RAY HADLEY:
In the meantime, the Prime Minister of course is on the line from our Canberra studio. Mr Abbott, good morning to you.
PRIME MINISTER:
Ray, good morning to you.
RAY HADLEY:
Do you believe the denial from Mr Butler?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look, Labor, they haven’t learnt and they can’t change. Because of their alliance with the Greens, they are still absolutely committed to a carbon tax. Whether they call it an ETS or whether they call it a carbon tax is really a bit beside the point, whether it’s fixed or floating, it’s still a tax. Only this time you’ve got the floating tax that will hit households and then you’ve got this other tax that’s going to hit power stations and then you’ve got a third tax which is going to hit the cost of cars. So, all up, it just shows that you can’t trust Labor not to be a pain in the hip pocket.
RAY HADLEY:
Bill Shorten will be back before the Royal Commission some time we think next month, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a royal commissioner talk to a prominent witness in the way that Commissioner Dyson Heydon spoke to Mr Shorten in my absence. No wonder there are people within his own Party questioning whether he’ll lead them to the next election. I guess you’re hoping, as the person challenging him, or him challenging you, that you’ll still have him there if there’s an election sometime soon.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeah Ray, look, I’ll let the Labor Party worry about who leads it. My interest, obviously, is in good government and the interesting thing about the Royal Commission is, yes, every day there’s a procession of witnesses talking about rorts, rackets and rips-offs inside the union movement and what we need to do is address the fundamental problem which is failures of governance, long-term failures of governance. A long-term culture of union officials ripping off workers inside the union movement.
That’s why it’s so important that the Registered Organisations Commission Bill currently before the Senate gets passed, that’s why it’s so important that the Australian Building and Construction Commission Bill currently before the Senate gets passed because these bills are about ensuring the same standards of integrity in union officials that we’ve long had in company directors and ensuring that the rule of law really does apply on construction sites.
So, I’m interested in solutions – that’s what I’m interested in – and there are solutions if only the Labor Party would be cooperative for once and not obstructive.
RAY HADLEY:
What would you do if they don’t pass the Senate? There have been a couple of suggestions you may have noted on Monday – suggestions that I think would be not a bad idea, given Mr Shorten would still be the Leader of the Opposition.
PRIME MINISTER:
Ray, interestingly, the last sitting fortnight before we got up for the winter parliamentary recess was the best sitting fortnight of this Parliament. We passed about $14.5 billion worth of savings, there were some fundamental structural reforms passed through the Senate, some with Green support, some with Labor support, some with crossbench support, and the last thing I want to do is call time on this Parliament just when it’s starting to perform. But the important thing is to get these industrial reform – union reform – bills passed through the Parliament and, frankly, the Labor Party should be ashamed and embarrassed about what’s coming out in the Royal Commission and, certainly, I think the crossbenchers are taking notice and that’s why I’m very optimistic about these bills passing once the Parliament comes back.
RAY HADLEY:
Do you think that Mr Shorten will somehow lead them to the Senate and say, ‘Well look, we’ll agree with the Prime Minister, the behaviour of myself and others during my time as union leader’ – and there was an interesting stat coming out yesterday on how many people who sit on the frontbench for the Opposition, how many people in the Senate, how many people in the Opposition generally have ties to the union movement. It would be hard to imagine that they’d be wanting tighter controls on the union movement given where they’ve come from.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, Ray, but there are lots of decent people in the union movement who want to see the unions Act cleaned up. For instance, one of the people who was loudest for several years in calling for a royal commission into union corruption was former AWU National Secretary, Ian Cambridge, now Fair Work Commissioner, who’s been saying for a long, long time now this requires a royal commission. Now, Labor wasn’t prepared to have a royal commission, this Government put one in place and now having seen what the Royal Commission is producing, the important thing is to have solutions. We’ve got solutions before the Parliament and I suppose the challenge for Bill Shorten is: are you living in the past or are you prepared to embrace a better, cleaner future for the union movement?
