E&OE……………………………………………………………………………………
CORDEAUX:
I see interest rates remain on hold, have you got a comment?
PRIME MINISTER:
I expected that they would keep interest rates on hold and it was the right decision to take. What will happen in the future I won’t speculate about but interest rates remain very low and that’s important given that the international economy is a little weak and we have the economic effect of the drought beginning to be felt around the country. So I would imagine that those two factors were in the mind of the Reserve Bank when it took that decision.
CORDEAUX:
The economy is slowing of its own accord through other influences and you expect what sort of growth for the next 12 months? Do you think…
PRIME MINISTER:
It’s closer to three now, I mean we’ve had four for the last five or six years, it’ll be closer to three this year. The drought will have an affect, this is a very bad drought, I had a briefing yesterday, Cabinet did from the Deputy Prime Minister and the met bureau is saying that 70 per cent of the country is in a very severe or severe water deprivation situation if I can put it like that. The common language would be 'drought' but not of all that 70 per cent is officially declared as drought but it is very bad and it’s approaching the droughts we had in 1982 and in the 1940’s and in the years immediately after Federation, that’s how bad it is. And unfortunately the advice we have from the meteorological bureau is that we’re not going to see any break in the weather patterns before possibly March or April of next year. Now that is pretty grim news. Now the met bureau, it will be the first to admit it has been wrong in the past and we hope it’s wrong on this occasion but the outlook is not good and the economic consequences of this are going to be felt for a long time into the future. The only mitigating factors are that the world prices for those Australian farmers who have been able to keep herds and stock and sew crops are quite good, that’s the only bright spot and if you’re a farmer that’s in one of the few areas, I think there are one or two areas in South Australia that have got a lot of rain, you’re not doing too badly.
CORDEAUX:
Let me ask you this, you’ve got all sorts of people giving you advice, you’ve got the Farmhand people and some pretty heavy individuals involved in that telling you what you should be doing to drought proof the country and I know you’ve said on this programme before that you’re more than prepared to listen. Now you’ve got this other group called the Wentworth committee, they’re telling you that you can’t drought proof the land, you’ve got others trying to say that all of the money that may come from the full sale of Telstra should go to managing our waterways and doing something for the bush and the country generally. What is your feeling on all of this? You must be getting it from every angle?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well my feeling is that we do as a country need to see if we can better provide in the future against the impact of drought. You cannot literally drought proof Australia and I don’t think it would be fair to them and even the Farmhand group, who are doing a great job and I want to thank them for the leadership they’re displaying in the private sector in particular in helping people in country Australia, I don’t think even they have said you can completely drought proof the country. But what everybody is now doing is coming together and seeing if there aren’t ways in which we can conserve water, recognise that it’s a very precious asset, it’s got to be appropriate priced, you’ve got to give farmers proper property rights, if they have a water entitlement now it can’t be arbitrarily taken away from them without some kind of compensation. And what came out of our discussion yesterday was a recognition that in order to make progress as is so often the case there’s no one single silver bullet solution, you have to take steps on a number of fronts. Now the proposal from Richard Pratt for the covering of drains in certain local areas, the advice we had from our experts is that can make a difference and there is some work in conjunction with Mr Pratt’s foundation now being undertaken investigating that. From an overall national point of view the capital cost involved in that would be such as to make it unlikely that it would be economic to do it all over the country so once again it’s a question of a bit of that idea makes sense, from a nation-wide point of view not necessarily. Water is a valuable commodity and it has to be properly priced and it shouldn’t be wasted and we have to find ways of ensuring that both of those things occur.
