Subjects: Economic management; ABC funding; dental care; foot and mouth disease; small business; interest rates; credit card fees;
E&OE................................
JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister good morning.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good morning, very nice to be with you.
JOURNALIST:
If you'd like to put a question to the Prime Minister, 4044 2000, the number as usual. Mr Howard you've admitted to your mistakes. You've admitted the Ryan by-election being very close. You've acknowledged voter anger towards the Coalition. How are you going to get over the line come November?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well there are a number of ways that that can be achieved. The first it to remind people of what happened when Labor was last in government. I'll remind people that interest rates for homebuyers went to 17% or 18%. The farmers listening to this programme will remember the bill rates that were 22% and 23%. To remind people of the $85 billion of government debt that we inherited when we came to power. To remind people of the 11.2% unemployment rate that was there when Mr Beazley himself was the Employment Minister in the former Labor government. To remind people of what we have achieved over the last five years - now we've got interest rates to very low levels, we've got very low inflation, we've paid back $50 billion of government debt despite the strenuous opposition of Mr Beazley. I mean he not only left us with $85 billion but he tried to stop us paying it back. And I think that only compounds the folly of what he did when he was in government. To remind people that this Government has improved the industrial relations system and that has been the foundation of Australian workers actually getting higher pay under this government than they did under a Labor government. The Labor government actually boasted of cutting workers' wages, we have in fact increased them in a sustainable way because productivity is much higher in Australian now partly as a result of our industrial relations' reforms. To remind people of how we saved private health insurance, so much so that the Labor Party has now said it will keep the policy change it previously ridiculed although I don't really trust them if they were to win government to fulfill that commitment. So there are different ways in which through advocacy this government can see the benefits of the Coalition Government and by contrast the disadvantages of Labor are pointed out to the Australian public.
I think there's another thing that we'll do too. We'll expose the way in which the Labor Party at the moment is deliberately talking down the Australian economy. They're bad-mouthing our economic position at the moment. They ought to listen to the advice of Bob Carr, the Labor Premier of New South Wales who again yesterday said that he wasn't going to be part of talking down the Australian economy. He said the Australian economy was fundamentally sound. He said that all political leaders, and he meant clearly on both sides, had an obligation to get out there and talk up the Australian economy and talk about its strengths and that was a clear message to Mr Beazley and Mr Crean - stop bad-mouthing the Australian economy boys and join me, join the Prime Minister in talking up the benefits and the merits of the Australian economy.
JOURNALIST:
But fresh in people's mind is the performance of both yourself and your government - 29.5%, 7 out of 10 people in Australia don't appreciate what you say you've been doing over the past three to five years.
PRIME MINISTER:
That is an opinion poll taken at a particular point of time. Opinion polls don't elect governments, elections do. You asked me what was I going to do and what was my colleague and friend Warren Entsch, the Member for Leichardt and Leichardt's never had a better member, what are we going to do between now and the election. Now that was the question you asked me. And opinion polls come and go, I read them, I don't like them when they're low, I like them when they're high, but don't we all? But they don't elect governments and you know while you're talking about opinion polls, the opinion polls in Ryan predicted a much worse outcome for us than actually obtained, not that I was happy with the outcome because it looks on balance as though it's going to be .
JOURNALIST:
A loss, is it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, I think so, that's what it looks like but I mean I don't know until the figures are finished.
JOURNALIST:
One thing that has caused voter angst in regional Australia particularly is continued government cuts to ABC funding. Now if you're re-elected ..
PRIME MINISTER:
When you say continued cuts - we made a cut in 1996, we made one cut in 1996. I mean I acknowledge that, I accept that but we also cut a lot of other things because the deficit that Mr, the previous year was about $10 billion or $11 billion and we had a Budget problem.
JOURNALIST:
Well perhaps I should have said, our funding doesn't seem to be keeping up with inflation.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well no, I mean please, I don't mind being criticised for cutting once which we did. We cut in 1996 and you say continued cuts, there haven't been continued cuts. I mean I know the ABC's a very valuable institution in this country but I'm not going to be criticised for things I, we haven't done. I mean we did effect a cut on the ABC in 1996, about $55 million, but we cut a lot of other things and everybody had to make a contribution including the ABC to getting the Budget back into the black. I mean if Mr Beazley hadn't left me with an $85 billion national debt and a $10 billion annual deficit I wouldn't have had to cut the ABC. I mean he runs around criticising our cuts but has he promised to put more money into the ABC? He hasn't.
JOURNALIST:
But it is an essential service in regional Australia.
PRIME MINISTER:
Look I am not denying that.
JOURNALIST:
And some people don't receive the ABC.
