LEON BYNER:
The Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister thanks for joining us this morning.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good morning. Good to be with you.
LEON BYNER:
We’ve been confronted today with news that North Korea has launched a missile which flew over northern Japan. What’s been the information that you’ve been given about this?
PRIME MINISTER:
I can confirm Leon that the missile flew over the north of Japan and landed in the Sea of Japan about 1,000 km to the east of Japan in the Pacific Ocean. At this stage we assess the missile was an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile.
I want to say that we condemn this latest missile test in the strongest terms.
The North Korean regime continues recklessly to threaten the peace and stability of the region and indeed of the world. We call on all nations to impose the harshest sanctions as stipulated by the Security Council, against North Korea. In particular Leon, it is vitally important that China plays its part.
The North Korean regime is not a docile client state of China that does whatever Beijing says, by any means. They have a lot of problems with Pyongyang as well. But China has the greatest economic leverage and they have the ability to bring North Korean to its’ senses without military action and they should use that economic leverage to do so.
LEON BYNER:
Why do you think there is hesitation on their part to do this?
PRIME MINISTER:
I think there are historical factors. They have been allies in the past, of course. China fought to defend North Korea in the Korean War. So there is a lot of shared history. They certainly don’t want to have American forces in that area that is now North Korea. They certainly don’t support a unification of Korea at this stage.
But the problem that China faces - and I’ve raised this with Chinese leaders over many years now - the problem that they face is that North Korea is not to China what East Germany was to the Soviet Union. It isn’t a client state that is reasonably accommodating to what Beijing wants. Quite the contrary. It is putting the stability and the peace of the region and hence the prosperity of China, at huge risk with one reckless provocation after another.
LEON BYNER:
As PM, where do you think this leaves Australia?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, it leaves us in a region where the single largest, or most severe threat to the stability of our region right now, is North Korea. We all have a vested interest in maintaining the peace and stability of the region and we have to continue the diplomatic and economic efforts to bring North Korea to its senses.
The latest round of sanctions which will see China no longer importing coal and iron ore from North Korea, which will hit them hard, the Chinese will start implementing those they have said, on the 5th of September. So what they have to do, China has to ratchet up the pressure. Now they’ve condemned these missile tests as everyone has. But China does have unique leverage and with that unique leverage comes unique responsibility.
LEON BYNER:
Have you had a security briefing Prime Minister about this?
PRIME MINISTER:
I have had a briefing already today and will have Cabinet meeting later and a National Security Committee of Cabinet meeting later today as well and will receive further information. But I have received a security briefing already from our agencies.
LEON BYNER:
I want to talk about energy. First of all, and this has been something that you’ve been asked about a lot but I’ll take it in two parts; can you categorically rule out any plan to build a low cost coal-fired power station?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well certainly the Government is not planning to build a coal-fired power station, but I might say Leon, there is no ‘low cost’ coal-fired power station, a new one anyway. The lowest cost coal-fired power station’s are the ones that are actually operating. You know, where obviously the capital has been written down or indeed written off many years ago.
LEON BYNER:
So from your point of view not only from the Government but even a commercial perspective, it’s just not going to happen?
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh no, I’m not saying that at all. You asked me whether the Government was planning to do it. I’m saying the Government is not.
LEON BYNER:
Sure.
PRIME MINISTER:
But no, I think I’ve often said that I think it would be, given that we are the largest exporter of coal in the world, it would be good if we had in Australia, a state-of-the-art, high-efficiency, low-emission coal-fired power station. But that’s not a piece of infrastructure that the Government is planning to build.
We already are making a considerable commitment to Snowy Hydro. Yesterday I was there at the Tumut 2 power station and the Snowy Scheme. Because what we’re going to do is create there, the biggest battery in the Southern Hemisphere actually and one of the biggest in the world. Which of course is what you need - what South Australia lacks - to support all of the renewables.
