PAUL MURRAY:
Prime Minister, thanks so much for joining us.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good to be with you, Paul.
PAUL MURRAY:
Politics is about perception – what do you think the perception is of the Government right now?
PRIME MINISTER:
Obviously, we’ve had a difficult couple of months, but I think the Press Club speech on Monday was a good opportunity to start the year on a strong note. We will be a different Government this year from last year. Our focus this year will be jobs, families, a stronger economy and a secure nation – and I think that’s what people want. They want us to be focused on things that are important to them.
PAUL MURRAY:
What about the perception of you? I was interested when Ray Hadley spoke to you yesterday, he asked you about what’s the difference between Tony Abbott, Opposition Leader, versus Tony Abbott, Prime Minister. Do you notice a difference?
PRIME MINISTER:
No I don’t, Paul, because I’m obviously very conscious of being the same person. Yes, doing a slightly different job, in some ways a more difficult job, but certainly an absolutely exhilarating job and every day I count my blessings because to be the Prime Minister of this extraordinary country is the greatest honour anyone in public life could have.
PAUL MURRAY:
Now, I want to talk about the elephant in the room, but I also want to talk about other stuff that matters to the country. Do you believe Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop when they say they’re not going to challenge and they’re not campaigning for your job?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, I do. They are my Cabinet colleagues, they are my friends, I have known them both for a long time, I’ve worked closely with them for a long time. You always have your ups and downs; that’s natural when you’ve got strong personalities talking about the most difficult decisions that any country can face. But I trust them; they’re my friends and colleagues.
PAUL MURRAY:
Is there a form of words that they should or shouldn’t have used? Is there a tweet they should’ve put out? Are you happy with everything that they’ve said and done here? Because as you know the people who work in this building try to read into the grey all the time.
PRIME MINISTER:
And the last thing I want to do is play those Canberra insider games. I think people are heartily sick of the Canberra insider games. I think they want their members of Parliament, their Ministers, to get on with running a good Government. That’s what we were elected to do, that’s what I was elected to do: to clean up Labor’s mess, to build a strong a prosperous economy for a safe and secure Australia – and that’s what I’m focused on every day.
PAUL MURRAY:
What you do have is you do have a couple of backbenchers and a man who was at one point a minister here in your own Government saying he doesn’t give you unqualified support. That’s not a Canberra game; that’s a message.
PRIME MINISTER:
And obviously this does need to be a better Government this year than last year. We had a lot of really significant achievements last year: we stopped the boats, we scrapped the carbon tax, we scrapped the mining tax, we secured three vital free trade deals for Australia’s future, that means better markets for our exporters, particularly our farmers, it means lower prices for consumers. But I know that the people don’t want me to dwell on the past, they want me to excite them about the future and what we’ve got in store for people early this year is a big new families package focused on childcare and a tax cut for small business.
PAUL MURRAY:
I’m going to get to both of those and the Free Trade Agreement because I think that is very important. But have you spoken to Arthur Sinodinos since he said what he said on Sky News yesterday?
PRIME MINISTER:
Not yet, but I will soon.
PAUL MURRAY:
What do you want to say to him?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look, what I say to all my colleagues – we have been a good team; we will be an even better team and let’s talk about any issues that people have.
PAUL MURRAY:
Right. So you’ve got these backbenchers but you trust the only people who would potentially be any contenders for this job and ambition’s not a bad thing as politicians, I assume, all have it.
PRIME MINISTER:
And John Howard used to say all the time, ambition is a good thing and he was absolutely right.
PAUL MURRAY:
Right, but no doubt you’re confident that you’ve got their support, you’ve got the support of the majority of the party room. But any leader could win a leadership vote everyday there’s a party room meeting. Why wouldn’t you just have one on Tuesday just to say, alright let’s double-check how confident I am.
PRIME MINISTER:
Because we’re getting on with Government and I know what a distraction that would inevitably be.
PAUL MURRAY:
It’s five minutes. It’d be a big distraction but it’s in and out, if it’s this easy.
PRIME MINISTER:
As I said, let’s not distract ourselves, let’s get on with things.
PAUL MURRAY:
Ok, but if there was to be a vote Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, for whatever reason of whatever circumstance, how confident are you that you would win it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Again, I’m just not going to deal in hypotheticals. I don’t expect anything like that to happen. I don’t expect anything like that to happen because I know that this is a Cabinet which is working together for the good of our country.
