HADLEY:
Special guest in the studio, the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, good morning.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good morning Ray, great to be back.
HADLEY:
I've got to tell you a funny story.
PRIME MINISTER:
Please.
HADLEY:
Now one of the things that I get emails about from other parts of the world, they find it strange that you, as our Prime Minister, make yourself so readily available for programmes like this one and sometimes, I know you go on with Neil Mitchell nearly every Friday, and put yourself up there to be questioned. You got us on the hop today, so you were here a bit earlier than we thought. So I sent a young...you've got to understand this to believe this, this is the Prime Minister, you know the most important bloke in the country, some days, and other days when Big Brother and Eddie McGuire are on the front page maybe not. So we got the one-iron, who works with me at the football, we said the Prime Minister's here early, go downstairs, and bring him up to the building, without thinking any more about it. So I'm five to ten looking up and here's the Prime Minister of Australia standing in the call vetting area. I said what's happened? So one iron has brought you, dumped you here and taken off! And one iron has been censured and said one iron what you got to do if someone important comes in you've got to take them to the boardroom and put them there, don't leave them in the call vetting area.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well he brought me to the centre of 2GB power, so....
HADLEY:
You've created another first, you've created another first. Anyway welcome, I'm sorry about the way in which you were delivered to me.
PRIME MINISTER:
Don't worry at all.
HADLEY:
I appreciate that. Now a couple of things. I jokingly said Eddie McGuire and Big Brother have kept you and other politicians off the front page, and we'll talk about that maybe later. But Peter Costello tried to ram you back on the front page I noted yesterday. Are you in accord with him about his plans to take financial control of States?
PRIME MINISTER:
I certainly think that we need to go on debating the respective roles of the Commonwealth and the States. I think what we have to understand about this is that people don't really care who does things as long as they get done and too often these debates between the Commonwealth and the States are power trading debates - in other words the States say you can't impinge on...in...encroach on our rights or other people say everything should be run by the Commonwealth. I find going around this country that people are very pragmatic, they say to me we don't care who does it, as long as it gets done, and if it's not being done well at a State level they want the Commonwealth do it, and if it's not being done well at a Commonwealth level they want the States to do it.
Increasingly people think of themselves as Australians. I think States' rights passion in this country was never all that strong, might have been some years ago, it will be fairly strong on Wednesday night down in Melbourne, but that's for fun, for sport, it's not about running the country. I think people want a good outcome for Australia. And my attitude to all of these things is that if an existing arrangement is not producing a good outcome for Australia, we ought to change it.
Now particularly Peter raised the question of regulation at ports. Now I agree with him. The ports should be subject to a single stream of regulation and we've worked out a compromise at the last COAG meeting and I said to the Premiers if that doesn't work we'll come back to this issue. Now I hope it works. If it works, well we don't need to come back to it, if it doesn't work, we do need to come back to it because this country will live or perish on the strength of its exports and we can't have any impediments when it comes to the regulation of our ports.
HADLEY:
What about something equally important; health?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I'm not convinced that if the Federal Government ran public hospitals, they'd necessarily be any more efficient. Bureaucracy at a federal level can be just as inefficient as at State level. I think what we need to do is to eliminate the overlaps in health and we've come some way towards doing that. I guess the greatest grizzle I have about the States is that we gave them a lot more money with the GST but whenever they get into a problem they always say they'd solve it if only we give them still more.
I think States are suffering from an unwillingness to be accountable for their own mistakes. If we make a mistake with the Army we don't try and blame the States. And I say to them if they make a mistake with public hospitals they shouldn't try and blame us.
HADLEY:
Education?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well education, a lot of people say, let all of that be run by the States. I don't agree with that because the teacher unions would bully State Governments over time into limiting support for independent schools and I am dead against the Federal Government vacating the education field because my great fear is that the anti-independent school lobby within the teacher unions would get control of state education decisions and bully State Governments out of helping private education.
The education thing doesn't work too badly. The curriculum is run by the States. The government schools are run by the States. The Federal Government provides top-up funding for government schools and provides most of the funding for independent schools.
I do think in the area of universities it's anomalous that you can have the Federal Government providing all the money, but universities are still regulated by the States. I think that is ridiculous, if we pay all the money we should be responsible for the regulation.