It was interesting to see there, the turbines were whirring away in the Snowy Mountains, generating hydroelectricity. Why were they doing that? Well, because the wind had stopped blowing in South Australia. So, you need to have backup. And this is – again, without wanting to labour the point, your listeners are more familiar with it than anyone – the reason South Australia has the most expensive and least reliable electricity, is because the Labor government decided to have a huge dependence on wind.
Of course, the wind doesn’t blow all the time.
They allowed baseload coal-fired power stations to close and at the same time they didn’t put in place the backup, the storage, to support the renewables. That was just a combination of ideology and idiocy. Sadly, South Australians pay the price for it.
LEON BYNER:
You’re having a meeting with power companies again, second time in about three weeks.
PRIME MINISTER:
That’s right.
LEON BYNER:
What do you think you’re going to get off them?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, what we’ll be doing, we’ve already got commitments from them and I want to confirm those and see how they’re tracking in delivering.
This is all about getting relief from high power bills in the here and now. I mean we talked about Snowy Hydro a minute ago; that is going to put downward pressure on power prices in the future, but it will take five or six years to build. So –
LEON BYNER:
So what will the power companies give you now? Making, maybe contracts a little bit clearer? Which is still really, they shouldn’t even be legal should they?
Because most of the people that had a look at this including the ACCC have made the comment Prime Minister, that these energy companies are deliberately confounding consumers with over-complicated contracts to make it easier to price-gouge them.
PRIME MINISTER:
There’s no doubt that inertia and complexity are the friends of the retailers.
LEON BYNER:
Yeah.
PRIME MINISTER:
So what we’re doing is requiring them – and they’ve agreed to this – to alert people when they’re on a plan and it’s coming to an end and advise them to what the consequences would be - ie paying more money – if they don’t renew it or go onto another plan and instead flip over onto the standard offer. We’re also requiring them to advise people whose plans have expired and have gone onto the standard offer, what the better alternatives are.
My goal is to ensure that no Australian family is paying more for electricity than they need to. In other words, they they’re not paying on a plan or an offer that is inappropriate for them. Now we’re already seeing in response to the action I’ve taken, my Government has taken, we’re seeing people getting offered discounts of 25 or 27 per cent - was one I saw the other day, you’re talking there about hundreds of dollars.
I mean an average family’s electricity bill is say $2,500, 25 per cent is a lot of money. Some people are paying, some families – it’s about a million families at least that are paying too much – some people are paying over $1,000 more for electricity than they needs to. So it’s really important to ensure that the retailers look after their customers in this way. We’re making sure that they do. Now that’s something that is effecting electricity prices in the here and now.
The other thing we’re doing which is very important in the here and now, is putting restrictions on the export of gas from the east coast. Because again - this was a huge mistake that was made by the previous Labor government both federally and in Queensland – they allowed gas to be exported from Queensland, from the east coast, without ring-fencing or making any provision to protect domestic gas customers, whether it’s families or whether it’s industrial, businesses and so forth. So we’ve seen this extraordinary situation where we actually became short of gas on the east coast.
Gas prices went through the roof.
This drove up electricity prices.
This put thousands of manufacturing jobs at risk.
So uncharacteristically for a Liberal Prime Minister, I’ve had to take some pretty heavy-handed interventionist action to put restrictions on the export of gas so as to ensure there’s enough supply domestically. That already has seen the spot price, the wholesale price of gas, coming down. So it’s having some impact.
But it gives you an understanding Leon, that whether it’s in the long-term, putting in the storage capacity that will make energy affordable and reliable in the future, or whether it’s right here in the here and now, today, we’re taking action on every front to ensure energy is affordable and reliable
LEON BYNER:
I want to talk about banking, because we read now that the Government is going to tighten the rules about bank executive pay. But it does seem, as soon as we hear about wrongdoing among the banks, another inquiry is announced. Wouldn’t it be just better to have a Royal Commission into the entire sector and be done with it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well let me deal first with the point about remuneration. In the Budget, we announced measures to make banking executives more accountable, so that they will all have to be registered. If they do the wrong thing, they will essentially lose their registration. APRA can take that away. They will lose the ability to continue working in the sector.
