Samantha Armytage, Host: Minister, good morning and welcome. What can you tell us about the Australians currently unaccounted for?
Penny Wong, Foreign Minister: Good morning, good to be with you. We have some 39 Australians now who we know were in the region and are unaccounted for. So, obviously our thoughts are with their families and friends. Obviously this is a very distressing time. We are urgently working to ascertain their whereabouts, and we are deploying more Australian officials into the region, which we will build on over the coming days in order to try and ensure we can ascertain their whereabouts.
Armytage: How is DFAT going with communications? Obviously, Nepal is a developing country anyway and I imagine communications are pretty poor there at the moment. How difficult is DFAT finding it to locate Australians?
Foreign Minister: Well, obviously it's very difficult. I think your viewers would have seen the images which are very distressing of the scale of this disaster. We know many people have been killed, many people are missing and the scale of the disaster is quite horrific. I did speak to the Ambassador in Nepal yesterday afternoon to talk to him about what we needed to do and the support we wanted to provide. We've got about 20 people on the ground. We are providing more assistance in terms of a Rapid Response Team to help with the humanitarian response and also more consular officers. We'll build on that over the coming days. And the Government has also announced some $5 million of assistance through different partners towards the humanitarian response to this disaster.
Armytage: Okay, so we are starting to help with the humanitarian response. Would there be any thoughts to deploy our military to help the Nepalese people here?
Foreign Minister: Look, we tend to deploy what we call rapid response teams. These are people who have expertise in this sort of disaster response, logistics, planning, communication, humanitarian response. So, we've got an initial team of three who are being deployed over the next 48 hours. And I'll certainly speak to the Nepalese about what it is that they most seek from Australia. I think that they are grappling with the scale of a disaster, which is very, very challenging.
Armytage: It's just horrendous to see these pictures come in and so many Australians there at the moment, obviously 39 Australians missing, but on tours, on pilgrimages. How are we Australians helping the families here in Australia searching for their loved ones over there?
Foreign Minister: Well, the first thing we have to do is to try and get whatever information we can. And as I said yesterday, we are taking calls to our emergency centre, and we've taken calls from people who have information about Australians in the region and, also we can provide them with whatever information we have. So, the first priority is for us to do everything we can, first on the ground, to ascertain the whereabouts and the status of Australians, to confirm their welfare, and second, to ensure we provide whatever information we can to the next of kin. We're doing that. It's a very difficult situation however, as you've described in Nepal.
Armytage: Yeah, it's just shocking and awful to see what's happening to these poor Nepalese people. Just quickly, Penny Wong, while we have you. There's been a Bush Summit in Dubbo this week and the Prime Minister was there and he faced a very heated crowd over Labor's renewable rollout. Let's have a look.
[BUSH SUMMIT AUDIO GRAB]
Armytage: There's a lot of anger from country people out there, Minister, on energy and on immigration. Is the Prime Minister listening? Is your Government listening?
Foreign Minister: Well, the Prime Minister is listening. And the Prime Minister fronted up in front of a crowd that obviously wanted to express its views to him. To be honest with you, I didn't see it until you just played it for me there. I've been much more focused on what is happening in Nepal and responding there, trying to do what we can to find the Australians who are missing.
Armytage: Okay, Penny Wong, we'll leave it there. Thank you for your time this morning.