Alan Jones interviews Tony Abbott

Alan Jones interviews Tony Abbott today on Radio 2GB, Sydney, 21 September, 2010:

ALAN JONES:

The Opposition Leader is with me in the studio. Good morning.

TONY ABBOTT:

Morning, Alan.

ALAN JONES:

How are things?

TONY ABBOTT:

Oh, things are fine. It’s a beautiful day outside. The traffic’s flowing reasonably well by Sydney’s standards. Things couldn’t be better in that sense but unfortunately we’ve got I think an incompetent and chaotic Government in Canberra. But, I’m not here to complain, Alan.

ALAN JONES:

You spoke to Mr Oakeshott yesterday about being Speaker?

TONY ABBOTT:

That’s right and, look, I’ve always supported an independent speakership but that doesn’t mean that the Speaker has to be an Independent.

ALAN JONES:

Right. Now, he’s not going to put his name forward. I mean, I can’t think we won’t go on, I can’t think of anymore person less suited to the speakership and I’ve said that before. On the other hand, what if neither the Government nor the Opposition offers a candidate for Speaker? Is there any likelihood of that happening?

TONY ABBOTT:

Look, as far as I’m concerned, Alan, we want a play a constructive role and we want the Parliament to work. Now, if the Government’s not going to put up one of its members to be Speaker and I don’t see why they shouldn’t – Harry Jenkins has been a pretty good Chair…

ALAN JONES:

You’d be happy with him?

TONY ABBOTT:

I’d be very happy for Harry Jenkins to continue…

ALAN JONES:

And you’d pair him?

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, there is this argument that it’s inconsistent with the spirit of section 40 of the Constitution. I’ve asked the Government to provide us with Solicitor-General advice on that and they say they’re coming back to us…

ALAN JONES:

If they stick Jenkins up though and he’s not paired, now for the benefit of our listeners that means that he doesn’t get a vote. A truly independent Speaker is just that, he’s independent of any voting on specific legislation, he basically is, he lacks any kind of role in the deliberative, or deliberations of the Parliament and therefore if he were to be such a person, Jenkins say, the current Speaker, he wouldn’t get a vote on any of the Government’s legislation. They then wouldn’t have the numbers in the House.

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, they’d be down one.

ALAN JONES:

Yep.

TONY ABBOTT:

Instead of having, with the Independents 76 votes, they’d only have 75 votes.

ALAN JONES:

Which doesn’t give them a majority.

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, it’d be 75-74. So, it’s a very tight situation. So, my suspicion, Alan, is that as I said the Government won’t want to nominate Harry Jenkins despite his undoubted qualities as a Chair. They’ll be more inclined to try to keep the numbers in the Chamber. That’s my suspicion…

ALAN JONES:

Well, what happens next? Do you have to talk to Julia Gillard about this?

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, I will have a discussion with the Prime Minister about it but as far as I’m concerned the Opposition will be as constructive as we possibly can be. We want to make this Parliament work. Yes, it’s going to be difficult but I don’t think that the public should go back to the polls any time soon. I regret the outcome but we’ve got to accept that this is democracy.

ALAN JONES:

Just on that, you to be constructive and so on, which everybody agrees with, on the other hand you opened by saying it was an incompetent Government, we’ve got another report in today on the Building the Education Revolution with massive wastes of money. I’ll come to you about a carbon tax in a moment. We’ve got a Budget deficit going through the roof, you’ve David Murray saying this kind of spending shouldn’t be made unless there are proven multipliers, there should be all sorts of economic modelling. None of that has happened. Now…

TONY ABBOTT:

And the boats keep coming, Alan.

ALAN JONES:

And the boats keep coming. Now, at such a way that they said in the election campaign they wouldn’t going to extend the Curtin facility. They are now obviously extending the Curtin facility. James Allan, the Professor of Law at the University of Queensland wrote recently – ‘in razor thin minority governments stability only ever benefits the team in power. The goal is to create a sort of after the fact sheen of legitimacy so voters forget what just happened.’ That Labor won fewer seats, that Labor’s campaign was so bad Julia Gillard was finished if she couldn’t entice two giant egos into her camp. So, if you are not, are going to be persuaded to some kumbaya that we’re going to sing all these little accommodating songs? Isn’t it incumbent upon you given that you believed the Government was the wrong government and the wrong policies for you to prosecute…

TONY ABBOTT:

Oh yes, Alan. Look, I mean, we will be holding this Government rigorously to account. But, we will be trying to do so in a way that the Australian public accept is fair. It will be hard but fair criticism…

ALAN JONES:

But, the Australian public are worried about the big things you said. You got 44.5 per cent of the primary, she got 38. They are worried about the big spending, the big taxing, the big government, the left wing agenda. They are worried about all of those things. You will be, you’ll give commitment, you’ll be unrelenting…

TONY ABBOTT:

Absolutely.

