Subjects: Mal Brough; electoral enrolments; dairy industry, economic issues; petrol excise.
E&OE................................
LOANE:
Prime Minister good morning.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good morning Sally.
LOANE:
I was wondering if saying not a terrific day for you yesterday, Mal Brough the young Queenslander with I guess a pretty sparkling future an hour away from being sworn into your ministry as Employment Services Minister pulled himself out. He's under somewhat of a cloud over allegations of electoral rorting in his office.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, I didn't know anything about any of this and...
LOANE:
[inaudible] got to you?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it's a glitch. Whether it represents a set back for him will of course be determined when all the inquiries have been made. There's no evidence that he's been involved in any way. He's denied any wrongdoing. The people involved on his staff, or formerly on his staff, are not so I'm told members of the Liberal Party. So it's not some kind of Liberal Party effort. They apparently did it because they wanted to help him but it's quite wrong. As far as I'm concerned he's done the right thing. He said don't swear me in until I've been given a clean bill of health by the authorities. And that's fair enough and that's what I would insist on. You need a completely clean bill of health to be sworn in as a minister. I have no reason at present to believe he won't receive that and I will go ahead and have him sworn in when he's been cleared by the police and anybody else who ought to clear him, and I think essentially the police. It's been referred to them. And I don't know that I can say any more. I literally knew nothing of it until after having been interviewed on your companion program the 7:30 Report the night before last. And I came back and I was told that this story was going to be in the papers yesterday and was briefly filled in. And we've just handled it in an entirely proper and correct fashion. Now he's fully accepting of the fact that it's got to be dealt with and cleaned up before he's sworn in. I hope it is. I have no reason to believe it won't and life goes on. And people are entitled to continue to look to us to do good things for the country rather than spend too much time on these other matters.
LOANE:
Prime Minister, of course it has though weakened your case against Labor rorting. You were quite I suppose pleased to point the finger at Labor particularly in Queensland and say look, you know, this is happening in the other party. This does weaken your case against Queensland doesn't it, the problems that Labor's been having?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I think as far as Queensland is concerned the people of Queensland will make a decision about that. I don't want to sort of get into too much comparison except to make the obvious point that there's a vast difference between employees of a member of parliament who are not members of the Liberal Party admitting to doing something that is plainly wrong, and a government that loses a deputy premier and two members of parliament who themselves had admitted themselves having done these things. And bear in mind that Mr Brough has denied any knowledge of his staff doing these wrongful things. And on top of that...
LOANE:
Do you believe him when he says that?
PRIME MINISTER:
I have no reason to disbelieve him. I mean...
LOANE:
[inaudible]
PRIME MINISTER:
Well hang on Sally. I mean I don't work in his office. I mean I have, there are 120 odd colleagues of mine in federal parliament. I mean I can't be expected to know every piece of behaviour in which their staff are involved. That's an impossible thing, any more than I'd expect Mr Beazley to know that.
LOANE:
No, you wouldn't know that.
PRIME MINISTER:
But you have got a situation here where in Queensland the people have been, you know, that admitted doing these wrong things of breaking the law were in fact Labor members of parliament, and they were in fact in the case of Jim Elder the Deputy Premier of the state of Queensland, and it was all of a piece and part of a concerted Labor Party pattern of behaviour. Now..
LOANE:
Nevertheless Prime Minister we've got in the eyes of the public we've now got a police inquiry into I guess one of yours and one of theirs in a federal sense.
PRIME MINISTER:
No hang on hang on. At this stage the police are not inquiring into an allegation that Mr Brough has done anything wrong. It's just that we want to be completely satisfied by referring the matter to the police that there are no areas of concern. I think it is important when you're dealing with allegations of illegal behaviour that we get a language absolutely correct. In the case of Mr Swan there is an allegation of preference buying. That is being investigated and the allegation was that Mr Swan himself was involved in it. The allegation here is that members of Mr Brough's staff without his knowledge did something that was wrong. Now there is a big difference. And you know I don't want to sound unduly pedantic but you can't be too pedantic when you're dealing with people's reputations.
LOANE:
Fair enough Prime Minister. You were lawyer of course. [inaudible]
PRIME MINISTER:
No no, it's not question of the law. It's just a question of being fair and so that's all I'm asking for.
