THE HON ANDREW HASTIE MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SOVEREIGN CAPABILITY
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR CANNING

TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEW WITH JAMES GLENDAY, ABC NEWS BREAKFAST

Wednesday 16 September 2026

Topics: One Nation; immigration; artificial intelligence; manufacturing.

E&OE……………………………………

JAMES GLENDAY: Andrew, welcome back to News Breakfast.

ANDREW HASTIE: Good to be with you, James. Thank you.

JAMES GLENDAY: It's been a little bit since we've had you on, so I'm going to go over some ground that I know you've spoken about elsewhere. We were in Western Australia recently, and normally when we speak to people on the road, politicians and politics doesn't come up unless we prompt them. But in WA, the fight between the Liberal Party and One Nation was a topic of conversation. You've had to upgrade your personal security. What's the tone of the debate like in your electorate at the moment?

ANDREW HASTIE: I haven't been home for about 10 days, but I know that I love my community. They've always been very respectful and good to me, and it's a pleasure representing them here in Canberra. But certainly, the national tone I think has taken a real dip of late and become quite personal. United States style MAGA politics have been run by One Nation, and I've decided to push back. We want to win the next election as the Coalition. It's a three-corner contest and the Liberal Party should be striving to be number one on the ballot, and that's what I've been arguing for.

JAMES GLENDAY: I mean, you know where I'm going with this. Pauline Hanson was offering some apologies of sorts yesterday. Have you had any conversations with her directly about why One Nation has decided to target you so directly? Of course, there was this cartoon where you were labelled a traitor, but it's broader than that.

ANDREW HASTIE: It is broader than that. I put the gauntlet down last week to Pauline Hanson. I said, either own the words – traitor – yourself and say them publicly or take the cartoon down. And as a weak leader, she did neither. In fact, she tried to minimise it as merely satire. I think that just shows she's not fit to be prime minister of our country. That's why I've gone head-to-head with her, and she went to water. James Ashby has her in witness protection this week. She can't even explain her immigration policy, and she can't even come out and address what I've asked of her.

JAMES GLENDAY: We did ask her on the show. She declined again as she hasn't been on our show since March. The building where you're at this morning is a small one. People run into each other all the time. Have you had a conversation with Pauline Hanson?

ANDREW HASTIE: No, I haven't. I haven't seen her.

JAMES GLENDAY: We've seen some members of your party tiptoe around One Nation. I think we've even seen some members of your party try to imitate parts of what they do and not criticise them. Is that an approach that you think is going to work if you're going to win the next election?

ANDREW HASTIE: I think we are in a three-pointer contest. I think politics has fundamentally changed. There's no such thing anymore as a safe seat – which was either red or blue – I think all seats are in play. If the Coalition is going to win the next election, we've got to win 34 seats, so we need to be striving to win every single seat that we can, every single vote that we can. I think the two big issues that the forgotten people of Australia are really concerned about are high inflation and high immigration. We've got to get the cost of living down for regular Australians. They're getting hit with their power bills, their groceries, and this has largely been caused by Labor's reckless spending. And then there's high immigration – Labor has lost control of our borders. We've grown over the last four years, in terms of population, by 1.9 million people – 1.5 million of those have been through temporary visas. That's the size of the city of Adelaide, which is why we have a housing shortage, which is why our essential services and our infrastructure are under incredible strain. So, we're working on those two issues: cost of living, immigration. We're going to take our own path. We're not going to be led by Pauline Hanson; it's not a race on social media. But we're still waiting for the government. They're yet to say anything in terms of policy about immigration, and I think that shows that the government's flat-footed at the moment.

JAMES GLENDAY: I know that's what you wanted to come on our program to say. I just wanted to take you back to the specific issue of One Nation. Would you be comfortable, given what's happened, if you need to after an election, to work with them to form some kind of government?

ANDREW HASTIE: These are hypothetical questions, and I think the thing we need to focus on – when our primary vote is still very low compared to what it's been in historic terms – is we've just got to focus on being number one in terms of primary vote. So, whatever happens after the election, I just don't know. But right now, we're fighting for our survival, and that's what we should be focused on.

JAMES GLENDAY: It is a long way away. I will concede that. Just to your portfolio, we're seeing state and federal governments intervening to secure heavy manufacturing, like steel making, like aluminium production. Given the sums of taxpayer money involved here and the importance of some of these facilities to national security, should governments be taking an equity stake or even offering low-interest loans so that there is at least some sort of return on investment for taxpayers?

ANDREW HASTIE: Sure, and it's a really good question because we are pouring a lot of taxpayer money into heavy industry to keep it alive in this country. We need sovereign capability. We need to be able to make structural steel. We need to be able to refine alumina. We need to be able to make glass and aluminium and all these other sorts of things that are critical to our construction sector. The problem is, at the moment, we're bailing them out because the Labor government has created conditions where heavy industry is no longer cost competitive. They've got all sorts of carbon taxes that they're having to deal with, and they just can't compete with other countries. The net impact of that is, we send those businesses offshore and the jobs offshore as well, and we'll just end up being an IKEA nation – a flat pack nation – if we can't build things ourselves. So, I'm open to those sorts of things but at the moment, we just need to get the cost of energy down.

JAMES GLENDAY: So, we should be owning steel mills? We should be owning aluminium production plants?

ANDREW HASTIE: Absolutely. And the lesson coming out of Ukraine is, if you go to war, you need to be able to make things yourself, and you need to be able to stand on your own two feet for a period of time before your allies come and help you. So, we need to have a level of sovereign capability, and sometimes the government has to step in and say, yes, this is what we need as the Australian people, and we're going to invest in it to make sure it stays.

JAMES GLENDAY: This morning there were again warnings about the pace of artificial intelligence development. What sort of contingency should we be putting in place as a country do you think, in case some of these systems do go rogue, in case some of these worst-case scenarios are realised?

ANDREW HASTIE: At the moment, we're tethered to the United States through submarine cables. And so, whatever happens in the United States impacts Australia, as we found out back in June, when the U.S. government issued an export control order and basically cut off a new model from Anthropic, which was Mythos or Fable Five. It was cut here in Australia. So, I think what we need to do is have a sovereign capability here – something that's built on our Red Earth, the full tech stack with the chips, Australian talent, the data – that is governed by Australian law. That means that in the event of a crisis, we'll have some resilience and redundancy here. At the moment, we don't have that, so the task is to build a sovereign capability.

JAMES GLENDAY: Just before I let you go, on sovereign capability, an increasing number of cars in Australia are now coming from China, especially EVs and hybrids. Would you like to see a return to some sort of car manufacturing in Australia? I know you've floated this prospect before.

ANDREW HASTIE: I would love to see cars being made in Australia. In fact, I'd love to see high-end advanced manufacturing recover in this country, and AI and robotics is one way that we can do it. I'm agnostic about what we produce here, but let's just say that if the market conditions were such that we could produce electric vehicles here, I'd be all for it.

JAMES GLENDAY: Andrew Hastie, we appreciate you joining us.

ANDREW HASTIE: Thank you, James.

[ENDS]