HADLEY:
Now every interview you've done, I would think for the last two years plus, has raised the spectre of what you will do in the future. I hear the sound bites on our news service from other states, I see the TV coverage and all the rest of it. Now there's one out of left field, Bennelong, with the electoral boundaries, they say, making your seat even more marginal. I think Malcolm Mackerras has said today that you'll resign from the top job before the next election....
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh yes...
HADLEY:
News to you?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeh, well...
HADLEY:
Will Bennelong be harder to win?
PRIME MINISTER:
Bennelong, according to my calculations, the margin which I had at the last election of four and half per cent, according to my calculations has gone to down to somewhere between four and four and a half, I've picked up about three... about 5000 voters around the Ermington area and I've picked up about 1700 voters in the sort Carlingford-Beecroft area and the effect of that is to slightly reduce my notional majority based on last time's figures.
HADLEY:
Ermington's one of those funny places but. It's changing demographic...
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh yes...
HADLEY:
It was a housing commission area...
PRIME MINISTER:
That's right.
HADLEY:
My dad was a butcher at Betty Cuthbert Avenue at Ermington. It's changing now, it's young couples in the main...married young couples who are buying their first home.
PRIME MINISTER:
A lot of parts of my electorate have done that. Putney, when I first became the Member for Bennelong, I got 33 per cent in Putney. At the last election it was one of my best polling booths.
HADLEY:
It's a sought after area, with views of the Parramatta River.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeh, it changed in 30 years. So you get that kind of thing happening. Look I think the Liberal Party will hold Bennelong, it's a slightly....
HADLEY:
...whoever sits in Bennelong.... I don't know.
PRIME MINISTER:
It's a tougher ask and I don't think there's any doubt about the party holding the seat. But you know I never take the people for granted, I haven't in 30 years and I want to say to all of those new people who are coming in to the electorate, I'll be working very hard for them.
HADLEY:
Okay, now, Nicholas Cowdery often takes me and others like me to task for not wanting our own business in relation to the DPP here in New South Wales. I note that he's broken his own rule, that he's now trying to help the Federal Government in relation to David Hicks. The ruling that was made last week and now the interference being run by Nicholas Cowdery. You have said quite clearly what you think should happen to Hicks at the moment...
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I think Hicks should be brought to trial as soon as possible. The American Supreme Court has said that the current military commission is not good enough, so therefore they've got to change it. They've either got to establish a military commission that does comply with the rules laid down by the Supreme Court or alternatively they've got to try him before a court-martial or trial him before a civilian court and we are saying to the Americans and Philip Ruddock spoke to the American Attorney-General, Gonzales, over the weekend. We're saying to the Americans we want this to happen and we want this to happen quickly, but I am not much interested in this bloke coming back to Australia without facing some trial in America because we can't try him here.
And the allegations, I stress they're allegations against him, are very serious and I'm not moved by the view that just because we've run into this difficulty we should immediately call for him to be brought home.
HADLEY:
The IR laws, now I was of the view and probably still am that we needed to make some changes. I sat here on another radio station and now on this programme taking calls from employers saying look a bloke thieved from me, I need to have footage of him doing it, I've got to have someone... I can't get rid of him, I've got someone who's being counter-productive, I can't unload them, it's archaic, it's terrible and so I to a certain extent supported changes in IR laws.
But then we hear stories like the one I've documented on my programme about a fellow on the mid north coast of New South Wales, 25 years service, doesn't have a contract and doesn't really come under any award, he works his way up from being a service technician to being the service manager. The company is sold on the Friday, he gets the punt and is not legally entitled to anything other than his holiday pay and his long service leave.
Can we ever get to the stage...I think I'm going to ask you, where we can actually legislate against people who are not really fair when it comes to employing people?
PRIME MINISTER:
Ray, very hard, very, very hard to do that. You've quoted an example, in my understanding and have some investigation into that case, my understanding is it's not in any way the product of our new laws.
HADLEY:
They could have done that before...
PRIME MINISTER:
Exactly, exactly, because this bloke was not apparently employed other than under what's called a common law contract and there was no statutory entitlement to a redundancy.
Now if you say why don't we legislate to make it impossible that you'll get a rotten employer who'll do something unfair, I don't think you can devise a law that covers every contingency any more than you can devise a law which protects a vulnerable small businessman if he has a couple of thieving employees, and that does happen. Human nature being what it is, 98 per cent of employees do the right thing, 98 per cent of employers do the right thing, it's very, very difficult. I mean we'll continue to look at those situations. I've said if there's any finetuning we can do with the existing laws. But I do stress as I understand it, that particular case is not a result of our new laws.