PRIME MINISTER:
I am not denying that, but it is not the only thing that should be..the only area of expenditure that was quarantined from cuts when we came to power was defence. Now I make no apology for that because that is the first responsibility of government. Everything else in different ways had to carry some of the burden and we also imposed some impost on higher income earners so they could make a contribution as well, we got criticised for that. So I didn't like cutting the ABC in 1996, but it was forced on us by the state of the Budget we inherited and I was fascinated the other day when Mr Beazley's spokesman on communications, Stephen Smith at the ABC rally in Toowong in the middle of the Ryan electorate, he was asked 'would you give more money to the ABC' and he said 'no'. He said 'I can't give any commitments at all'. The reality is that they are perfectly happy to attack every single area of government activity but when they're asked if they've got a policy alternative they don't have one. I mean the same thing with the so-called pension discount. I mean they were asked would a future Labor government increase the pension by a further 2% and they said no.
JOURNALIST:
Would you give favourable consideration to increasing the ABC funding in the next Budget?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look the ABC's position will be considered along with everybody else's position. I am not making any promises but I reject the claim repeatedly made, I am sorry to say, that we have continued to cut ABC funding, that's not right and the claim should not be made.
JOURNALIST:
The pace of economic change under your Government has left many people in rural Australia hurting but then there's no end in sight to the misery and in many instances few alternatives for them on the horizon. Here in the Far North it's getting tougher and tougher, not just for dairy farmers, tabacco growers, the list goes on. Why should they vote for your Government?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well once, I will come to the question of whether they should vote for me in a moment. Once again that statement does not present the full picture. If you're a beef exporter, you're doing very well at the present time. If you are, I mean not necessarily in this area, but if you go around rural Australia, fine wool is doing very well, cotton is doing very well, many people in the dairy industry are doing extremely well - not in Queensland and northern New South Wales, but the dairy farmers of Tasmania and Victoria are doing extremely well. Dairy deregulation was not forced on the industry by the federal government, it was put to us and requested of us by the industry itself and facilitated by the legislation of state governments. So can I say to your rural listeners, it is not all gloom and doom. Some of it is, some of it's not. How are we going to persuade them to support us? Well one thing I will keep reminding them of is that when you have a Labor government you have very high interest rates. When you have a Labor government you have more union power. When you last had a Labor government you didn't have the concessional tax arrangements regarding diesel fuel that were brought in as part of the taxation package. This Government had a $500 million rural health programme in the last Budget. This Government has put $1.6 billion into extra road funding and an enormous amount of that is coming into Far North Queensland. Mr Beazley has not given a promise to keep that road funding. So yes, there are a lot of difficulties in rural Australia, I acknowledge that and I am sympathetic to the impact of change, but some changes are unavoidable, some changes have been beneficial and not every area of rural Australia is in a state of despair.
JOURNALIST:
Mr Howard could we go to the people who really matter .
PRIME MINISTER:
Sure.
JOURNALIST:
. and that's the people of Australia. Our first caller, Neil from Atherton, he has a question in regards dental care. Neil?
CALLER:
Good morning Mr Howard.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes.
CALLER:
Welcome to the Far North.
PRIME MINISTER:
Pleasure Neil.
CALLER:
I have been waiting three years for a check-up at the Atherton Dental Clinic and recently I had severe pain from a tooth and went to the Dental Clinic, they took x-rays and told me I had a dying nerve. They said it was as a result of the fact that I hadn't had a check-up for so long. They said I would need a root canal filling which they can't do so to save the tooth I would have to go to a private dentist which I have. I've had the first part of the treatment which cost me $370 and the rest of the treatment's going to cost about another $1,200. Now I don't have another $1,200. I am living on a disability pension, so what, I've got to save up the money. I can wait fortunately a period of a month to try and save up the money, but I would like to ask if you could please consider putting some money into the public dental system please.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well historically Neil public dental care has been the responsibility of state governments and I think that is the responsibility of Mr Beattie to address and of all of the state governments in Australia, Queensland will benefit first from the introduction of the GST. One of the reasons we brought in a GST was to dedicate all of the revenue from it to state governments so they'd have more money to pay for basic services like health and education. And it is historically the case that these things have been the responsibility of state governments. Now I am not trying to avoid responsibility for things that are the federal government's responsibility, I mean I don't, I wouldn't ask the state governments to contribute to the upkeep of the Army, that's clearly a national responsibility. But there's too much of this buck-passing to the federal government by state governments - they want the money, the independence and the freedom and the authority but when it actually comes to additional services they say 'well we don't have the money'. Well they do have the money as a result of the GST and I can assure you that despite what he may say publicly and despite what he may say in the context of Labor's federal campaign, is that Mr Beattie was an enthusiastic signatory to the Commonwealth/State agreement on GST revenue. He couldn't get there quickly enough to sign the agreement. I am very sympathetic to your situation but I do think providing more resources for that kind of thing is really a responsibility of the state government.
