Peter Dutton has ducked questions about the quality of the Liberal party’s vetting processes after concerns were raised about a 2024 charge against a Melbourne candidate in the latest saga surrounding the party’s candidates.
The opposition leader, who visited a metalworks factory in the Labor-held seat of Aston in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs on Thursday, would also not divulge details about how his promise to achieve $7bn in savings by cutting 41,000 public service jobs by 2030 could match Labor’s plans to dramatically lift bulk-billing rates.
Dutton was asked whether the party’s vetting process was up to scratch after the Nine newspapers reported that its candidate for the seat of Wills, Jeffrey Kidney, pleaded guilty to obtaining financial advice by deception in 2024 for a 2019 breach. The report said it was not clear what type of financial advantage Kidney obtained from WorkCover.
Kidney was ordered to pay fines and $10,640 in compensation to the Victorian WorkCover authority but no conviction was recorded against him.
Dutton said the party had selected “some amazing people” across the board, before claiming Anthony Albanese could be “convicted” for not being trustworthy.
“If you look at the standard of candidates we have selected across the board, I think we have selected some amazing people,” Dutton told reporters.
“I don’t think the prime minister is somebody who can be trusted, now to your point [Albanese] hasn’t been convicted by a court but maybe he will, because if he keeps going like this you can’t trust this prime minister with anything that he says.”
The report about Kidney’s conduct followed questions about other Liberal candidates running in some seats around the country.
Guardian Australia reported comments made by former Whitlam candidate, Ben Britton, last week, who expressed a string of controversial views on fringe podcasts before his preselection, including the claim that women should not serve in combat roles in the Australian Defence Force.
Britton was disendorsed days later and replaced by Nathaniel Smith, a former NSW MP from the party’s religious right faction who has claimed school students are being “brainwashed” by Marxist and woke ideologies.
Dutton told 2GB on Thursday morning that Britton was dumped for holding views Dutton said he did not agree with – “some of them not in the public domain, and … deeply concerning”.
The Liberal-National candidate in the must-win far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt, Jeremy Neal, apologised this week after social media posts airing controversial views about China, Covid-19 restrictions and “feminists” who helped “kick out” Donald Trump in 2020 resurfaced.
A dossier of now-deleted social media posts revealed by the Courier Mail showed Neal, a paramedic, railing against China, lockdown measures and Daniel Andrews’ Victorian government during the first two years of the pandemic.
With Dutton’s Thursday appearance, the Coalition continued to avoid revealing how it plans to downsize the federal bureaucracy by 41,000 jobs in five years – a key part of its plan to deliver savings to the budget.
Earlier this week, Dutton said the roles would be removed through “natural attrition” by 2030 and there would be no forced redundancies – despite analysis suggesting it would be a difficult target to reach without slashing frontline service roles.
On Thursday, Dutton reiterated that the costings would be revealed before the election but declined to outline how the savings would be achieved in the budget.
“Australia has, per capita, one of the highest numbers of public servants in the world,” he said.
“We need to make sure we have an efficient public service, which we will do and we will make sure that that is the case.”