RAY HADLEY:
And if he’s not?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well if he’s not, obviously, that’s a problem for him because …
RAY HADLEY:
A problem for him, Prime Minister, becomes an opportunity for you, because he’s already tainted by the Royal Commission, if he won’t pass legislation – it’s not his call, but he directs it not to pass in the Senate –if that doesn’t happen, there’s an ideal opportunity for a Government intent on making sure they’re there for a bit longer than they are at the moment, on seizing upon that. Now, that’s very prime ministerial of you to say all the things you’ve said, but at the end of the day, you’re a politician and given the opportunity to be the Prime Minister into the next term and if Bill Shorten is in charge and won’t pass legislation connected to a union movement where he’s tainted, it’s an ideal opportunity for the electorate to say ‘Well hang on a sec, we don’t want him, we’ll have this bloke as we’ve had previously.’
PRIME MINISTER:
Well these are all reasonable points, Ray, but my job is to do what I was elected to do, to do what the Government was elected to do and that is to provide good government for three years, not just to, I guess, speculate on all these things. I mean, good government means passing these bills to clean up the unions, passing these bills to ensure that we’ve got the rule of law on construction sites, that we don’t have standover men and so on on construction sites. So, that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to shut the Parliament down; I want to the Parliament to continue the good work that we saw in the last fortnight.
RAY HADLEY:
So can we leave it by me saying that I’ll never get you to say ‘There will never be a double dissolution under a government I lead’?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look, I don’t know what the Senate is going to do, but certainly, the last sitting fortnight, it was almost a sea change. I mean, the Greens decided to be constructive over our more sustainable and fairer pension reforms, then of course the Labor Party decided to actually pass some of the savings that they had supported in Government but were refusing in Opposition and the crossbench chimed in with some constructive work on the Renewable Energy Target and allowing wood waste and others to be included in that. So, there was a lot of good work in the Senate in the last fortnight and let’s hope that we can replicate that when the Senate comes back in a couple of weeks’ time.
RAY HADLEY:
I’ll take that as a no, you’ll never say ‘There will never be a double dissolution under a government I lead’?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, look, you’ve tried to get me to do a lot of things on this programme, Ray. You were always goading me to attack Rob Oakeshott in the previous Parliament.
RAY HADLEY:
Well it worked eventually. We got rid of him.
PRIME MINISTER:
You’re right. He decided that it was all too much and he wasn’t going to run again, but I’m going to resist your invitations if you don’t mind.
RAY HADLEY:
Suggestions of disunity within Cabinet, partly due to issue of mining Liverpool Plains. I think for our listeners, they need to understand, and I checked with Scott Morrison when I spoke with him on Monday it eventually comes back to the state government, does it not? I mean it will be their decision or can you overrule the decision by the state government?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, as I understand it. Ray, there are some 17 different sets of permissions that the proponent of this mine requires and if at any stage permission is denied that stops it. Now, one of the 17 stages was a Commonwealth government stage and we have said, yes, it passes all the tests. Now, I can fully understand people being absolutely passionate to protect the Liverpool Plains. I have been on the Liverpool Plains. These are amongst the best farming areas in our country.
RAY HADLEY:
One of the most passionate who proceeds me on this network...
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, exactly.
RAY HADLEY:
…and he had a fair bit to say about it this morning and I think he would be having a bit to say about it to you on air sometime later this week.
PRIME MINISTER:
I have no doubt and as Alan often says, ‘the soil is so good you can eat it’. That’s what he says and I agree with him but I also agree that mining and agriculture have coexisted for a hundred odd years in this country, they can and should continue to coexist in the future. This mine is actually off the Liverpool Plains. It is in the ridge country adjacent to the Liverpool Plains. All the signs tell us it is not going to have an impact on the water table and frankly if it is not going to damage the farming areas, if it is going to bring billions of dollars’ worth of economic activity and hundreds of ongoing jobs I think we should say let’s go with it.
