydney and going to a fundraiser
Speaker 1: with one of Australia's wealthiest businessmen, someone who quite notoriously
Speaker 1: also underpaid his workers for years. So since that moment,
Speaker 1: since it was discovered that that's what Dunnan was doing,
Speaker 1: what else have you found out about these types of fundraisers.
Speaker 3: Well, I think what's so interesting about it is that
Speaker 3: one of the hallmarks of Peter Dutton's leadership of the
Speaker 3: Liberal Party since he became leader has been how he
Speaker 3: has put distance between the Liberal Party and its traditional
Speaker 3: backers at the big end of town. And he's carefully
Speaker 3: positioned himself, I think as a defender of mainstream voters
Speaker 3: against out of touch boardrooms, and has particular railed against
Speaker 3: corporate Australia's support for some of these so called woke
Speaker 3: issues like the Voice and not stocking Australia Day merchandise.
Speaker 3: But at the same time Peter Dutton has actually cultivated
Speaker 3: close corporate links. He's managed to work those links to
Speaker 3: secure financial backing and strategic advice for the Liberal Party.
Speaker 3: And I think the person who he's got closest to
Speaker 3: in his time as opposition leader has been Gina Reinhart.
Speaker 5: Now, please enjoy your evening. I'm thrilled you've been having
Speaker 5: bonding for the last two days on our charter jets
Speaker 5: delighted will soon hear from another outstanding leader, the honorable
Speaker 5: Peter Dutton. Thank you everyone.
Speaker 3: She's Australia's richest woman. He went to her seventieth birthday
Speaker 3: party in Perth. He flew all the way across the
Speaker 3: country so he could attend that event just for one hour,
Speaker 3: as it turned out, and at the time he said,
Speaker 3: I considered Gena Reinhardt to be a dear friend, a
Speaker 3: great Australian and Australia's most successful business woman, and so
Speaker 3: I wanted to dig a bit more into these elite fundraisers.
Speaker 3: And I spoke to several people who were actually attended
Speaker 3: some of these events this year.
Speaker 2: Okay, so tell me about who you spoke to.
Speaker 3: One person I spoke to was Jeff Wilson, whose company
Speaker 3: is more than five point nine billion dollars under management.
Speaker 3: He's a very successful investor who's based in Sydney, and
Speaker 3: he was really open about a dinner that he went
Speaker 3: to on February twenty seven at the Towers Road mansion
Speaker 3: of billionaire Melbourne investor Alex Weislitz. The tickets were around
Speaker 3: twenty thousand dollars ahead and it was attended by who's
Speaker 3: who of prominent Australian investors. These are chief executives from
Speaker 3: medical tech companies, banking, biotech firms, the pharmacy of Godfrey's,
Speaker 3: the vacuum cleaner retailer, and the executive chairman of Australian
Speaker 3: Community Media, Anthony Catalano, who employs more than four hundred
Speaker 3: journalists around the country at over sixty media titles. So
Speaker 3: all of these rich men gathered together to have dinner
Speaker 3: with Peter Dutton, and by all accounts was a very
Speaker 3: successful dinner which stretched over more than three hours.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you have these banking, tech media leaders spending
Speaker 1: three hours at dinner with Dutton.
Speaker 2: So what did they talk that Jason.
Speaker 3: Well, according to Jeff Wilson, he told me that he
Speaker 3: saw the dinner as an important opportunity to present his
Speaker 3: view that the Albanese government has unfairly cracked down on
Speaker 3: franking credits, so a tax credit given to shareholders by
Speaker 3: the tax office for income tax paid by a company
Speaker 3: on its profits. He also said that Dutton took the
Speaker 3: opportunity to open the dinner with a fairly informal speech
Speaker 3: laying out his plans for the upcoming election campaign. Jeff
Speaker 3: Wilson told me that he was surprised actually by how
Speaker 3: open and engaged Peter Dutton was, and he didn't even
Speaker 3: mind Dutton's stance on some of these other issues that
Speaker 3: are seen as quite antagonistic to big business. These are
Speaker 3: things such as Dutton's plan to break up supermarket diopolies
Speaker 3: or insurance companies that are charging too much for insurance premiums.