ALAN JONES:

…in opposing those things.

TONY ABBOTT:

Absolutely, look, unlike the Government we will stick with the commitments that we made during the election. We aren’t going to change our minds just because of the election result. Unlike Julia Gillard all bets weren’t off for us just because polling day passed.

ALAN JONES:

She’s wanting to say that things have changed now. Now, she said during the election campaign there will be no carbon tax. She was quite specific about that. Now of course Kloppers has opened his mouth and wants a carbon tax, I suppose that’s so that the existing mining tax will stay in place. Julia Gillard said during the election – ‘well I can’t tell you what that was about but I’ll tell you after the election.’ When are we going to find out what the deal is that she did with BHP, Rio Tinto and Xstrata on a mining tax?

TONY ABBOTT:

It’s a very good question, Alan. The fact is that this was a deal done between three big companies and two ministers in secret. As far as we’re aware there’s been no modelling done of the impact of this new tax. Obviously, all the other mining companies were excluded from the deal and that’s why they felt so aggrieved that they re-started their advertising campaign. This is a dodgy Government, there’s no doubt about that, Alan, and we will doing everything we can within the ordinary limits of procedure and civil discourse to hold this Government ferociously to account.

ALAN JONES:

Have you spoken to Kloppers?

TONY ABBOTT:

Not since he made his speech the other day, no.

ALAN JONES:

Would you be concerned? I mean, here’s a fellow, head of the biggest mining company in the world, who’s bar the bulk of his coal mining, is out of the country. So if you can seduce the Government into sticking a carbon tax on coal mining in this country then that will make him competitively more advantageous because his bulk of his interests are out of the country. He’s also got uranium, the biggest uranium deposits in the world and of course uranium would get carbon credits. I mean, the man hasn’t met his own emissions trading limits that were set by BHP when Chip Goodyear was in charge. What are we to make of these sorts of comments? Is he sucking up to government and trying to get the mining tax, which was a compromise deal, stay in place and in return I’ll support you on a carbon tax.

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, Alan, I think he’s entitled to a viewpoint, I just don’t agree with his viewpoint and the trouble with a carbon tax, regardless of what it might do to BHP, is that it will very much damage the hip pockets of ordinary Australians. I mean, the thing about our electricity prices is that they’ve been going through the roof for years and it’s just going to get worse, far, far worse, if there’s any form of a price on carbon…

ALAN JONES:

But, you’ve got this story today that the State Government’s working towards a timetable for scrapping all price controls on electricity and I can understand that the electricity suppliers would say, “well, if you’re going to whack a carbon tax on us our costs go up and we can’t pass them on”.

TONY ABBOTT:

Exactly right and that’s why this is such an economic own goal for Australia. Not only will it make it much more difficult for our coal industry and for our gas industry but it is going to hit the hip pockets of every Australian. A $40 a tonne carbon tax for instance has been estimated to double the price of electricity and this is the prospect that Australians face because of the Labor/Green alliance which is going to be running Australia for the next period of time.

ALAN JONES:

But Julia Gillard in the election said there would be no carbon tax.

TONY ABBOTT:

And again just as she explicitly denied that anything was happening at the Curtin air base just as her office explicitly denied that anything was happening at the Scherger air base, this was a blatant pre-election lie.

ALAN JONES:

Kevin Rudd’s strutting the world. Whose policies is he articulating?

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, I think he’s probably articulating Kevin Rudd’s policies.

ALAN JONES:

This new Government hasn’t met.

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, I think that Kevin…

ALAN JONES:

He’s out there talking about climate change.

TONY ABBOTT:

I think that Kevin Rudd still feels deeply resentful, Alan, about the fact that he was politically assassinated when in his view he remained the best person to lead the Labor Party into the election. Arguably, given the catastrophic loss of seats that the Labor suffered, particularly in Queensland, his judgement was right and Julia Gillard’s judgement and the judgement of the faceless men was wrong. So, I think what we’ve got with Kevin Rudd is someone who is going to feel permanently aggrieved that the prime ministership was quite illegitimately stripped away from him.

ALAN JONES:

You know a lot about sport, you’ve been involved in it, you’ve played it, you talk to sports people and you know them. If you were Prime Minister of Australia would you be happy about Australian athletes going to the Commonwealth Games in Delhi or even our cricket team playing Test matches over there when gunmen open fire on a tourist bus near New Delhi on Sunday and an Australian private security company claims there’s an 80 per cent chance of a terrorist attack in New Delhi during the Games and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is advising “there is a high risk of terrorist attack in New Delhi.”

