HOST: Prime Minister, good to talk to you again. Good afternoon.
PM: Hi Tim.
HOST: Can you tell me first of all about your anticipated agenda meeting with the Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono who's just arrived Darwin and of course the much-discussed, much-vexed topic of asylum seekers. Will that be on the agenda?
PM: I'm just about to go to an event with President Yudhoyono, so I've had the opportunity to welcome him to Australia today.
We are now going to look at a disaster centre that can bolt up a hospital for people in desperate circumstances, and Indonesia has taken a lot of leadership across our region trying to bring countries together to respond to natural disasters and we've seen far too many of them.
Tim, my agenda with the Indonesian President is a broad one. It will be across our economic relationship, our people-to-people links, the work we do together globally and regionally, but yes, we will be talking about the work we also do together on people smuggling.
HOST: Is it as pressing an issue for the Indonesian President as it is for you, the Australian Prime Minister?
PM: Look, I can't speak to you about the Indonesian President's top ten or top twenty issues. He is obviously a man with many issues on his mind, as Indonesia emerges on the world stage as they continue to lift people out of poverty, as they see dynamic growth in their economy, and of course it's a democracy that is going from strength to strength.
And one of the wonderful things I've got to do as a Member of Parliament was to go as an election observer to the first free, fair election in Indonesia.
HOST: Are you confident that you can at least come back to Parliament when it resumes in six weeks with something firm from Indonesia given the impasse from last week that will allay the fears perhaps of Australians that there is another massacre, another tragedy imminent on Australia's coast?
PM: We already cooperate very strongly with Indonesia in combating people smuggling, and the Indonesians do have a good track record, one that they can point to, of disrupting people smuggling ventures and arresting people for people smuggling.
So of course I'll talk to the President of Indonesia about these matters during the course of our discussions at a leader-to-leader meeting. But we can't ask the President of Indonesia to solve what is an issue for the Australian Parliament, which is getting Australia's laws in the right shape so that we can have at our disposal offshore processing options.
I've been working to do that, I've been prepared to compromise to get that done.
Unfortunately that preparedness to compromise has been met with, you know, not one millimetre of movement by either the Coalition or by the Greens, which is why I have created an expert panel to try and find a way for us to get out of this gridlock and to see compromise all round and effective action.
HOST: Prime Minister, Clive Palmer who of course you are very well-versed in, and of course who wants to unseat your Treasurer Wayne Swan, has said today he wants the Government to let asylum seekers get on planes and then let Customs and Immigration deal with them when they get to Australia.
Now we keep hearing the same solutions or variations of the same solutions, but could Clive Palmer, perhaps coming from a very different approach, have come up with something that is of some merit?
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HOST: Clive Palmer says that the Government should be allowing asylum seekers to get on planes and be processed by Customs and Immigration in Australia, rather than what's going on at the moment.
Is he onto something perhaps, with an unusual approach?
PM: Look, not in my view, no, I don't think Mr Palmer is onto something, I'm just not sure how he's thought that through.
Clearly the concern would be that if you just let people fly on in then you will see them in astronomical numbers.
HOST: Now onto the carbon tax, how concerned are you that the Australian consumer is, perhaps in small increments or large, going to be the biggest loser if you like from the imposition of the carbon tax?
With the very best will in the world of your Government, the very best will in the world of the ACCC, that it will ultimately be the individual Australian or the Australian family that gets belted for the carbon tax.
PM: Well I'm very confident that that won't be the case and I can explain my confidence to you.
We've had Treasury, the same experts that advised government when the GST was enacted, model what is going to be the impact of the flow-through for carbon pricing for consumers.
They got it right under the GST, and they're saying for carbon pricing the impact for Australians who just go about their business and buy the things that they and their family need is less than a cent in a dollar.
The single biggest impact is a ten per cent increase in electricity, and the jury is already in on that. The price regulators around the country have spoken, and have said that the impact will be ten per cent or less.
So, they've already got the single biggest part of it right, and so I'm very confident that what they've said to us and we are saying to the Australian people is right too.
The cost of living impact will be less than a cent in a dollar and people will have at their disposal tax cuts, pension increases and family payment increases to meet that flow-through.