Speaker 3: And the whole thing, I think goes to show that
Speaker 3: political parties, regardless of ideology, do depend on wealthy backers
Speaker 3: to fund their campaigns a lot more than people realize.
Speaker 3: The uglier side of politics is that everyone in Parliament
Speaker 3: or who aspires to be elected to federal Parliament has
Speaker 3: to raise money so that they can campaign and have
Speaker 3: their various campaign messages heard, just in the same way
Speaker 3: the Australian Greens or the Teals or other independent candidates.
Speaker 3: They have to do the same thing. And when it
Speaker 3: comes to the government, well, I think hath been easy.
Speaker 3: He's attending his fair share of fancy fundraisers too. It's
Speaker 3: not just Peter Dutton who's hosting these events.
Speaker 1: After the break, what do Anthony Alberzi's own fancy fundraisers
Speaker 1: look like?
Speaker 6: Hi, I'm Daniel James seven Am tells stories that need
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Speaker 6: our work, Jason.
Speaker 1: You've been speaking to people who've attended Peter Dutton's high
Speaker 1: end fundraisers and you've got the inside story on pow
Speaker 1: Dutton behaves, what's talked about in the room.
Speaker 2: But what about on the.
Speaker 1: Other side of politics, What do we know about what
Speaker 1: kinds of fancy fundraisers that Anthony Appeneasy is attending.
Speaker 3: Well, it's a great question, Ruby, because I think the
Speaker 3: Labor Party sees a real opportunity here to go after
Speaker 3: Peter Dutton. They haven't been able to attack him personally
Speaker 3: on his own success as a property investor in Queensland,
Speaker 3: but they are trying to attack his links to some
Speaker 3: of Australia's wealthiest people. And in a fundraising email send
Speaker 3: out last week by Labour's national President Wayne Swan, the
Speaker 3: title of that email was billionaires are coming for Labor
Speaker 3: and Wayne Swan, who's of course a former Federal treasurer,
Speaker 3: asked recipients of this email to join the dots and
Speaker 3: see who is running Dutton's campaign. Just to quote from
Speaker 3: that email directly, Wayne Swan said, this week we learned
Speaker 3: that Reinhardt is ramping up her funding and demands on
Speaker 3: Dutton with the election too close to call. This is
Speaker 3: a real risk of becoming reality. Swan said. The truth is,
Speaker 3: bosses like Reinhardt don't like that we've made it easier
Speaker 3: for their workers to own a fair day's pay. So
Speaker 3: I think while Labour's attempts to frame Dutton's billionaire tires
Speaker 3: as a liability, its own engagement with corporate donors suggests
Speaker 3: that the line between grassroots campaigning and elite fundraising is
Speaker 3: much blurrier than either side might care to admit.
Speaker 2: Tell me more about that than Jason.
Speaker 1: What is happening behind closed doors when it comes to
Speaker 1: seeingior labor figures and corporate donors well.
Speaker 3: On the same day that Peter Dutton attended the event
Speaker 3: at Justin Hem's mansion in Sydney, Anthony Abernezi also attended
Speaker 3: a fundraiser in Sydney on the morning of March the fourth.
Speaker 3: The way Anthony Albanesi has tried to explain it is
Speaker 3: that on the same day Peter Dutton flew out of Queensland.
Speaker 3: I was flying into Queensland.
Speaker 5: I've been getting on with doing this job.
Speaker 4: That's what I've been doing, giving support to people in
Speaker 4: a totally non political way.
