TRANSCRIPT – Paul Murray Live, Sky News

Angie Bell MP

Shadow Minister for the Environment

Shadow Minister for Youth

Federal Member for Moncrieff

TRANSCRIPT

Paul Murray Live, Sky News

8 October 2025

Subjects: ISIS Brides, Triple zero and Coalition’s good faith negotiations with Minister Watt.

E&OE…………………………………………………………………………………………………

PAUL MURRAY:

Two people who are in Canberra just to help and will agree on everything. I have no doubt. Stephen Conroy, in the Labor corner. Angie Bell is the Shadow Environment Minister as well. Look at that. They’re in completely separate parts of the same studio. Oh no, I broke the fourth wall. I broke the fourth wall. All right, lovely to see you both. Okay.

ANGIE BELL:

Don’t put the colours together!

PAUL MURRAY:

I know, So Angie, before, I can’t wait to see how Stephen plays this, but you were in the House today, the past couple of days, where Prime Minister’s been really clear, right? Now, he tries to pretend that the fig leaf in and around these ISIS brides is, well, we didn’t send a plane to go and get them. But are you preparing? Are you getting ready? Well, no, we’re not. I stand by all of this. Senate estimates, turns around and says, well, yes, in fact, they applied for them. We sent them passports and we’ve known since June.

ANGIE BELL:

It’s laughable, Paul. They’ve been caught out. The Prime Minister has been absolutely caught out. I can’t wait to hear what Stephen has to say about this either. But what I will say to your viewers is I hope they saw that footage that James Patterson had on his socials where Penny Wong was speechless for the first time in her political career. She didn’t answer the question. She wouldn’t answer the question. She was staring at the ceiling in Senate estimates. But look, this is about transparency, and it’s about the Australian people’s right to know who is in the community. And, that their Prime Minister is absolutely hiding this, and why? I mean, Stephen, come on, try and defend this mate.

PAUL MURRAY:

Well, Stephen, the guest has done the hosting for me. Try and defend this mate.

STEPHEN CONROY:

Look, I think what’s important to understand is there’s a difference between re-issuing or giving new passports as a perfectly normal process that every Australian goes through and trying to pretend the government is somehow complicit in secretly smuggling them into the country.

There’s a very clear difference. Any Australian is entitled to apply for a passport, particularly if their children were born outside of Australia. You need to. So, I think this is a scandal about nothing. The Prime Minister has been very clear.

PAUL MURRAY:

Okay, let’s get to.

ANGIE BELL:

I think you’re splitting hairs. I think you’re splitting hairs there. Dai Le was on the money.

PAUL MURRAY:

Yeah, let me get to something here, which is the sidebar question, right, which is we have previously seen in the previous term many of these people coming back into the country, right? Thankfully there has not been the feared consequences, right? So the government thinks, all right, well-worn path, let’s go back, let’s do this again. But what I don’t understand, Stephen, and you would have done this both as somebody asking the questions and answering the questions in that Senate Estimates process, right? How hard is it just to say, look, calm down, James, I know what you’re trying to get at, here’s the deal. They’re Australian citizens, they applied in June, instead yesterday it was, oh, take it on notice, nothing to see here, nothing to see here. And then, you know, in between the news cycles, oh, funnily enough, everything they knew the day before they decided to admit to.

STEPHEN CONROY:

Well, look, in the previous term…

ANGIE BELL:

Speechless, just like Penny Wong.

STEPHEN CONROY:

I’m not speechless, I’m just being very precise, which is what Senate estimates is very much about.

PAUL MURRAY:

What we like.

STEPHEN CONROY:

We don’t give misinformation. So, in the last Parliament, a group did come back and the government were far more active and actually facilitated that process. In this instance, the government, you know, it’s not like any Minister would have known, I wouldn’t think, that there was a passport being issued. Now, providing the security checks were done, and I would have expected that they absolutely would have been done.

PAUL MURRAY:

True.

STEPHEN CONROY:

Then, there is nothing to see here.