PAUL MURRAY:
How are you going to deal better with backbenchers? Because the truth is that anyone of any organisation when you get 50 people in a room you’re not going to get uniformity of opinion, there are going to be people who are annoyed they’re not further up the chain or anything like that. So, you’re not going to get 100 per cent, but how do you actually engage with backbenchers that they don’t just get five minutes with the PM but you actually listen and pick up what they say?
PRIME MINISTER:
The important thing is to give people a fair hearing and one of the things that perhaps we didn’t do enough last year was take better advantage of the wisdom and insight of our Backbench Policy Committees and so one of the things that I’ve said will be very different this year and we’re starting on Monday is that at least once every two months, all the Chairs of the Backbench Policy Committees will sit down with the Cabinet for a frank and fearless exchange because there are ideas and insights amongst our party room colleagues that the Cabinet needs to hear. All wisdom does not reside in the public service.
PAUL MURRAY:
But one of the things about either perception or reality, but one of the things that as somebody who watches this for a living became a very big talking point, a big discussion point last year, was that multiple people would come and apparently say to you or your staff, you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’re doing the wrong thing, this policy’s the right thing or the wrong thing, but you kept going. When did you change your mind? What does it take, in terms of leadership style, for you to change your mind about something you passionately believe but can you be convinced otherwise?
PRIME MINISTER:
Paul, you would expect a party leader and a Prime Minister to have very strong convictions. You wouldn’t want someone in those jobs without strong convictions. But I accept that no one gets his or her own way all the time and you know what I felt about paid parental leave, but I have listened and I accept that it’s not the right policy for this time and that’s why it’s off the table. You know how I feel about appropriate honours in the Order of Australia, but Prime Ministerially awarded knighthoods are gone and all awards in the Order of Australia will now be handled by the Council of the Order.
PAUL MURRAY:
So what’s the threshold for you changing your mind? Is it whether you can get something through the Senate? Is it whether the country can afford it? What’s the threshold, because again for your supporters the sense is, look as much as they might support a medical research fund or they support a co-payment or they support even a paid parental leave, if they can’t see a path through this Senate then they say what’s the point.
PRIME MINISTER:
Obviously, Paul, you can’t put anything forward if you don’t believe that it’s affordable at this time and into the foreseeable future. And obviously there’s a limit to what you should try to do if you don’t think it’s going to get through the Senate. Now, obviously we bit off a lot last year in the Budget. As it happens, we bit off more than we could chew, certainly more than the Senate was prepared to digest. Now, we’re not going to make that sort of decision again, we are going to accept that if it’s unlikely to create anything more than a counterproductive bunfight in the Senate we probably won’t do it. But there are things from last year’s Budget which are still important and outstanding and certainly the higher education changes are very important so that our universities really can be amongst the best in the world.
PAUL MURRAY:
To continue the food metaphor, when you take an idea such as say higher education and you take it to the Senate, is the plan – and I picked this up from your speech on Monday and I think it’s something that a lot of people missed – it seems that rather than just saying, here’s the singular option, take it or leave it, that you’re willing to open up the buffet of options and it’ll be slowly but surely traded away because probably part of the political problem is that if you stand up and in this courtyard and you announce the government will be doing X, Y and Z and then slowly but surely it gets pared away, that’s what looks as a problem for the Government, or weakness for the Government, or difficulty for the Government?
PRIME MINISTER:
I think all governments expect to have to negotiate in the Senate that they don’t control and let’s face it, this is an Opposition dominated Senate, no doubt about that. All governments expect to have to negotiate in the Senate and this Government is no different.
This Senate is probably as wilful, if I might say, as any Senate. I think the assumption that probably prevailed until quite recently that the Government ought to basically get its way in the Senate is no more, but I don’t blame the crossbench for that, I really blame the Labor Party because the Labor Party created the debt and deficit disaster. It’s their fault that we are borrowing $1 billion a month every single month just to pay the interest on their debt. It’s their fault that we can’t build a brand new tertiary hospital every month because that amount of money is going out in interest.
So, I really do blame the Labor Party, but still, this is the world as it is and we’ve got to work with the Senate we’ve got.