HADLEY:
Well have there been cases that have been brought to your attention by either the media or the opposition or anyone else that you can look at and say, gee whiz we need to have a solution for that, we can't have that happening...
PRIME MINISTER:
I think too early, a bit too early for me to say. I have said all along, Ray, that we are not going to alter the fundamental direction of these laws, I believe in them and nothing that's happened in the last three months changes my view one iota. But if there are, some anomalies emerge, and there is some fine tuning, well we're quite happy to undertake that, quite happy to do so. I'm not so pigheaded as to take the view that with a big change like this there mightn't be some things that you need to look at.
HADLEY:
Okay. You've got Mark Vaile, trade talks in Geneva, the World Trade Organisation talking there. There's information coming back from reporters that there's some sort of crisis. That cuts to farm subsidies are at a stalemate, have you had information like this?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, I spoke to Mark last night and the situation is that we've run into the sand. The Americans made, what I thought was a reasonably generous offer last September, to phase out their subsidies by 2013. The European response in my opinion was not enough and there the stalemate is.
Now I don't think the thing has fallen over completely. What will happen is that everybody will go back to their home countries and then the World Trade Organisation will get people together again, hopefully before the end of July.
But it is critical we don't allow these talks to fall over. But they'll fall over unless the countries that practise the highly protectionist agricultural policies-and that's the Americans, the European Union and the Japanese-agree to reduce their protection. The Americans to their credit got the ball rolling and unless there's an adequate response from the Europeans, it won't happen. So I still believe that the big stumbling block is the intransigence of the European Union.
HADLEY:
I can't imagine that you and your wife on a Sunday night put your feet up and have a look at Big Brother on a regular basis, but you know that they've taken you and other politicians off the front page of newspapers over the past few days, along with Eddie McGuire, as I mentioned earlier.
But what about standards? I mean I respond to listeners to this programme and callers to this programme by saying the oldest weapon is the remote, you just switch it off or change channels, but there does seem to be a shift away, particularly on the Ten Network, which is aimed at a much younger demographic, to things that we wouldn't have accepted, maybe three, four, five years ago.
PRIME MINISTER:
I agree with that. You can give too complicated a response to something like this. I think it is just a question of good taste and I don't like heavy handed regulation. The business community is always saying to me let us self regulate. Well here's a great opportunity for Channel Ten to do a bit of self regulation and get this stupid programme off the air.
HADLEY:
Alright. Now when Andrew Johns made this announcement last Thursday, I thought well Cricket New South Wales lost leave of their senses, but all of a sudden I was expecting on Friday for a cricket tragic to be included in the 20-20. I didn't know what State, you'd play for your home State New South Wales, you'd offend all the other States.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes I definitely wouldn't do that, I'd only be available for an Australian team. But I don't think I'd get chosen mate.
HADLEY:
Well Andrew Johns didn't think he'd get chosen for the Blues either.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I mean I think, look he's a wonderful footballer, terrific bloke. See I sort of regard 20-20 cricket as entertainment and exhibition cricket rather than serious cricket and therefore I sort of don't take the composition of the teams all that seriously. But in fairness to some of younger players who do, I can understand their sensitivity. Cricket Australia's a bit upset about it but the New South Wales Cricket Association has a slightly different view. I think it just underlines a bit the...that this is entertainment, it's not serious cricket.
HADLEY:
World championship wrestling or something like that, it's for theatre not...
PRIME MINISTER:
Exactly.
HADLEY:
And the thing about it is and I had that view as well that, oh gee, but you'd get maybe 1500 people, 2000 people to watch it in Newcastle. You throw Andrew Johns into the equation, you get maybe...
PRIME MINISTER:
There is no doubt about it and look it's not for me to say you can't do it, I mean, I don't run cricket, I only follow it and love it, but it's up to the people who run it. But I think it does sort of underline that point. It does draw an audience and I'm a cricket traditionalist but if it brings new people into the game, that's great, but don't expect me to be a spectator at 20-20, thank you.
HADLEY:
Alright. Well thank you very much for your time, for the extended chat, I do appreciate it. I will find someone else to escort you back to your car so you don't....
PRIME MINISTER:
Okay.
HADLEY:
Thanks Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER:
Okay.
[ends]