JOURNALIST:
It is a health issue of course Mr Howard. Why can't it be covered better under Medicare?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well there is a limit to how many things that you can do under Medicare without increasing the levy. I mean the Medicare levy doesn't fund the cost of Medicare and what we have sought to do is to take the load off the public system by getting people back into private health insurance and we have been very successful. We've actually saved the private hospital system in Australia as a result of the introduction of our rebate and it is beginning to take some of the strain off the public hospital system. We have increased the money we've given to the states under the Medicare agreement for public hospitals and they have the resources to look after things like that. And they can't have it both ways, they can't say well we want extra money but whenever there's a pressure point to do something more, aw gee the Federal Government should do it. I mean those days really are over. If we hadn't have brought in the GST, if we hadn't provided the wherewithal for increasing revenue to go to the states it would be a different matter. But you can't get more revenue and then turn around and ask the Commonwealth to assume more responsibility.
MORISH:
Well can we go to another listener question? Suzanne from Cairns has a question about pensions.
CALLER:
Good morning Mr Howard. My question is overseas pensions, aged pensions, are called income and we are taxed on them where aged pensions should be tax free. Second, hospital orthotic shoes we are now told, will cost us between $750-$800 a pair. This is impossible for pensioners.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I don't know the background of the charges for the shoes of which you speak..
CALLER:
They're disability shoes.
PRIME MINISTER:
I understand that but I don't know the background to the increase and I don't know who made that decision. I don't think it would have been made by the Federal Government so I can try and find out for you but I honestly don't know off hand what it was.
CALLER:
Cairns Hospital they told us.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I understand that but we don't, I'm not trying to be clever or anything but we don't run the Cairns Hospital.
CALLER:
No.
PRIME MINISTER:
And that is something you'd really have to take up with your state member, take up with the Beattie Government, because the Cairns Hospital is run, presumably by the Queensland health department like most public hospitals are around Australia. As far as taxing the pension is concerned well we have a system in this country where if you are entirely dependant on the pension, and indeed if pensioners have a little bit of money above it, you don't pay any tax at all.
CALLER:
Yes but if you come from overseas it's not classed as pensions, it's classed as income.
PRIME MINISTER:
But you still have, what's your tax free, what is your total income? You've got pensions from overseas and you've got some local pensions, is that right?
CALLER:
That's correct.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well the rule I stated still applies and that is that up to a certain amount of money which makes allowance for the equivalent of the Australian pension, plus another slice of income, you are free of tax.
CALLER:
Right.
PRIME MINISTER:
So your income must be above that tax free area and that is why it has been taxed.
MORISH:
We'll have to move on Suzanne. Mr Howard you've indicated a willingness to make extra resources available to keep Australia free of foot and mouth disease. Now Warren Truss is proposing an increase.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well he's not actually proposing, he merely said that that was one of the options. Now it's an option that's a fair way down on my list I should say. We haven't yet assessed what the additional costs are. But I want to make it perfectly clear that whatever additional resources are needed, whatever additional resources are need for quarantine surveillance in relation to foot and mouth they will be made available to quarantine services. One of the possible options if we needed to do, although it really is something of a last option, a last resort, would be something in the area that Warren talked about. But we haven't made any decisions. The important thing for people to know is that the extra resources will be available without cavil.
MORISH:
Let's go up to Mareeba and it is John from the rural action group, John good morning. John good morning? We seem to have lost him, we'll go to Peter. Now Peter is also from Atherton Mr Howard and he's part of the retail sector. Hello Peter.
CALLER:
Oh hello Pat, how are you?
MORISH:
Good. Mr Howard's waiting for your question.
CALLER:
Good morning Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good morning Peter.
CALLER:
You initiated a couple of inquiries just after you were elected on a platform of helping small business. One of them was a standing committee on fair trade and the other was the inquiry into the retail sector. Both of these inquiries basically, to put it in a nutshell, said that what was wrong was sections of the Trade Practices Act that were not helping small business in particular as well as they should. And I think the sections were section 46, 51a and 51ac. Are you anticipating implementing the findings out of the inquiry and are you anticipating bringing about any change to the Trade Practices Act to help the lot of small family business throughout Australia?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well we did make a number of changes coming from those inquires. We did introduce after discussion with small business representatives and others a code of conduct regulating the relations between larger corporations and small businesses. And we, from recollection made a number of other changes that flowed out of the recommendations of that report. I don't recall all of the exact details. The question of how you change the Trade Practices Act, on the one hand one of the problems facing Australia is that on the world stage our companies aren't big enough to survive unless they merge and amalgamate with others. And if your anti-merger provisions are too severe what will happen is that Australian companies, because they can't merge, will disappear. On the other hand you have this constant struggle between small and large businesses, and I think it is problem and it does arise in the retail sector and we are open minded about finding different ways of balancing things more in favour of small business. So you ask me the question, we don't have any specific proposals at present but we are open minded about possible changes in the future. But you've got to be very careful in this area that while you might be attending to concerns of small business at a local level, on the larger national scene you might be making it impossible for Australian companies to combine and keep out the foreigners.