The experts take the view that there’s not a lot of feasibility in the turning the rivers inland approach. That was talked about yesterday and an assessment was made, now this is just their view, I’m not saying it’s the only view and I’m always ready to listen to alternative views but they’ve got to be properly based and you’ve got recognise that if you have a lot of rain falling in the northern part of the country and it’s going out to sea, as a lot of does, some of it of course passes through areas which are heavily stocked with fish and that has an economic component, it maintains communities, it provides often many of those costal rivers which are the basis of a tourist industry. So there’s a lot of interconnection in all of these things and what is good about the debate that is taking place at the moment is the whole country is getting focused on what is a big national challenge and I want to see that accelerate, I want to work with the states and the local government because we’re all in this together, I don’t have all the answers and I’m not pretending that I do. But I’m very committed personally and as the leader of the government to trying to capture the sentiment in Australia at the moment to do something more about the challenge of water shortages, we can’t do anything about the current drought and it would be unrealistic to imagine we’ll never have droughts in the future. But it’s not unrealistic to imagine that over time by taking steps in a lot of areas we couldn’t make the situation better.
CORDEAUX:
Scientists say that they should do something about banning the clearing of land and that seems to be pretty logical, they say that maybe food should be more expensive to make farmers more viable, they talk about water rights, but then who’s going to pay? The Federal Government or the states? There’s an enormously big question but a very important one.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it’s a very important one and I think we can work our way through all of these things, I’m not, you know I don’t think there’s much doubt that reducing land clearing is a step in the right direction. We’ve already started of course to tackle the salinity problem which is an offshoot of that issue. As far as the price of the food is concerned, well in the end the market will decide that, it’s not for the government to try and fix the price of food, the market will determine that. We have very high quality food in Australia, it's very plentiful, the problem of course that farmers face is the corruption of world markets, they can’t sell their produce on world markets because the subsidies of the European Union and the Japanese and also the Americans in some areas have depressed the price and they don’t get a decent return.
CORDEAUX:
Just quickly, if the remaining section, portion of Telstra is sold, do you side with that money being spent on the environment or do you side with it being spent to wipe out debt?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well my view is that we should look at wiping out our debt, but by wiping out debt you save money because if you’ve borrowed money, which the Government has from the people, then the government is paying interest each year and if we pay back the money we’ve borrowed we’re no longer paying that interest and we save that money and we save it not just in one year but each year. So if the rest of Telstra were to be sold at a reasonable price then over time you would save some hundreds of millions of dollars in interest each year indefinitely. So that of itself, even if you use all of the money to repay debt, would provide an annual saving of some hundreds of millions of dollars and that money would obviously be available for spending on anything the government chose or going towards reductions in tax, that would be a decision that we would need to make. But I hold to the view that the capital that comes from any sale of an asset ought to be used to be repay debt and if you get a dividend and therefore extra money to spend by wiping out the interest payments. A lot of people think that if you sell the rest of Telstra for say $40 billion, and I’m just plucking that figure out of the air, then that $40 billion comes into the budget in the year in which you sell Telstra, it doesn’t, that $40 billion doesn’t actually, it’s not a receipt, it’s not like collecting tax. That $40 billion goes to the payment of debt and if you spend $5 billion notionally out of that $40 billion the $5 billion appears on the debit side of the books, but the $40 billion doesn’t appear on the credit side. There are a lot of people who sort of think it does, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t work that way because it’s not a revenue item. You only get the $40 billion once. You don’t get it twice. You don’t get it each year. You just get it once. And the thing you do get each year is the interest saving because you pay the $40 billion to reduce debt and you’re no longer paying interest from that debt. That’s the saving you get after making adjustments for no longer having a dividend stream.
CORDEAUX:
Have you sounded out the Greens who are getting it would seem more and more powerful? They would probably side with you on the sale of what is left of Telstra if you made some guarantees about the bush.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I haven’t sounded out the Greens. I haven’t had any formal discussions with anybody on this because we haven’t made a decision to sell the rest of Telstra as yet, and we won’t make a decision to sell the rest of Telstra unless and until we’re satisfied that the telecommunications conditions in the bush are up to scratch. I expect to get the report of the Estens committee of enquiry at the end of this week and depending on what is in that and it will take a few weeks to study obviously, depending on what is in that then we may be able to move towards a judgment as to whether conditions in the bush are up to scratch. But we said in the election campaign we wouldn’t proceed to a further sale unless and until we were satisfied that everything was up to scratch in the bush and the Estens enquiry will be very important in making that judgment.