LOANE:
No fair enough. Can I ask you though does there seem to be some sort of culture from Queensland across the parties that needs to be cleaned up?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I wouldn't say that. Sally can I make it perfectly clear anybody who's employed by a Liberal anywhere around Australia should understand from me we will not have any truck or any kind of illegal behaviour full stop, and where that occurs people should be thrown out of their jobs for doing it. I mean I'm just not interested for a moment in having people like that employed and that can be a message to all of my colleagues to make absolutely certain I have no reason to believe that there are any problems. I just want to make it clear that is my view. I mean there can be no compromises on this kind of behaviour. Now I don't accept that there's a culture in my party in Queensland.
LOANE:
Is there a culture in Labor in Queensland?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well the facts, you know, are there. Labor people have alleged it. You've raised the issue. I don't seek to dwell over much on it but you asked me. I mean when you have a deputy premier and two members of parliament thrown out and admitting it, and when it's quite plainly been practising, indulged in by, you know, it's systematic. You've got to remember that it was because of the rules of the Queensland ALP that required you to be on the electoral roll for the district for which you were preselecting a candidate before you could participate in the preselection of course that brought this about. That's been the organisational trigger I suppose for this kind of conduct. Now we don't have those rules in our party. You don't have to be. Now whether that is a good or a bad thing is another matter. But certainly you can see how it has become institutionalised in the Queensland ALP.
JOURNALIST:
Prime Minisiter you're going to need a Minister for Employment Services. How long are you going to hold this Ministry position open?
PRIME MINISTER:
For a reasonable time. I am not going to put a strict time limit. Obviously not indefinitely. I don't think the inquiry will take an indefinite period of time. That is a matter for the police. I mean, the police act independently and I am not going to start heavying the police or even trying, I don't even give the appearance by the way I respond to this question.
JOURNALIST:
Will there be an acting Minister?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well there is no acting Minister. Mr Abbott just continues. Mr Abbott was the Employment Services Minister, he takes over Mr Reith's role as Employment ,Workplace Relations and Small Business. It is a very easy thing to handle in this interim period. Tony just continues in the job he had before so it is really no particular problem and when as I expect Mal gets a clean bill of health he will be sworn in and he will do a very good job.
It's the right thing to do. This issue has arisen, he denies any wrong doing, but I want to be completely satisfied and so does he and the public is entitled to be completely satisfied that he is in no way involved because these people were employed by him. Now it is as simple and open as that. He has written to the police, he has written to the Electoral Commission, he's written to me, he's written to the Special Minister of State and he said here I am if you want to talk to me come and talk to me I am happy to be interviewed to answer any questions, I deny any wrongdoing. Now I don't think a bloke can be more transparent and open than that.
JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister you are in the middle of dairy country there, you would have probably travelled through a bit this morning on your way to the studios. The ABARE report has found that dairy deregulation, which was a federal government initiative has left 200 New South Wales dairy farmers leaving the industry in the past six months. You can't be happy with reports that farmers walking off their farms, because they are simply not getting enough money for their milk, because of deregulation.
PRIME MINSITER:
Sally, the ABARE report has found a number of things, it did find that. It has also found that consumers have benefited enormously from dairy deregulation because milk is much cheaper and you have to weigh that against the difficulties.
JOURNALIST:
Do you think that that does weigh up? I mean a lot of people say look why let all of these people walk off their farms? Isn't it better to pay a few cents more a litre for those of us who can afford it perhaps in the cities.
PRIME MINISTER:
Sally it is not just a question of those who can afford it. You don't have a means test in the milk section of the supermarket, we all have to pay the same amount.
JOURNALIST:
But a lot of people might feel that it's worth just a bit.
PRIME MINISTER:
You might, but a lot of people who are on stretched budgets, any fall in the price of something like milk is very welcome so I don't know that every body would. Anyway can I just say that there are some other things about deregulation. We put a levy on - which means that the price would have fallen even further if it weren't for that levy and out of the proceeds of that levy we are providing help.