TONY ABBOTT:

Alan, I’d be very wary of giving the terrorists a win and the trouble if there were big pull-outs from these Games it would appear to give terrorism a win. Now, I’m not close enough to the arrangements to say what the security is going to be like. I imagine that the Australian Government is in close contact with the Indian Government to satisfy itself that the best possible security is in place. I know that there has been conversation between Australian and other security services about Games security and provided we’re doing our best to ensure that these Games are as safe as they can be I’d very much hope that our athletes go and that the Games go ahead.

ALAN JONES:

Anna Bligh bought off the Greens at the last state election by introducing this Wild Rivers legislation, locking up Aboriginal land from indigenous economic development. In the last Parliament you put a Bill before the Parliament to revoke the Wild Rivers legislation. Bob Katter has opposed the Wild Rivers legislation. Windsor and Oakeshott say they’ve got open minds. Will this be a concern, a priority of yours to re-introduce this legislation into the new Parliament?

TONY ABBOTT:

Yes it will be, Alan. This is a real shocker this Wild Rivers Bill because it essentially takes away the land rights of the Aboriginal people of Cape York. I mean, these are the rights that they fought for years which a decade or so back were given to them amidst general approval and now they’ve been taken away by stealth in the name of environmentalism. Now, the idea that the Aboriginal people of Cape York are going to lay waste to their own country is just absurd. So, it is in fact a total sell out to the Greens in Queensland…

ALAN JONES:

I should just say before you ever thought of becoming Opposition Leader you actually lived with these people up there did you not for an extended period?

TONY ABBOTT:

Yeah, look, I’ve been a great admirer of Noel Pearson for years now, Alan, and in 2008 when I was the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs I spent three weeks in Cohen as a teacher’s aide. Last year I spent ten days in Aurukun as a kind of member of the truancy patrol up there. I think that what Noel Pearson is trying to do in Cape York, the encouragement that he’s giving to Aboriginal people and people generally to take more responsibility for their lives, it is prophetic and visionary leadership. It ought to be supported by government. It should not be undermined by the kind of cave-in to the Greens in Brisbane which the Queensland Government has orchestrated here and, yes, I think it’s very important that at an early stage the new federal Parliament has another go, and it will, as far as I’m concerned, have another go at overturning this bad Queensland Act.

ALAN JONES:

When Julia Gillard announced her Ministry she didn’t even mention disabilities. Then, as an after thought she put in a Parliamentary Secretary Jan McLucas. You have got Mitch Fifield as your Shadow Minister for Disability, full portfolio responsibility. How significant and important is a national disability insurance scheme and how much grunt are you going to give to it?

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, the Productivity Commission is enquiring into this very subject and I think that if one is feasible the Productivity Commission will try to find a way to make it work. We’ve got insurance schemes for various other issues such as disabilities arising out of motor vehicle accidents…

ALAN JONES:

You’ve got a Medicare fee, haven’t you?

TONY ABBOTT:

… and so on. So, look, I hope that the Productivity Commission can come up with a workable scheme because people with disabilities do need a better deal. I mean at the moment, it’s a complete lottery, the kind of care people with disabilities get, whether their disabilities arises from birth, whether there’s any possibility of medical negligence, whether it happens through a compensable accident or not and it would be much better if we could have a more general and better system for dealing with it.

ALAN JONES:

Absolutely. Malcolm Turnbull is the communications spokesman on the frontbench. Is that designed? Is he committed to the dismantling of this broadband network or to a wider education of the electorate about its limitations, no economic modelling, whatever, stack of taxpayers money tied up?

TONY ABBOTT:

Yeah, look, Malcolm wrote with great insight into the Government’s nationalised broadband network during the election. He is a rare political talent and I think this is exactly the right position to bring him back onto the front bench. The last thing we need Alan is a government owned nationalised telecommunications monopoly having spent years trying to dismantle the last one. Competitive markets are far more likely than a government monopoly to give us the high speed broadband services that we need at the right price.

ALAN JONES:

And a fixed piece of infrastructure that may be obsolete before it’s finished.

TONY ABBOTT:

Exactly right. I mean, you look at all the people who are sitting in cafes using the internet, they’re all using wifi. Not one of them is going to thank the Government for spending $43 billion of taxpayer money, running up billions and billions of extra debt if they’ve then got to go and find a cable somewhere to shove into their computer. We do not need to be chained to a cable in this day in age.