CORDEAUX:
There have been a few public opinion polls around the place about gun control and it certainly has been a hot issue on this program. We put it on our online poll and we got a result of 99 per cent saying that taking hand guns away from law-abiding citizens would not make the country any safer – 99 per cent.
PRIME MINISTER:
Look law-abiding citizens, I mean by definition somebody who is law-abiding is not going to misuse something. But the problem is that no matter what kind of logic that statement makes, there are too many hand guns that fall into the hands of people who are not law-abiding. And what we want to do, and I’m very strongly committed to this, is to basically say if you’re a sporting shooter to be defined under certain conditions and you can have access if you’re in the police or the security industry you can. And other than that you don’t need a hand gun.
CORDEAUX:
Well that’s pretty logical.
PRIME MINISTER:
And I think most people would agree with that. And the problem though is that whatever may be the intention of current state laws, that is not what happens in practice. It is alleged, and I say this very carefully, because it is alleged that the person involved in a recent crime in Melbourne had access to seven different types of hand guns. Now I don’t think anybody believes that that is defensible. I don’t.
CORDEAUX:
No, well the law…
PRIME MINISTER:
The state laws have allowed this to happen and we want to tighten it. And I think the Police Ministers have made a lot of progress. I haven’t seen all the fine detail.
CORDEAUX:
The extraordinary thing Prime Minister about that Melbourne case was that he was somebody who couldn’t speak English and I find it amazing that he could get either a drivers licence, let alone a pistol licence. And he wasn’t a member of a sporting club. Amazing.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well as I say, the laws seem very inadequate to say the least and that is the reason why I reacted as I did and why the public apparently agrees with the approach I’m advocating. I haven’t seen the detail that has come out of the Darwin meeting, all the detail. But it looks as though we have made progress.
CORDEAUX:
What would you like to have happen?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I want what I have described a moment ago. I would want a situation where if you are of police, security industry – a tightly controlled…
CORDEAUX:
And legitimate member of a sporting shooters club.
PRIME MINISTER:
And yes – legitimate. And that could be properly defined by reference to recognised international competition. Now that is okay, and I think the public will go along with that but we want to be satisfied about the people who are claiming to members of sporting clubs, that it is legitimate and not just a cover and we’ve got to, you know, perhaps run a bit of a look see at some of those shooting clubs too to see that they’re not covers for something else.
CORDEAUX:
The loopy left will of course want you to go a lot further.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I’m always interested in a commonsense approach to these things. I don’t want to stop people aspiring to participate in Commonwealth or Olympic Games in international sporting events. I don’t think anybody does. And I must say that people that I have met in that area have always been pretty responsible, decent people. But I’m also conscious that you can get some fringe elements around these organisations. You’ve got to be careful about that. And it’s really… we can agree on some rules and we’re talking to sporting shooters. We can agree on some rules that protect that. But beyond that for the average citizen, I say no. And it is just ludicrous that people should have access, and a lot of them do. And the rules are too lax.
CORDEAUX:
What about psychological testing to make sure that…
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I’m not against that. I’m not quite sure how you make that work without perhaps being unfair to some people. But anything that imposes a tight regime that doesn’t make it difficult for the average, decent citizen who is just interested in sporting shooting, as I’m interested in golf or something like that, I mean they’ve got a right to pursue those things. But they’ll have to accept because the weapon they’re using is inherently dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands, they have to accept that there is a tighter regime and I believe they will because they’re interested in public safety as you and I are and they’re also aware of public opinion.
CORDEAUX:
Would you take a call from Peter?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeah sure.
CORDEAUX:
Peter, here is the Prime Minister.