RAY HADLEY:
You say that but back to the question can you be overruled by the state government and your colleague, Mike Baird. Can he say, ‘no, it is not going to happen’?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, as I understand it there are a couple more stages which are in the hands of the state government but I believe that Mike was asked about this at a NSW Farmers Conference yesterday and he said that based on all of the evidence that he had seen this was as environmentally beneficial and appropriate a decision that he could make and as far as he was concerned the mine was going ahead.
RAY HADLEY:
Good luck with Alan. Anyway, that will come up later in the week. I’ve got other issues to press and I will leave that entirely in his forum because he has been the one pushing that issue. It looks like you may have been right in suggesting that it is not a good idea for people from your side of politics to appear on Q&A without another stunt, with this little boy Ashton Platt on and of course we’re up to Wednesday you have heard what Ashton had to say. It has now been revealed that Ashton didn’t actually write the question. That Ashton used to love you but doesn’t love you anymore and he was helped by Mummy and Daddy to write the question and he may have been helped by some producers on Q&A as well I would imagine.
PRIME MINISTER:
Who knows. Look, I am not in the business of advertising Q&A, suffice to say that the ABC itself obviously thinks that Q&A needs to clean up its act that is why the Chairman of the ABC said, in a letter to me, that it would be a meritorious thing to do; to move Q&A from the entertainment to the news and current affairs division and there it would have much more editorial supervision. As soon as that move is made I look forward to those of my colleagues who wish to appear – frontbench colleagues who wish to appear – going back on the programme. But they really do need to clean up their act, as they themselves know.
RAY HADLEY:
Well, it’s more like a reality TV programme; more like a Farmer Wants A Wife or Masterchef or, you know, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or whatever they call it.
PRIME MINISTER:
All fair points, Ray, but I am here to say how fantastic 2GB is and not to get drawn on advertising any other programme or network or channel.
RAY HADLEY:
No, of course. Now, this one is a curly one about Indonesians cutting live cattle imports by 80 per cent – shocking the industry and, I think, catching Barnaby Joyce off guard as well. I note that in the Australian Financial Review today they are saying it doesn’t matter there are other markets because live cattle are in high demand at the moment and we will get other markets but, geez, it’s a big chunk of our export market. The other thing they are saying is the Indonesians are doing it not out of spite – they want to try and put a little bit of a push under their local industry but they are going to find out they can’t sustain it and they will come back to us. What is your view on all of this?
PRIME MINISTER:
Ray, I think in some ways this is just another one of the aftershocks of Labor’s catastrophic decisions to ban the live cattle trade back in 2011. It has been a bit of a rocky road ever since then. The best advice I have is that this is a one-off reduction. It is not an ongoing reduction because as you suggest, Indonesia does have a rapidly growing appetite for beef. As Indonesia get stronger and wealthier dietary tastes will change. They will need more beef and it is going to be very difficult for them to supply everything they want domestically. So, I think in the medium term it is all up for Australian beef exports, live cattle exports to Indonesia.
But, yes, there are other markets, particularly thanks to the Free Trade Agreements that we’ve signed with China, Japan and Korea under which beef tariffs will drop ultimately to zero and under which beef exports have already very substantially increased.
So, look, yes it’s a disappointment – yes, it is a bit of a worry. But Indonesia is certainly not the only market and even there I think things will be back to growth in the not too distant future.
RAY HADLEY:
By way of finality – I used to get emails and often a phone call from Alby Schultz, the former Federal MP for Hume. He passed away age 76 after a terrible battle cancer. A tribute from you I think would be appropriate given the stature of Alby.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, you’re dead right, Ray. Alby was one of those one-off models. He was a character, he was an individual. He wasn’t your bland, white-bread politician. He was someone who called it very unambiguously as he saw it and he was a strong foe, he was a good friend. If you had a blue with Alby, you always knew you could make up afterwards because in the end he was a very decent Australian who called it as he saw it and respected others who did likewise.
RAY HADLEY:
Nice tribute – and I thank you for your time.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good on you, Ray. Nice to be with you.
[ends]