MRT 1377, Mornings with Steve Vizard
Monday, 24 May 2010
Subjects: Super profits tax; Tony Abbott; Labor’s wasteful spending; foreign aid budget; David Campbell.E&OE…
STEVE VIZARD Julie Bishop is the Deputy Leader of the Federal Opposition and Shadow Foreign Affairs spokesperson. Thanks for joining me Julie.
JULIE BISHOP Good morning Steve.
STEVE VIZARD Well, there do appear to be a few cracks in the Government’s resolve on the super mining tax.
JULIE BISHOP Steve, the Government is becoming increasingly desperate and is now relying on dodgy analysis to support its claim. Yesterday Ms Gillard launched an extraordinary attack on major Australian companies saying that they only paid an effective tax rate of 13 per cent and gave the impression that the figure came from Australian Treasury modelling. In fact the claim is based on a paper written by a graduate student at an American university. It cannot be relied upon let alone form the basis of an attack on Australia’s mining companies.
Now when the Government resorts to relying on dodgy analysis to launch such an attack you realise how desperate this Government is and that its whole case for a super tax on mining is unravelling.
STEVE VIZARD Wayne Swan has got internal pressure to change the mining tax we see. It seems to me Julie the Government has invited the miners to consult, after the announcement of the tax, and it’s a [inaudible] stick for them. They either consult and don’t change, to which case they are going to fighting the mining industry and you on this mining tax, or if they do move it is yet another backflip. Can I ask you, which of those options would you prefer going into an election?
JULIE BISHOP Well the Government has got itself into a corner. You either support the tax which will damage the Australian economy or you change the tax which will damage the budget.
You see the Government has already put into the budget the $12 billion it expects to receive from this super tax on mining based on certain fundamentals. It has spent the money. It is in the budget, it has been spent, allocated and accounted for.
So if the Government changes the rate of 40 per cent or if it changes the threshold, the 6 per cent, or if it makes it prospective not retrospective it can’t collect the $12 billion so its budget becomes a house of cards that collapses.
So this idea that they are consulting with the mining companies is a nonsense. The mining companies are in fact wasting their time and it seems that consultation Kevin Rudd style is to present a fait accompli, say there will be a mining tax at 40 per cent coming in at a 6 per cent threshold and it’s retrospective and then say he is going to consult over it. We’ve already seen the damage that it has done to the stock market, to the value of the Australian dollar, let alone the damage that it has done to the confidence of people working in the Australian economy.
STEVE VIZARD I am talking with Julie Bishop, Deputy Leader of the Opposition. Julie there was a sustained attack on Tony Abbott last week over his 7.30 Report concessions that politicians have differential forms of honesty in certain circumstances. But Kevin Rudd played very little part in that. He seems to lack credibility because of his backflips on the ETS. Do you expect this personal attack on Abbott to form a substantial part of the election campaign?
JULIE BISHOP Yes I do. Regrettably Labor has form in this regard and I expect it will be a very personal and very nasty and vicious campaign against Tony Abbott. The reason you didn’t see much of Kevin Rudd last week is essentially the Australian people are sick of hearing from Kevin Rudd, they don’t believe him any more. His backflip on the ETS which he said was the answer to the greatest moral challenge of our age, climate change, means he just can’t be believed any more.
Now this is the week after Labor presented its budget. Normally the Prime Minister and the Treasurer of the country would be out selling the benefits of the budget for all its worth. We hardly saw Kevin Rudd because he knows he is no longer believable but I expect that Labor will continue to attack Tony Abbott personally, they will seek to denigrate him and it should, unfortunately, be a rather nasty campaign.
STEVE VIZARD He has made himself a target though hasn’t he?
JULIE BISHOP Well Tony concedes that it wasn’t the best interview but I take Tony as I see him. I’ve worked closely with Tony for many years, I was his junior Minister when he was senior Minister in the heath portfolio, I’ve been his Cabinet colleague and now I’m his deputy. I can take Tony at his word, I’ve been able to rely on Tony, take his word on every issue. I’ve never been let down in that regard.
STEVE VIZARD Does it disappoint you at a general level when public discourse reduces to one liners, to grabs and gaffes?
JULIE BISHOP Yes it is disappointing. Obviously the issues on the national agenda are extremely complex and they do deserve a much greater level of analysis. But we live in a 24/7 world where there is a 24 hour news cycle. Now some people play the five second grab and the cheap headline for all it is worth, and I think that is what has caught up on Mr Rudd. He has been seen as spinning his way through the last two years and his grabs and his clichés are coming back to haunt him.