People - 7 million of them - will see a tax cut in their pay packet to help them with the flow-through of carbon pricing, and around the country millions of households, millions of families will actually come out square or better off.
HOST: Should - the case we've been discussing here in Brisbane today - an energy supplier be talking about the carbon pricing mechanism and the impact it's having on prices.
I've got a letter from one that says, ‘The carbon pricing mechanism is just one of many factors that impact the price of energy we buy and in turn sell to you. As such we will not be separating out the cost of the carbon pricing mechanism'.
Is there enough clarity, perhaps, in this?
PM: Well I'd prefer people to have more and more and more information, but we know from the people who regulate electricity prices in Queensland, in NSW, around the country, that the impact of carbon pricing is ten per cent or less, that is that the Treasury modelling got it right.
The single biggest impact in terms of electricity bills is all of the cost that goes into the poles and the wires and the infrastructure. That is putting a significant imposition, but of course that's all about state government planning and state government arrangements.
HOST: Prime Minister, can I just read you a little of a letter I got from a listener, Greta, a retiree, who says she sometimes has a quick lunch at a restaurant, a fast-food restaurant, and as a pensioner she gets a free coffee but noticed that on 1 July when she had a quick chicken wrap at this restaurant that their prices had gone up form that day.
Not that surprising, but do you not think that a company such as this who puts up its prices that day, that a lot more companies are going to do the same thing?
The price of one lunch item went up by 20 per cent, and this is the sort of thing I'm talking about, where it won't be obvious but there will be increases where some are large some are small, that might be put down to the carbon mechanism, perhaps might not directly be put down to it but there will be profiteering taking place in the margins.
PM: Well if Greta is a pensioner, then she will see $338 extra to help her with the flow-through of carbon pricing, and we've deliberately factored that so that people like Greta are getting 20 per cent more than they need to deal with the average impact of carbon pricing on them.
That is, we wanted them to end up in front. In terms of profiteering from carbon pricing, any business that falsely misrepresents to anyone that a price has gone up because of carbon pricing when it hasn't, when they're just putting it up, is that risk of a million dollar fine.
HOST: Now, I would imagine you were expecting to wake up to disappointing polling today given the last week of course, and the carbon price coming in, but how long will it take do you think before Australians understand the true impact of this? And it's the impact that you're describing I guess, for the purposes of our conversation, rather than the impact Tony Abbott's describing.
PM: Well I think the important thing now is we've listened to months and months and months of fear campaigning: coal's not going to be mined anymore; Whyalla's going to get wiped off the map; the Sunday roast is going to cost $100; and it will become clear to people that all of these fear campaign items have just been completely ridiculous, completely false.
People now have the opportunity to judge for themselves. They don't have to listen to the politicians, they can just judge for themselves.
Look at their pay packets, look at their pension, see the extra money coming in, go to the shops, do their weekly shopping, buy the same items they normally buy and work out what they're paying for them and just judge for themselves.
I think in the months ahead, people will be able to work this through and I do believe too Australians will come to see this as an important reform for our nation's future so that we are tackling climate change and seizing a clean energy future.
HOST: Do you wish you had called it a pollution tax rather than a carbon tax? Do you think a pollution tax might not have been the controversy magnet, if you like, that the carbon tax has?
PM: At the end of the day I don't think it's about the words, I think it's about what happens.
I think it's about the lived experience, I think Australians are a common sense, practical people and they'll work out what actually happens.
And Tim, we've lived through big fear campaigns before. You know, Medicare, we wouldn't be without Medicare now. It was the subject of an enormous fear campaign. Universal superannuation, the subject of an enormous fear campaign, was going to destroy the national economy-
HOST: The GST?
PM: Australia was going to be kaput, and we all know that these reforms now are not only accepted, they are cherished as part of what it is to be Australian.
We've got decent health care and a decent way of helping people in their retirement. So, you know, we've lived through controversial reforms before. People ultimately end up judging them on what they can see and feel in their own lives.
HOST: Prime Minister, you've been very generous with your time, but can I ask a favour before you go, and that is could you please get Craig Emerson to stop singing?
PM: I'm not going to make any false promises!
HOST: Thank you for that, nice to talk to you again.
PM: Thank you.