PAUL MURRAY:

But, hang on, they knew they were going to get asked that question yesterday, and they decided to slow play the ball on the assumption that the only people talking about it would be Sky News Primetime, but oh, it accidentally slipped into the 6pm news, so they had to do something today.

STEPHEN CONROY:

I mean, Senate Estimates is a process where you do take things on notice, and then if you’re up the next day, you are expected to give an answer.

ANGIE BELL:

Oh, come on.

STEPHEN CONROY:

Taking something on notice, and I’ve done it for 20 years, taking something on both sides asking and receiving the questions. You want to make sure you give exactly the correct information.

ANGIE BELL:

Come on, these are wives of known terrorists.

STEPHEN CONROY:

Exactly precise information that you have to be able to give. So, 24 hours goes past, they come back to the table, and they’ve got the right answers. That is the appropriate way to deal with serious issues.

PAUL MURRAY:

Alright, well I would have thought that the many, days of briefings and rehearsals and the phalanx of people with the folders behind them might have been able to pump something out yesterday. Let’s talk about Optus. Again, now we have to declare here, Stephen has an association with them and not just as a customer. But, and the company itself, it’s working through its issues.

We’ve discussed it plenty of times. But there is a level of accountability here. And Angie, again, we get back to the Anika Wells of it all, right? I mean, every possible way of changing the subject or big-upping the company, this minister has done, right? Including the indignity about the questions about, well, hang on, have you actually contacted the four families that were worst affected by this? Oh, how dare you politicise when literally 24 hours before she, in my view, is right to, but still was, again, politicising the deaths of other families that she was willing to talk about here.

Look, reality is that Labor will think, okay, one more day and then we’re off to a whole bunch of stuff and nobody comes back to this. But you’re sitting there, you’re watching, you’re obviously the opposing side and you’re not going to be impressed, but she’s not doing as well as she thinks she’s doing.

ANGIE BELL:

Well, I think the first day Anika answered this question in the Parliament, her tone was completely off. She forgot to talk about the families and the grief of the families. Now, that is the most important thing that families have lost their loved ones, because of this outage, and on top of that we’ve seen the Minister misrepresent in the Parliament about the timelines of this. It’s an epic fail of Optus and it’s an epic fail of the Minister and her department. And she should be apologising, not being aggressive on the floor of the parliament about this. We’ve seen her true colours and she’s made a very big mistake here.

PAUL MURRAY:

Yeah, I mean again, Stephen, your previous experience informs your current role right, which is that is the former communications minister, right? And, so, I get it here, but what I find amazing is that it took forever for them to talk about, whether or not the person who they promised would be there in terms of the triple zero controller or fat controller or whatever the person, the position is to be called, right? Basically, oh, no, look, I know we agreed to it in April last year, but it never really turned up. Then multiple days in, oh, yeah, they’ve been there since March. Well, hang on, and here’s the urgent legislation that they promised to do last year. We’ve had the dog and pony show of the companies coming in, but, you know, I’ve read the Riot Act. We’ve had the multiple, you know, the multiple seasons of emotional response and political tactic here. But, and I get that the company is the one who bears the responsibility here. But again, your thoughts on how this is playing out in the parliament, as vexed as a question as that may be for you.

STEPHEN CONROY:

Yeah. Well, look, the question about how to handle tragedy like, you know, individuals, families, you know, passing, that will be a terrible dilemma, whether you made the phone call or not. I mean, I used to sit next to John Faulkner, who was Minister of Defence in a time of war, and I saw the toll it took out of him phoning the families, not within, you know, seconds, but the enormous toll that it had on John.

So, in Anika’s position, I would probably err on the cautious side myself. And that’s not trying to play a Labor-Liberal card. I would feel terribly uncomfortable about intruding on someone’s grief like that. So, I have some sympathy for Annika’s view on that. In terms of the timelines that everyone’s chasing and who knew what when, they’re all perfectly legitimate questions of being asked in a parliamentary process. But in terms of that core issue, I myself would, I would feel, I would absolutely share Annika’s, you know, should I, shouldn’t I, don’t want to intrude on the grief. I can really feel for her when she was having to think about that.