PAUL MURRAY:
And just a big part of your negotiation is about Clive Palmer and the Palmer United Party. I say unpleasant things about him that I’m sure you can’t say. You’ve said you want to be very respectful of everyone involved in the process. He existed politically because he wanted to get rid of Campbell Newman. He spent millions of dollars of his own money, as the AEC proved, trying to get rid of Campbell Newman. Campbell Newman is gone. Does that mean that Clive Palmer is a different person to deal with now?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, that’s a question to put to Mr Palmer and I guess that’s something that we will discover in the weeks and months ahead, but my point is the same: we want to work in good faith with everyone who wants to work with us and we have to accept that Australia has a budgetary problem – a big budgetary problem. We don’t have to cure it overnight, but we do have to have a credible path back to surplus and I would like the Labor Party first and foremost and Mr Palmer and others with influence in the Senate, if they don’t like the way this Government is going along that path, tell us how they would go along that path, because if you want to be a responsible member of this Parliament, you’ve got to be part of the solution, not just the problem.
PAUL MURRAY:
I’ve only got a couple of minutes left to talk about some pretty big issues, but Islamic State…
PRIME MINISTER:
Please, Paul, don’t call it by that name, please. I mean, I don’t believe that it is Islamic in any meaningful sense and it certainly isn’t a state. It’s a travesty of religion and it’s a travesty of governance.
PAUL MURRAY:
Well probably the name I would give them is both un-prime ministerial and secondly, probably not fit for consumption!
PRIME MINISTER:
And look, I call them the death cult, because that’s what they are, and all decent Muslims know that and say that. We had President al-Sisi of Egypt in a remarkably courageous speech earlier this year called for a religious revolution in Islam and the jettisoning of centuries old ways of thinking which are causing grave damage to Islam and, indeed, to the wider world.
PAUL MURRAY:
But, obviously, a Jordanian pilot was murdered in the worst possible way. You know that Australian troops are there, you know that Australian pilots are there, obviously. Did that murder change the emotional stakes for you that that could have been an Australian pilot?
PRIME MINISTER:
We have very sophisticated response procedures in place if anything like that were to happen. If one of our planes goes down, there are emergency response procedures which I have talked through at great length with the Chief of the Defence Force. I am confident – as confident as you can be in this imperfect world – that we could deal with it and we wouldn’t find ourselves in that absolutely atrocious situation.
But just on the subject of terrorism more generally, I’m pretty happy with the way Australia’s anti-terrorist, counter-terrorism measures are coming on. We’ll shortly be responding to the report into the Martin Place siege. But as well as tackling organisations which are actively promoting and engaging in terrorism, organisations that justify and excuse terrorism and organisations which act as recruiters for terrorism such as Hizb-ut Tahrir, we’ve got to act against them and we will be.
PAUL MURRAY:
But it’s also things like, I mean, people can if they want to in their bedrooms they can radicalise themselves by seeing things on YouTube, the Internet and all the rest of it. Free speech is a very delicate thing to play with and to restrict but, I mean, there are TV shows you can’t watch because they emanate from certain countries but if you want to watch some mad preacher on YouTube you can do it. What role does the technology companies play here that if the Government says, look please make this harder to get?
PRIME MINISTER:
That’s the kind of dialogue that we are constantly having and my understanding is that a lot of material that’s been put up by the Daesh death cult that you referred to earlier by that term I’d rather avoid, has been taken down because we talked to the various Internet service providers and they are citizens as well as being businesses. Yes, they’re in the business of communication, but some things frankly should not be communicated and that kind of message shouldn’t.
PAUL MURRAY:
Why didn’t you declare what happened in Martin Place a terrorist act?
PRIME MINISTER:
I said it was a brush with terrorism.
PAUL MURRAY:
But in the moment, because as I understand it and this again is probably what’s in your report, is that if there was a declaration made it was the SAS dealing with it not the New South Wales Police. Was there a failure to decide anything?
PRIME MINISTER:
No, that’s not true – that’s not true, Paul. The first response to any crime, including terrorist crime in the jurisdictions is by the state and territory police. If they believe that they require federal assistance, federal assistance will almost naturally be forthcoming. But given that this was one terrorist, in one location, it was something that the New South Wales Police were more than capable of handling. And while I don’t want to pre-empt the coroner’s report, I am pretty proud of the way the New South Wales Police handled it.
PAUL MURRAY:
Prime Minister, thank you so much.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good on you.
PAUL MURRAY:
All the best for a great year.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thanks so much.
[ends]