CALLER:
Good morning Prime Minister and thank you for speaking with me. I have to tell you that there is a wide section around the community that the approach to guns has been driven totally by your own personal dislike of them. And that may not be what you intend but it nevertheless is the case. And I need to make three or four points to you. There is so much I would like to say, I really hardly know where to start. But the first thing I would like to say is that the three prongs of the Government approach to the problem which are fundamentally bans – that is the tightening up of who may hold what; buybacks - which are not buybacks at all - but indications from the Government that they will take control of guns that have been privately owned; and gun registration. These three prongs are the three guaranteed failing approaches to all gun control worldwide - If you look at it and do the research. The thing that most troubles me is that that is so clearly established in all literature - everybody knows that where the serious work is done. Yet, The Australian Institute of Criminology appears to have been evoked to promote unimportant variables, including such things as firearms harm, and I've heard you speak about this the other day, and Australia's murder rate at 1.8 has been steady for so long and it is now very fashionable to say - if we just take away certain guns and if we can't get them, we'll take certain kinds of guns within types, we'll break it down into classifications and sub-classifications and then there'll be fewer firearm harm. But in fact, it does nothing whatever to bring down the murder rate, or anything to bring down the aggravated assault rates, or anything to bring down the suicide rates - and those are the matters that count. So, my point to you is that if this independent research has been totally ignored and I wonder how it is that the Government instrumentalities, which masquerade under the traps of being advisories bodies, don't let the independent research come forward.
CORDEAUX:
All right, Peter. Let me get the Prime Minister in here.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well Peter, I listened carefully to what you had to say. I'm strongly committed on this issue because I don't want to see Australia go down the American path. There's a lot about America I admire, but one thing I don't admire about America is the worship of guns in that country and it's brought untold misery and harm and also delivered to America a very high murder rate for a stable, open, western society. You can't compare the murder rate in America with the murder rate in undemocratic, or more turbulent society. But compared with countries like Australia, and the United Kingdom, and France, America does have a very high murder rate. So, that's my motivation. Now, as far as the research is concerned, I have never argued, and I would never argue, that if you ban all guns completely that you would eliminate murder. What I'm saying is that if you dramatically reduce the number of guns, that will have a beneficial impact on the murder rate. And there's evidence, independent of the Government, that that has already begun to occur as a result on the ban on longarms, coming out of Port Arthur in 1996. Now, this research was carried out in an American University by an Australian, to my knowledge completely unconnected with the Institute of Criminology, and that demonstrated that the number of gun related murders has fallen in the six years since the prohibition on longarms was introduced in the wake of the Port Arthur tragedy. Now, they are measured claims I make. I'm not making absurd claims. I'm not pretending that we can abolish evil and unhappiness by getting rid of guns - I'm not saying that at all. But I do think we can make the contribution towards a safer Australia. And I do think we have a capacity to avoid going down the American path. I devoutly hope that this country has the wisdom to take that decision.
CORDEAUX:
Thanks, Peter. Good morning, Bill.
CALLER:
Hello. Hello, Jeremy. Hello, Mr Howard. Mr Howard, I want to ask if you're aware of the Australian working life residency rules of 25 years, aren't you? And I want to ask you why you won't include the pension bonus years? I mean after all, people on the pension bonus are not drawing the pension. So why won't you include those years?
PRIME MINISTER:
What was… it was a very faint sound. I'm sorry, Jeremy. What was the first thing he said?
CORDEAUX:
What did you call that - Australian working life residency?
PRIME MINISTER:
The Australian working life residency.
CALLER:
Of 25 years.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeah.
CALLER:
Now, what I want to know is why you won't include the pension bonus in that?
