THE HON ANDREW HASTIE MP

SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SOVEREIGN CAPABILITY
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR CANNING

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEW WITH SALLY SARA, ABC RADIO NATIONAL BREAKFAST

Wednesday 4 March 2026

Topics: Iran conflict; Australians in the Middle East; Liberal Party election review.

E&OE……………………………………

SALLY SARA: Joining me now is Andrew Hastie in the studio. Andrew Hastie, welcome back to breakfast. Good to have you here.

ANDREW HASTIE: Good morning, Sally. Good to be with you.

SALLY SARA: Okay, we've got you there. Well, as thousands of Australian travellers remain stranded in the Middle East, the Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong has described the unfolding situation as a consular crisis. An estimated 115,000 Australians remain in the region. Meanwhile, Energy Minister Chris Bowen says there will be impacts on petrol prices, but there's no need for Australians to panic buy. Andrew Hastie is the Shadow Minister for Industry and Sovereign Capability. Andrew Hastie, firstly, you've served in the Middle East. We're now hearing that multiple sites across Gulf states are coming under attack. How do you reflect on what's happening?

ANDREW HASTIE: I think the war was always at risk of escalating, and what we're seeing is exactly that. Iran was going to retaliate and we've seen Bahrain, Dubai, Qatar, Jordan has had to intercept missiles. The risk is that this continues to expand and escalate so a lot of concern, particularly for those 115,000 Australians who are trapped there. I know people who have family members who've reached out as well. This is a very challenging time for people in the Middle East, especially the Iranian people, but also Australians. It affects everyone around the world.

SALLY SARA: Is the Australian government doing enough, in your view, to try and get Australians home at the moment?

ANDREW HASTIE: I haven't been briefed. I'm not a member of the intelligence committee or the soon to be established defence committee, so I can't comment on that. I'm sure they're doing whatever they can to repatriate people but as we saw on social media yesterday, there was footage from a commercial airline of a missile flying up through the clouds. It's a high-risk situation, and we'd hate to lose Australians in the air.

SALLY SARA: Yesterday, you said that you think the world is governed by power and you don't think the global rules-based order exists anymore. Government frontbencher Clare O'Neil called those comments unhelpful and overblown. Do you believe that the actions of the U.S. and Israel defy diplomatic orthodoxy?

ANDREW HASTIE: I think we're in a new stage of history. After World War Two, it was the United States who built the international order, the international institutions – that's why the United Nations is headquartered in New York – and I think that that construct is defunct, in a sense. We've got a different President who is mercantilist when it comes to his economics. I think he's an apex opportunist – we've seen him strike Nigeria, Venezuela, he's attempting regime change now in Iran. But we've also seen the rise of autocracies: China's flexing its muscles, we've seen Russia invade Ukraine illegally and immorally, and Iran, of course, was sponsoring Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in the Middle East. So this is a very different stage of history, and my concern foremost by making those comments, is to wake Australia up. We've only got 30-odd days’ worth of fuel. If our shipping lines are cut, then our whole economy could grind to a halt very quickly, never mind the fact that our industrial base is also shrinking, and that makes us vulnerable to world events. My concern is for our country and making sure that we're resilient and self-sufficient.

SALLY SARA: We've got Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, in the country. His speech at Davos earlier this year about the role and his view of the rise of the middle powers attracted a lot of attention. How do you see the role of middle powers such as Australia, not only in peacetime, but in situations like this?

ANDREW HASTIE: I think middle powers absolutely have a role, but middle powers are middle powers because they have a level of power. And my concern is that Australia's industrial power and military power is shrinking, and you can't just rely upon diplomatic power – they're just words at the end of the day – you've got to back them up. Mark Carney's speech, I think, was excellent. I read it, and it was very powerfully written. But it delivered a powerful message, and that is that the world that we've enjoyed for the last 80 years is now gone, and that was the backdrop to my comments yesterday.

SALLY SARA: So what does that mean for Australia's strategic and defence relationship with the United States? Do we need to spend more, do more to stand on our own two feet? Or look the other way, if the U.S. is doing things that we don't like?

ANDREW HASTIE: I think the message is we need to be able to stand on our two feet. I think that was the message out of Ukraine, I think that's the message from Israel's positioning since October 7, 2023. I think that critical to our future is a strong industrial base. We need to be able to make things – not everything – but we need to be able to make things essential to our national life and our survival as a country. And we need to look at our supply chains as well - sovereign supply chains. I mentioned fuel stocks. Our country runs on diesel. All those trucks that deliver Woolies and Coles groceries, pharmaceuticals across the country to the outer metro, to regional parts of the country, they would all stop running if we had a massive fuel shock, and that is still a possibility. I mean, there's going to be price shocks for fuel. In Mandurah in Western Australia, where I live, we're already seeing it above $2 at some bowsers. We're going to see shipping logistics price shocks and then risk premium price shocks as well. We're all going to get hit as Australians and again, it just brings me back to this central point: we need to think about how we can make ourselves more resilient as a country.

SALLY SARA: You're listening to Radio National Breakfast, I'm speaking with Andrew Hastie, Liberal Party frontbencher. Just briefly before we finish up, the Liberal Party's review into its federal election defeat last year was tabled by the Prime Minister in Parliament yesterday. Do you think that the Liberal Party is failing to learn the lessons of this election loss?

ANDREW HASTIE: I don't think so. I'll have a look at that review. It was a bit of a boss move from the Prime Minister tabling our own review.

SALLY SARA: What did you think of that?

ANDREW HASTIE: He likes theatre. He had a twinkle in his eye when he did that. Obviously, it was leaked and there was a bit of stagecraft from him. But Angus Taylor and Jane Hume, in their initial press conference upon taking the Leader and Deputy Leader roles, acknowledged that we got it wrong. But we're not going to live in the past, we're going to live in the future, and our mission is to restore Australian standard of living. We're going backwards under Labor and also to protect our way of life. That's why we've been pursuing the ISIS sympathiser case this week, because our way of life is being challenged.

SALLY SARA: And why that instead of cost of living the first couple of days?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, I said, restore our standard of living and protect our way of life - they're two pillars of our platform. Just because commentators, like Dennis Shanahan, don't like our question time strategy doesn't mean it's wrong. Australians care about those two things, and there's only a certain amount of time in a day so let's see what happens today. But certainly, we'll be talking about the economy a lot going forward.

SALLY SARA: Andrew Hastie, good to have you back in the studio and on the right mic eventually! Thank you.

ANDREW HASTIE: Thanks, Sally. Cheers.

[ENDS]