Any dairy farmer that has net assets of less than $150,000 is entitled to an exit payment of up to $45,000 and in addition, there is some structural adjustment assistance available. It's very hard for the people who have to exit the industry but it is not all the fault of deregulation. Even if you have had no deregulation, the pressure of competition in different ways would have meant that people had to leave the industry and they would have left it without any adjustment assistance, they would have left it without any compensation payments and they would have..
JOURNALIST:
Perhaps not in the numbers that we are seeing now though Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER:
The dairy industry year after year there have been fewer and fewer people in it. Can I say that this dairy assistance, this dairy deregulation or adjustment plan was approved by the industry. It's not something that has be arbitrarily imposed.
JOURNALIST:
I think there are [inaudible] now about the number of people and also the compensation package too.
PRIME MINISTER:
A lot of this, to be fair, and can I also say is something that is not just a Federal Government initiative, it was also a state government initiative, and I have to say the New South Wales government has been a lot less generous in providing assistance over and above what is coming under the federal underpinning than say the Western Australian government which has provided a lot more adjustment assistance. The New South Wales government has been quite mean compared say with the Western Australian government.
JOURNALIST:
Are they playing politics then?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I don't know. I mean they are responsible to the people of New South Wales and we are all Australians and all Australians vote for both state and federal governments and it is a matter for the people to make a judgement about it.
None of this is easy but the idea that if we have had no plan, no adjustment plan everything would have gone along swimmingly with everyone earning high incomes, it just would not have happened because..and many parts of the industry, I mean, where I am right at the moment, things aren't too bad in fact they are quite good. You have got the Bega Co-op which got $660,000 grant from the Federal Government out of our regional assistance programme and it is now exporting $30 million a year of product and that grant will help it and it means that the local dairy industry will be able to sell more milk to the Co-op and as a result that will help them handle the process of deregulation and incomes of many dairy farmers in Victoria have in fact gone up as a result of the deregulation process.
JOURNALIST:
They said they haven't suffered as much as in New South Wales.
PRIME MINISTER:
They haven't and from a national point of view I've got to try and balance the interests of people irrespective of state boarders. I don't play the state game ever at all and it's a question of trying to look at the impact right across the board. These industries can't, in the long run, be helped by the Government putting its head in the sand and saying if you just leave it alone, the problem will go away. It won't, because under the pressure of competition you are going to have people losing market share, going out of business. Isn't it better to try and help them exit an industry with some assistance with debt, isn't it better to have access to an exit payment even though they may not think it's enough it's better than nothing, and isn't it better to have some kind of structural adjustment to improve their capacity to stay in the industry for those who don't want to go out and can hang on. Now all of those things have come out of the assistance, adjustment plan, and those things have been made possible by having this levy and also the consumers still get a benefit of cheaper milk.
LOANE:
Where you are Prime Minister in Bega we've had a couple of callers. One caller, Eugene, is a community worker in the town and he would like to know what can be done to help young people get jobs in the area? Apparently unemployment is a big problem there for all ages, but particularly for young people. I mean this is a universal problem of course, not just in Bega in that community. In rural communities..
PRIME MINISTER:
Well perhaps we should get this thing in perspective. The unemployment for South East New South Wales which includes Bega is 5.9% compared to the national rate of 6.2%. And the 12 month average for youth unemployment was 12.6% compared to 19.5% for New South Wales as a whole. Now whilst that is still much too high the truth is that compared with the rest of New South Wales, and compared with many other parts of Australia, the youth unemployment rate is much lower. One of the things that we have done in answer to the person who rang up, is that under our rural adjustment program we allocated $3.6 million to the Eden region following the closure of the tuna cannery. Now, that closure cost 145 jobs and we've spent - the community has spent $3.5 million creating 150 new jobs in the short term with another 200 coming through the pipeline. So whilst I don't pretend for a moment that we'll solve the problem of youth unemployment in this area, that's just an illustration - Eden is next door, so to speak. And also the decisions that we've taken in relation to wood chipping and the forest industry which always are heavily contested between the greener position which is anti-jobs and the industry position which is criticised by environmentalists and we've insisted on a larger area to be reserved and as a result that means more jobs. If the NSW Government view had prevailed there would have been fewer jobs in the industry and many of those jobs would have involved young people so the unemployment rate would have been higher.
