TRANSCRIPT - TODAY SHOW INTERVIEW - FRIDAY 27 JUNE 2025

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TV INTERVIEW
TODAY SHOW WITH KARL STEFANOVIC AND SARAH ABO
FRIDAY, 27 JUNE 2025

SUBJECTS: DEFENCE SPENDING, TERRORGRAM CRACKDOWN, CFMEU SPENDING FINDINGS

SARAH ABO: Welcome back. Well, Australia's national security is in focus this morning with the government listing an online group as a terrorist organisation.

KARL STEFANOVIC: This comes as the nation's defence spending is also back in the spotlight, with Trump putting pressure on world leaders to increase their budgets. For more, we're joined by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke in Sydney.

ABO: Hey, Tony.

STEFANOVIC: A bit on. Tony, thanks for your time. Donald Trump got NATO states to increase defence spending to 5 per cent yesterday. The PM's been under pressure to do the same. Will he?

TONY BURKE: Look, what we're making sure of is that we've got the capability we need to be able to keep Australians safe. Whether that's defence assets or whether that's my job with Home Affairs. You don't start with the dollars, you start with what's required to make sure that you can keep people safe and that's what we're doing.

STEFANOVIC: But you have to start with dollars when Trump's involved, Tony.

BURKE: We've already committed more than $10 billion than what used to be spent. And over the decade, that goes up to around 50 billion extra. So, there's a lot more money that we're spending, but we're doing it on the basis of working out what's the capability, what do we need to keep Australians safe and then making the decision.

ABO: I love your cheery disposition, Tony, but Karl's right, when it comes to Trump, we're talking dollars and cents here. I mean, we saw Spain push back on the increase to their defence spending and what followed was Trump threatening to increase tariffs. I mean, it's quite the gamble.

BURKE: Look, our starting point on all of this is making sure we keep Australians safe and secure. Like that's what the job's about. And everything will always go into other context, but it keeps coming back to that. And so you make your defence decisions, you make your Home Affairs decisions. Looking at what do we need to keep Australian safe, that'll result in capabilities that you need and they do cost money.

STEFANOVIC: So, you will not take an increase in defence spending to Donald Trump when you meet him, eventually.

BURKE: The conversations will be about capability. That's what they'll be about. Obviously, capability does involve additional - it involves additional funds, but it's capability, that's the point.

STEFANOVIC: So, there will be an increase? I'm confused.

BURKE: There already is. There already is.

ABO: Yeah, but what is it? 2.37 in 2035? Not 5 per cent.

BURKE: As I say, across the immediate budget numbers, there's an additional $10 billion that's already there and you've then got $50 billion across the decade. We constantly are making these assessments and obviously the world at the moment.. you look at the global affairs reports at the moment that you're running each morning, the world's in a really unstable space, so we constantly need to be reviewing.

STEFANOVIC: And on that, there is a considerable anxiety around terror threats. And this morning you're concerned about an online group. What exactly is Terrorgram?

BURKE: When people used to think about about terrorist organisations, you think about small groups of people that had been meeting in dark places and gradually recruiting people. This is like, if you imagine in the most general terms, a giant, dark, evil WhatsApp group, effectively like some sort of huge chat group on this platform called Telegram, where they've got a few different channels and effectively the people there, a lot of them don't know each other, will never meet each other, but are actively online recruiting people, telling people how to cause harm and involved in what's often, for shorthand, referred to as white supremacism or far right radicalism. This is a group that has already been a direct threat to Australians. And what we're doing by listing the organisation is saying, if you're a member of it, it's a criminal offence. If you're recruiting people to it, 25 years jail. If you're out there trying to assist it in any way, 25 years jail. This is the sort of group - their whole concept in Australia, in other countries, is to try to make people feel unwelcome in their own country. And what we're saying with this listing is, well, the people that they're trying to target, they're welcome, but this organisation isn't. It's got no place at all.

ABO: All right, and Tony, just very quickly before we let you go, there's a front page report in the Australian this morning about the CFMEU report revealing a $310 million war chest. That's an awful lot of money.

BURKE: And thank heavens we went down the pathway of having an administrator rather than doing the deregistration. One of the things that got lost in the mix at the time was when the opposition was saying, oh, why don't you deregister? If we'd done that, the people who were in control at the time would still be in control of all of those assets, every dollar. By putting an administrator in, what we've made sure of is there's now someone independent, who's making sure that the union can be cleaned up, because it's not the fault of ordinary members in the construction industry. So, to make sure that the union can be cleaned up and to make sure that those assets don't get used for the wrong purpose.

STEFANOVIC: Good to talk to you, Tony. Appreciate it.

ENDS