We’ve also taken measures to ensure that bonuses are not paid all in one hit, that they have to be, 40 per cent for most bank executives and 60 per cent for the senior people, have got to be deferred for at least four years. Now that’s modelled on measures that were taken in the UK.
Turning to question of inquiries; what APRA is doing is doing a targeted examination of the Commonwealth Bank, which will report in six months. You see my focus is on getting results and protecting Australian customers of banks.
Look, Royal Commissions have their use there’s no question about that. But a Royal Commission into the banks would take many, many years before it was concluded, before you got any recommendations.
We need action now. So we’ve just talked about what we’re doing with bank executive remuneration. Rather than waiting three years for a royal commission, we’re introducing the legislation when the Parliament comes back.
We established a one-stop shop, so that people who have problems with a bank or an insurance company or a financial adviser or superannuation, can take that to one -in effect- ‘super ombudsman’ who will be able to help them get a resolution.
Now what people want is resolutions, they want compensation. An inquiry, a Royal Commission, it cannot compensate anyone. It can’t change a law. All it can do is hear evidence - over a long period of time inevitably and at great cost - and then make some recommendations, inevitably years into the future.
LEON BYNER:
Prime Minister just quickly, there’s been this wave of dissent which seems to have been imported out of the United States for what’s happened there with statues of Robert E. Lee, into our statues and what they represent and British colonization and Australia Day.
How do you feel about councils involving themselves in discussing these matters?
PRIME MINISTER:
We stand by our history and our Australian values. My Government’s position and my position is that we should honour Australia on Australia Day, on the 26th of January.
Australia Day ceremonies begin, as we know, with an acknowledgement of our First Australians. They always begin with a Welcome to Country, and acknowledgment of country.
They honour and celebrate our multicultural society.
They honour our history and they generally end with a citizenship ceremony in which you’ll have a new citizen, you might have a little baby in the arms of her migrant mother.
So we honour our entire, extraordinary achievement as Australians. We are the most successful multicultural society in the world. We are strong in our diversity. We should honour that and be proud of it and that’s what we do on Australia Day.
As far as the statues are concerned, Bill Shorten is in the paper today basically rewarding vandalism. Now, you had shocking criminal vandalism against statues in Sydney’s Hyde Park over the weekend.
Bill Shorten’s response to that, has been to say that the inscription should be changed. I mean, how absurd. What’s he going to do get a chisel out and start changing the inscriptions on statues that are a hundred years old, or a hundred and forty years old?
I mean these are part of our history. If councils or somebody else wants to put up a statue that reflects a different view of history, they can do that. If they want to have an interpretive plaque somewhere, they can do that.
I mean that proposition that you start revising, reediting your history, is thoroughly Stalinist. I mean this is what Stalin did; when he bumped off one of his henchmen Leon, he would not only you know shoot them, then they’d go back and they’d doctor all the photographs, so that they became ‘non-persons’.
I mean we’ve got to recognise our history. Recognise that a statue like the one of Captain Cook which was put up in 1879, of course speaks to the values and perspectives of 1879. That’s no reason why we can’t put up another monument, nearby or somewhere else, which speaks to perspectives and historical perspectives of 2017.
But he can’t - I mean what are we going to do, go into the library and start pulling out history books from the 19th century and burning them because we don’t like 19th century historians’ view of our history?
This is an absurd, totalitarian, intolerant approach to our history.
A free society, does not burn old books, it writes new ones.
It doesn’t tear down old statues, it builds new ones.
It honours its history and that’s what we should do.
LEON BYNER:
Malcolm Turnbull thanks for joining us today.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thanks Leon.
[ENDS]