LOANE:
Prime Minister, just on the economy in a general sense, of course you have an eye on America at the moment. The Federal Reserve may bring down interest rates. Will that automatically lead to a down turn in interest rates here? And we've also got petrol excise going up tomorrow as well.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, can I deal with interest rates? That will be a matter for the Reserve Bank. I don't know what the Fed's open market committee will do. There's a lot of speculation it may cut rates again but we'll know but I'm not going to comment on or respond to any speculation as to what that may mean here in Australia. I make a habit of not trying to give public advice to the Reserve Bank on interest rates. On petrol excise, that is true what you say. We had a very thorough and comprehensive look at this issue before Christmas and we are conscious that people don't like the high price of petrol. I don't like it. It affects the disposable incomes of a lot of people and we wish it were lower. Now the main driver of high prices is the high price of crude oil around the world and we decided that it was a better long term investment to put another $1.6 billion into road funding over the next four years than to freeze the February increase in petrol excise which would have had an impact of about 1.5 cents a litre on the price of petrol.
Now, it's impossible from an economic point of view to do both. That would not be responsible. And we decided after a lot of careful thought that from a long-term point of view it was better to put the money into roads. Now, some people will agree with that and some people will disagree with it. It was a conscientiously arrived at decision. We are not in any way insensitive to the fact that people don't like the high price of petrol. Whenever I've visited rural areas people have talked about the state of the roads. They've asked for more money understandably and we took a decision in favour of road funding. Now, like all of our decisions the people will make up their mind and I want your listeners to understand that we thought about it very carefully.
Now our opponents will say well they should freeze the excise. Mr Beazley says he's going to introduce a private members' bill. Well that's sort of easy to do from opposition. It doesn't mean anything. It will only mean something if Mr Beazley announces next week when he introduces that private members' bill that at the next election he will commit a future Labor Government to reduce excise by 1.5 cents a litre. In other words, to take out of the excise component the February increase that he says we shouldn't go ahead with. I mean, it is terribly easy when you are in Opposition to sort of run off these things. When you are in Government you've actually got to make the decisions and that's the decision we took. And I understand that some people like it, and I understand some don't. But it was our honest assessment that that was a better long-term investment.
LOANE:
Prime Minister, your Treasurer Peter Costello floated the idea on the weekend that maybe the states should come in like Queensland and actually offer.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, Peter was making the wholly legitimate point that states, and New South Wales is certainly no exception, are running around saying we should freeze the excise, we should give more money for roads, we should do this that and the other. He was making the wholly legitimate point that if you know they believe this can be done, then maybe they should make a contribution. I mean I read the other day that there's been a massive swelling of state coffers as a result of a much greater harvest of stamp duty around Australia because of property values. Now, if that is the case, and I mean, I don't know, I haven't seen their books and they are unlikely to show them to me. If that is the case, then state coffers are pretty flush at the present time. But Peter's point was legitimate that, I mean, we looked at it and we decided that yes, we can't do both. We can't freeze the excise and increase road funding, so we went for road funding. Now that was our careful conscientious decision. Some people will like it and some people will not like it. But we are doing a lot of other things. I mean, I announced a very large science programme the other day. We are putting a lot of extra money in defence. We are putting extra money into tackling the problem of salinity and water quality. We have made commitments in the welfare area for the budget. So these things are being made possible as a social bonus if I can put it that way, out of our good economic management but we can't, we don't think we can go any further, we have to wear the criticism. I know people are sensitive about it. I don't want any of your listeners to imagine that I don't understand that sensitivity and that I haven't addressed it and thought about it long and hard and we came to the conclusion that it was better. And as I go around these rural areas, I've got Gary Nairn, who is the member for Eden Monaro which is Bega and Eden in the federal parliament, and he tells me the local people are very happy that there's going to be almost a $13 million injection of additional local road funding.
LOANE:
We might think that there's an election coming up Prime Minister?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, you know, you are damned if you and you are damned if you don't aren't you Sally. I mean, if we don't do it, you say you are ignoring the people, and you do it and you say well that's just because you are in an election. I mean, to be fair to us, we've been doing things very steadily from the time we were elected. I mean, we have not been a policy lazy government.
LOANE:
We are going to have to leave it there Prime Minister. We lose transmission in about 30 seconds. But thank you very much for your time this morning from Bega.
[Ends]