ALAN JONES:

As communications spokesperson though, is he allowed to comment on matters outside his portfolio? He said on the ABC, Malcolm Turnbull, the morning after he was restored to the front bench, “the Coalition has a policy on climate change. It’s not ideal from my point of view. Everyone knows I’d prefer a market based mechanism. I’m not going to flag now what I’ll be saying in Shadow Cabinet, but my view on climate change, the need for a carbon price, the fact that market based mechanisms are the most efficient way of cutting emissions…” and he went on and then when Kloppers made the statement that he did make about a carbon tax, he apparently called Kloppers speech “very thoughtful”. Is Malcolm Turnbull going to be allowed to comment outside his own portfolio areas?

TONY ABBOTT:

The short answer Alan is that every member of the Shadow Cabinet, however distinguished, has to abide by the Shadow Cabinet rules, but I’m certainly prepared to cut a bloke a little slack in the week he returns to the Shadow Ministry and obviously Malcolm has a certain exuberance which you wouldn’t want to restrain but he’ll be bound by the rules just as all of us are.

ALAN JONES:

But Abbott also has an unyielding sense of charity and forgiveness which shouldn’t be exploited.

TONY ABBOTT:

Fair enough and it won’t be.

ALAN JONES:

Ok, just on to Kloppers. In 2006, on the point I made before, the then Chief Executive Chip Goodyear said that BHP would cut greenhouse gas emissions per unit of production by six per cent by 2012. Last year they were tracking at three per cent above the 2006 base line. Carbon based energy use per unit of production was suppose to fall by 13 per cent over the period by BHP. It’s risen by eight per cent. Is Kloppers, you’ve said he’s entitled to his view, but is he grandstanding or saying one thing to the electorate out there but within his company doing another?

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, as I said Alan, look, I don’t want to get in an argument with BHP. My argument is with the Government and my argument is with any policy which imposes massive price hikes on the public. Let there be no mistake, a carbon tax would put electricity prices through the roof and that’s why it will continue to be opposed tooth and nail by the Coalition.

ALAN JONES:

Just finally, just coming back to this James Allan, Professor James Allan, who has also written, no opposition party gains anything at all from playing nice on peripheral issues with this sort of Frankenstein minority government. You just help them advance their core agenda. Now, do the people, the mass of people who voted for you, do these people know that you’re going to prosecute, continue to prosecute that case and identify things that are not in the national interest?

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, Alan, they saw me for nine months before the election. They know what I’m like and this leopard doesn’t change his spots.

ALAN JONES:

Ok. Just forget that, not easy for you to forget that you lost the election, but there’s a swath of correspondence coming to me about an electoral system which, firstly, it’s compulsory to vote, secondly it’s compulsory to vote preferentially and thirdly a preferential vote is worth as much as a primary vote. Is there something wrong, with not because you lost, but in general principle, is there something wrong with any or all of those three?

TONY ABBOTT:

Look, every electoral system has its supporters and its critics. Some would argue that the fairest system of all is first past the post system, like they have in the United Kingdom. I think the challenge for me and for politicians more generally is to work with the system we’ve got. By and large it’s served us well and I’m in no hurry to change it.

ALAN JONES:

And that means enrolments, the whole enrolment procedure?

TONY ABBOTT:

That’s another story. I’ve always thought that there is too much capacity for potential fraud in our system. I don’t see why people shouldn’t have to show more clearly who exactly they are when they go on the roll and I don’t see why people shouldn’t be required to show some sort of ID when they vote.

ALAN JONES:

Correct. And why should, for example, how many booths in your electorate?

TONY ABBOTT:

About 35.

ALAN JONES:

35 in Warringah. 35 booths. Why should Tony Abbott’s name be on the voting list at every booth? Why should the Electoral Commission say, Mr Abbott, you have been registered to vote at Manly School, Manly Public School at 55 Manly Road, Manly and that’s the only place your name will be, rather than have someone anonymouslygo around and be Tony Abbott at the 33 others. Labor changed that in 1994 I think.

TONY ABBOTT:

Luckily no one would be so cheeky as to try to impersonate me Alan, I’m sure. Who would want to do that, gee!

ALAN JONES:

That is true! But I just wanted to come back to that before I let you go. I mean, why? That would be a start, wouldn’t it, to see that your name is only on the roll at one booth?

TONY ABBOTT:

It would be quite inconvenient. Now, inconvenience I know, shouldn’t be allowed to contaminate democracy and fairness. Look, I think, myself, if we tried to ensure people had to produce the same kind of evidence of identity to go on the roll as they have to produce to open a bank account…

ALAN JONES:

Or borrow a library book.

TONY ABBOTT:

And if they had to produce some form of ID, you know a drivers licence or a rates notice or a credit card or something, when they turned up to vote – it would only take five seconds – I think we would have a much more secure system.

ALAN JONES:

Ok, good to talk to you. Thank you for your time.

TONY ABBOTT:

Thanks Alan.