MORISH:
We'll have to leave it there Peter and move on. The special guest, or my special guest is the Prime Minister John Howard. We do ask that you keep your questions brief so we can get through as many as possible. Now John is back online, Mr Howard he's from Mareeba and he's the local president of the rural action group. John.
CALLER:
Good morning. Good morning Prime Minister, how are you?
PRIME MINISTER:
I'm very well John.
CALLER:
Mr Prime Minister you agreed four months that you were going to meet with the rural action Mareeba. My name's John Gambino, I'm the president of rural action Mareeba. We have a meeting with Mr John Anderson about 12 months ago about the problem that we face on the rural and regional Australia. Now we gave Mr John Anderson five resolutions to look at them and come back to us. Now he hasn't done anything and we're never heard about, he left Mareeba, and we treated this man with respect when he was here, we had a public arena about 1200 people and he hasn't had the decency to ring us back and tell us what he's doing about the resolution. Now the rural regional Australia I believe.
PRIME MINISTER:
What's your five points?
CALLER:
The five points are ..first of all the Commonwealth Bank.
MORISH:
Keep the question short because we're about to run out of time.
CALLER:
Yeah but Prime Minister, the Commonwealth Bank, cheap interest so we can survive.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well we have very cheap interest rates, much cheaper than Mr Beazley will give you. If you're worried about low interest rates stay a long way away from Mr Beazley.
CALLER:
We're not going to go with anybody at the end of the day.
PRIME MINISTER:
You mentioned interest rates, and rightly so because there's nothing more important to rural people than low interest rates. And interest rates in Australia now are lower than they have been for 30 years. And you can't get them a great deal lower than what they are now. But you were paying 23-24% bill rates in the late 1980's, and you're now paying half that amount. Now I mean they could go down more, that's a matter for the Reserve Bank. But gee you can't get interest rates much lower than they are now, but if you muck around with these high debt policies of the alternative you'll get high interest rates again, I warn you.
CALLER:
Now Mr Prime Minister, what we wanted is something a long term, a bank, that we can survive with. If we don't survive the way the.
PRIME MINISTER:
I know it is difficult but on that very important issue of interest rates we have given you much lower interest rates and our policies will ensure that those low interest rates go on. But I'll talk to John, I'm sure he didn't mean to be discourteous, there is a no more courteous man in public life than John Anderson.
CALLER:
Well he has yet to come back to us with anything.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I'll check that out.
MORISH:
John we'll have to move on, thank you. Now could we go down to Tully and Bunny has a question. Do keep it brief please.
CALLER:
Good morning Mr Howard.
PRIME MINISTER:
G'day.
CALLER:
My question is this. I'm a superannuation pensioner, a retired Telecom worker, now you said a minute or so ago that pensioners in this country are not paying tax on their pensions.
PRIME MINISTER:
No, no I said that if you just depended on the old age pension.
CALLER:
I beg your pardon?
PRIME MINISTER:
If you just depended on the old age pension.
CALLER:
On the old age pension? Yeah well I pay $63 on mine.
PRIME MINISTER:
But you get more than the old age pension, that's the point I was making. I know that people who get superannuation, if you're above the tax free threshold you pay tax. I understand that. But the point I was making was that the old age pension plus a bit of an allowance over and above that is tax free, that's the point I was making. I wasn't suggesting that you didn't pay tax.
CALLER:
(inaudible)
PRIME MINISTER:
No, I appreciate that. I mean that is, a lot of self funded retirees argue that they should have the same travel benefits as people on the pension. I mean Governments of both persuasions are constantly having to juggle those priorities, and they're difficult and you never really end up satisfying everybody no matter who is in office.
MORISH:
We'll have to leave it there Bunny.
CALLER:
Thank you very much.
MORISH:
And finally Mr Howard, very quickly, the ACCC is campaigning against the credit card costs. Could this jeopardise the Government's relationship with corporate Australia. I mean is it really worth while having a battle on between the Reserve Bank and the major banks?
PRIME MINISTER:
Heavens above that's a complete oversimplification. I mean we're now, we've got a big fight between the Government and the big end of town because we happen to agree with the ACCC that maybe some of the charges made by the banks are unfair. Now I don't apologise for having said that, it doesn't mean to say I'm at war with every large company in Australia. I mean we really shouldn't trivialise things to that extent. We think that banks have got to be, have the ruler run over them in relation to these fees, and I would encourage the ACCC and the Reserve Bank to go and do just that.
MORISH:
Prime Minister John Howard thank you very much for your time this morning.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thank you.
[ends]