PRIME MINISTER:
The pension…
CORDEAUX:
Is this about British pensioners…
CALLER:
No, no. We've got to go back to look after my wife brother next year David - he's got Parkinson's - in England for two years. Now, they said in the Australian rules that you can't… that you lose some of your pension if you haven't been here 25… worked for 25 years. Now, next year we have worked 26, but this Government will not include the fact that I'm now 69 nearly and my wife is 66 and still a full-time registered nurse. They won't include the year between 61 and 66 and 69, they just won't include them even though, even though, you're not drawing the pension. They won't include those years.
CORDEAUX:
Do they say why?
CALLER:
No, they just won't include them. I think that Howard knows about this, actually.
CORDEAUX:
Well, it doesn't sound as if he does.
CALLER:
[Inaudible]
PRIME MINISTER:
I'm not trying to avoid the question, but because I don't know what it is and it's very very faint. I think that the gentlemen, as I understand, you correct me if I'm wrong, the gentlemen is saying that the years that he and his wife were in Australia between what - 1961 and 66 aren't included in the calculation in the 25.
CALLER:
Yeah, yes.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, I don't immediately know the answer to that, let me honestly say. If you leave your name and address, I'll found out and I'll let him know.
CALLER:
All right.
PRIME MINISTER:
I mean, I'd only be stabbing at it if I tried to hazard a reason. Occasionally, I get questions I can't answer and it's better to say so.
CORDEAUX:
… I'll get Bill's number. Now Terry Hicks has called again. He's called once before when you were on the program. His son is accused of terrorism. Will you take a call from him?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, yes. But I have… I mean, I'm quite happy to do that.
CORDEAUX:
Well, the reason I ask is that I don't want you to feel that you're being ambushed on this program.
PRIME MINISTER:
No, no. Well, I’m happy to take it again, but the last time I was on, he rang me and I don't know that my answer's going to be any different.
CORDEAUX:
Well Terry, what would you like to say to the Prime Minister?
CALLER:
All that I need to know is how would I get in touch with Mr Downer because I've been trying to get in touch with him for a quite a while now?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, he's got an office in King William Street, Adelaide.
CALLER:
Yeah, but he's never there.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, I'm sure he's there from time to time…
CALLER:
No.
PRIME MINISTER:
But as the Foreign Minister, he must travel around. Look Terry, get in touch… I mean, he's got staff there and he's got staff in his Canberra office and the question of how he and his staff deal with inquiries is really a matter for them. I can't… I'm not going to tell my Ministers how to respond to inquiries from the public. Now Mr Hicks, I'm quite certain that if you wrote to Mr Downer, he'd write back to you very promptly. I'm quite certain that if you rang his office, your inquiries would be very courteously dealt with. And I'm quite certain that perhaps even one of Mr Downer's staff is listening to this exchange and I'm sure they would nod their head in agreement with what I say.
CORDEAUX:
Look, I know he's in Adelaide today and he…
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeah, he did an interview on ABC Radio earlier this morning from Adelaide. Now, I know he's in Adelaide today because I saw him in Brisbane yesterday and he told me he was going back to Adelaide. But look, as you could imagine, I don't hold the hands of my Ministers as to their daily movements. They're grown men and women and they can handle those things themselves.
CORDEAUX:
Prime Minister, we're just about out of time. Congratulations on your opinion poll, your popularity poll. I mean, is that an absolute record for you?
PRIME MINISTER:
I don't know. Look, I don't really want to talk much about that. I've experienced every level of opinion poll ratings in my political career - the high and the low. So, I developed a good rule when I was doing badly in opinion polls not to talk about it and I think it's good to maintain the consistency of that approach when things are a little better.
CORDEAUX:
Prime Minister, thank you very much for your time. And I guess this is going to be the last time we'll speak before Christmas, so let me wish you and your family and your staff a very happy Christmas. And thank you for all the time you've given us on the show.
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh, that's very good and to you too, Jeremy. But maybe we will speak before Christmas, maybe not, have a nice Christmas.
CORDEAUX:
I hope so, I hope so. Thank you, sir. Bye bye, Prime Minister of Australia.
[ends]