PAUL MURRAY:

Another part of this, though, and again, I get it, for some people we’re starting to get into yawn land, but one little point I want to make about this, right, because it matters, right? Again, we’re about the grains of sand, put them all together, that’s how you get the beach, obviously. But what I’m interested in as well is that today there was this whole thing about did Optus send an email to the wrong account, all the rest of it, right? This also exposes something culturally, that exists almost in every business in Australia, is that everyone loves sending an ass covering email, but we don’t pick up the phone, right?

Nobody picks up the phone to follow up, to drive it home. Instead, the culture is, it’s been done. And whether you’ve sent it to the right one or the wrong one, or whether somebody opens it or not, means the blame’s off your desk and it goes somewhere else. Can I just talk culturally, not about Optus, but about maybe people we’ve worked with, seen, worked with, talked and apparently there’s some generational anxiety about calling people. Well, guess what? When you’re in a certain job of responsibility, the ability to use your thumbs for something other than texting does matter, Angie.

ANGIE BELL:

Well, you would think that there would be a backup mechanism there. I’ve never been a communications Minister or Shadow Minister in the Communications portfolio, but as an Australian, I know that calling Triple Zero is the most important thing. It is between life and death. So, you would think that sending an email, at any, 24-7, time of the day or night, is probably not enough to get someone’s immediate attention and there should be a secondary trigger there, whether that is a phone call as you said Paul, or whether it’s some other way of communicating directly with the Minister’s Chief of Staff or with the Secretary of the Department, a mobile phone number, to alert, because this is something that really needs to be rectified. And Labor’s been sitting on this pathway, on this plan, to rectify this for nearly a year now and done nothing with it. And now they’re fast-tracking it. And then they opposed our amendment in the House.

PAUL MURRAY:

Yeah, of course, that was a very snappy carry on from the Minister as well today. Look, again, Stephen, I probably shouldn’t go further there because of the series of issues and is he or isn’t he speaking on behalf of and any critics. Let’s move on, okay? So, interestingly, today, the government’s talking about the climate trigger. Now, of course, this has major consequences, Angie, as the Shadow Environment Minister, walk us through here, where the Environment Minister, Murray Watt, is choosing not to go and what the consequences of that are.

ANGIE BELL:

Okay. So, obviously Labor wasn’t able to come to a position on the EPBC Act reforms in the last term. Minister Plibersek was not successful with her friendless legislation and nature positive laws. Now, the Prime Minister has asked Murray Watt to have another crack at it. And obviously, the Greens have a position when it comes to a climate trigger. We saw their leader on ABC on Sunday talking about where her red line is, which is a climate trigger, they want it in. The Samuel Review said that the climate trigger should not be in this legislation because it’s in other legislation, i.e. the Safeguard Mechanism.

And so, she has said that is a red line for her. Obviously, the Coalition welcomes the information that the Minister outlined in Senate estimates yesterday, that the climate trigger has been discounted. It’s out. And so, that puts the Minister in an interesting position when it comes to negotiating to come to a place on EPBC reform.

We would like to enter into good faith negotiations with the Minister. I’ve had a number of meetings with him already on EPBC reform because he will be introducing that in the last couple of weeks of Parliament this year. And so, we want to see lasting reform in the portfolio in this particular Act because we want to see certainty for industry and jobs, but we want to see the environment protected better as well. And so we’re hoping that the two parties of government can come together to a point where we can pass these laws and we’d like to be obviously involved in that as a Coalition. We want to move forward with the Graham Samuel review recommendations and that is one of those from the review that Sussan Ley put in place when she was the Environment Minister.

PAUL MURRAY:

Thank you, Angie. Thank you, Stephen. Continue just to be there every time in Canberra. I get a warm feeling Stephen, because I know you’re just there to help. Alright and just continue to do so. Alright, thank you guys. We’ll see you again very soon.

ENDS.