STEVE VIZARD There was a substantial blow out on the Building the Education Revolution, $1.7 billion approximately, did Julia Gillard mislead Parliament about that blow out?
JULIE BISHOP This is one of the most extraordinary episodes in Australian Federal Government history. A school building program that was to cost about $14 billion has blown out by $1.7 billion in the first couple of weeks and now we see that there has been such extensive rorting and rip offs and wasteful and reckless spending that some are estimating we are likely to see less than half that amount as actual value in construction.
So $8 billion has disappeared, who has received this money? And when you see that a government school has to spend about four times what a private school spends to get the same building you know that this program is a scandal.
Now Julia Gillard just brushes it off and says there are a few problems. This is a massive waste of taxpayers’ money. She is the Minister responsible for it and, I have to say Steve, in any other government a Minister with that record and incompetence would have been sacked but it seems in the Rudd Government that incompetence is not only tolerated it is rewarded.
STEVE VIZARD Julie we’ve got insulation installers protesting at Parliament House about what has happened to them, what should the Prime Minister say to them?
JULIE BISHOP The Australian Prime Minister should apologise to these people for misleading them over what he was going to do to support them after the program was cancelled.
Kevin Rudd told them he would restart the program, he has failed on that promise and now these people are out of pocket, their industry has been all but destroyed by the Government’s home insulation program. It is a tragedy, when you think of the four deaths, the thousands of homes that are still considered to be unsafe, the fires that have occurred, and at no time has the Prime Minister ever admitted what he or his office knew of the many, many warnings that were given to the Government, not only about the risks but also about fatalities.
Now the Prime Minister should come clean. He has been questioned endlessly in Question Time, refuses to admit what he had been told and you are left with the very clear impression that Kevin Rudd didn’t care what safety warnings were being given, he was in such a rush to push money out the door to promote his stimulus spending, and we’ve seen the disastrous results.
STEVE VIZARD Julie Bishop your portfolio, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I can talk to overseas aid, foreign aid. The few big articles today about where some of our foreign aid has gone. Some of the ones that are the most eye catching: $12.7 on panda research, $307,000 to the AFL – no poor organisation – to promote Aussie Rules in South Africa. Give us your views about some of this foreign aid spend.
JULIE BISHOP Well this is part of an overall level of concern about how the Australian aid program is being delivered. For the past 12 months I have been raising real concerns about the Rudd Government’s foreign aid priorities.
Last year the Australian Audit Office raised very serious concerns about AusAid’s over reliance on highly paid consultants and on AusAid’s ability to properly manage large increases in aid. And there are real concerns that Australia’s foreign aid is not getting through to the people who need it most.
Now in particular, the Australian National Audit Office has found that AusAid spends double the proportion on highly paid consultants compared with any other OECD country, or double the average of OECD countries.
There are numerous examples of aid being used to fund questionable activities that are not likely to improve the standard of living in developing countries. After all that is what our aid budget should be for.
So I am deeply concerned with the latest revelations in the paper which question the effectiveness of the use of highly paid consultants and the allocation of aid and I have called on the Rudd Government to hold an independent inquiry into Australia’s foreign aid program, particularly whether taxpayers are getting value for money, and I can assure you that an Abbott-led government will hold such an inquiry if the Rudd Government fails to do so.
STEVE VIZARD Julie Bishop finally, just one slightly tangential question. We saw a New South Wales Minister resign last week because of a variety of reasons, but one of them was his declared sexual preference. Do you think there is a growing need for… or there will be a growing need for politicians to declare their sexual preferences less they fear an accusation that they are hiding something material from the electorate?
JULIE BISHOP Steve, when you stand for election and when you go into public office you know there is a very grey area between what is your private life and what is your public life and I think we are all aware of that when we go into politics.
The media is proceeding on the basis that the public have a right to know as much as they can about elected representative and so I think people have to think long and hard about what they want the public to know before they go into public office.
And if you are leading a public life, or if you can be the subject of accusations of hypocrisy or double standards, then you should take that into account when you put yourself up for public office.
STEVE VIZARD Julie Bishop, really appreciate your time this morning. I know you have stepped out of a meeting for this. So Julie Bishop, look forward to talking to you again.
JULIE BISHOP My pleasure Steve.