Speaker 3: But on March the sixteenth, it has emerged that Anthony
Speaker 3: Albanesi attended a ten thousand dollars per head dinner at
Speaker 3: Sydney's Aria restaurant, which reportedly raised one hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 3: for the Labor Party campaign. And that event has sparked
Speaker 3: criticism that the government, just like they've been accusing the opposition,
Speaker 3: was prioritizing elite donors over struggling Australians.
Speaker 1: Right, So this is something that everybody is doing, despite
Speaker 1: the optics of it. I mean, politicians know that it
Speaker 1: looks bad to have fancy fundraisers with wealthy donors, but
Speaker 1: they do it anyway. So what does that tell you, Jason,
Speaker 1: about how important these events are as revenue raises for
Speaker 1: the major parties.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it tells us that they're very important.
Speaker 3: A big part of fundraising campaigns for political parties these
Speaker 3: days is focused on so called small donors. These are
Speaker 3: people who are asked to pay twenty dollars fifty dollars
Speaker 3: every time they get an email like that one we
Speaker 3: saw from Wayne Swan. Both parties are sending out lots
Speaker 3: of these kinds of emails, and so are fundraising vehicles
Speaker 3: for the independent candidates too, Climate two hundred, which is
Speaker 3: of course headed by Simon Holmes a Court. They're sending
Speaker 3: out these kinds of emails every day asking people to
Speaker 3: stump up small amounts of money. But while those small
Speaker 3: contributions are very important, I think until we have the
Speaker 3: sort of proper public funding model in place, this is
Speaker 3: the legislation that was passed in the last sitting week
Speaker 3: of Parliament in February. Until those laws are firmly in
Speaker 3: place in the lead up to the next federal election,
Speaker 3: dinners like the ones we're talking about are just as
Speaker 3: important as money raised from small contributions.
Speaker 1: And what should we take from them Jason, Because obviously
Speaker 1: there is no formal arrangement made between a donor and
Speaker 1: a politician at any of these events. So how does
Speaker 1: it work. What is being implicitly agreed to by a
Speaker 1: political party when they take these large donations from people
Speaker 1: who do have an explicit agenda.
Speaker 3: Well, Ultimately, as voters head to the polls, they will
Speaker 3: not only be choosing between two leaders, but also weighing
Speaker 3: up whose financial back is a news vision for the
Speaker 3: country aligns more closely with their own interests. I think
Speaker 3: while leaders who attend these kinds of dinners aren't making
Speaker 3: formal commitments to the people sitting around that table, they
Speaker 3: are getting a lot of very important feedback from those
Speaker 3: people as to what they see as being the most
Speaker 3: important issues affecting the country. If you've got the money
Speaker 3: and are able to pay to sit at a table
Speaker 3: with Peter Dutton or Anthony Albanezi, you are being listened to,
Speaker 3: your voices being heard, and that gives you perhaps an
Speaker 3: unfair advantage over ordinary voters who perhaps are as well
Speaker 3: resourced financially.
Speaker 1: Jason, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 3: Ruby, always a pleasure to talk with you.
Speaker 2: Thanks very much.
Speaker 7: Also in the news today, the Opposition has promised to
Speaker 7: cut the fuel excise by twenty five cents for a year,
Speaker 7: taking the rate from about fifty cents to twenty five
Speaker 7: cents per later, outlining the policy in his budget reply
Speaker 7: speech last night. Opposition leader Peter Dutton said his policy
Speaker 7: would take effect as soon as he won office, and
Speaker 7: a member of Elon Musk's so called Department of Government
Speaker 7: Efficiency team wants support to a cyber crun game, according
Speaker 7: to digital Records. Records reviewed by news outlet Reuters revealed
Speaker 7: that Edward Korstein, a nineteen year old DOGE staffer, previously
Speaker 7: ran a company that provided services to a ring of
Speaker 7: cyber criminals that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and
Speaker 7: cyberstalking an SBI agent. As part of his role at DOGE,
Speaker 7: Coorsteine has been given access to official networks to radically
Speaker 7: downsize the US government