Julie Bishop - Member for Curtin

Channel 10, Breakfast with Paul Henry

Subjects: Carbon tax; border protection; Indonesian President’s visit to Australia
 
E&OE…
 
PAUL HENRY    Well its Julie and Julia time on Breakfast this Monday morning. Julie Bishop first up and Julia Gillard will be with us in just a minute. Julie Bishop though, Deputy Leader of the Opposition with us. Julie good morning to you, how are you?
 
JULIE BISHOP    I am very well Paul, good morning.
 
PAUL HENRY    It was an extraordinary political week last week ending of course on Sunday with the introduction finally of the carbon tax and we are see the government, so many Ministers, the Prime Minister out there on a charm offensive. Are you a little worried that people will just suck it up and actually not notice the difference?
 
JULIE BISHOP    Paul the carbon tax is designed to make people worse off. And the tax will go up year on year on year and it is designed to stop people using goods that use a lot of electricity because it is essentially a tax on electricity. That means that it will hit every household, every business, schools, charities, hospitals. So over time people will be worse off, and the cruel hoax is it will do nothing to reduce the emissions. It will do nothing for the environment.
 
PAUL HENRY    You see the funny thing is if what you are saying is right and people will be worse off then it might do something to help the environment. But the reality is the government is handing out so many subsidies to people – like rich people don’t get any but they can afford to pay to burn carbon, the poor people are getting subsidised to help them cope with it and even the businesses, the very industries they are targeting like aluminium based industries that require paying a lot of carbon credits they will be given huge handouts from the government as well. So in reality I don’t think people are going to get that much out of pocket and I certainly don’t think the environment is going to be improved one jot as a result of this.
 
JULIE BISHOP    Paul that makes it an entirely pointless exercise.
 
PAUL HENRY    Yes it does.
 
JULIE BISHOP    To put a tax on electricity, to then compensate people for the harm that it will cause them and have no effect on emissions, no effect on the environment, makes it completely and utterly pointless. That is why we are so opposed to it.
 
And Paul, if Julia Gillard really believed that this carbon tax would be good for Australia, if she really believed that, why did she promise before the last election there would be no carbon tax under a government she led? Until she explains that, people have every reason to be deeply concerned about a tax that is actually designed to make people worse off.
 
PAUL HENRY    Although as we know that is the reality of dealing with the hand of cards she was given isn’t it? She had to do a deal with the Greens and that was the worst of the two evils so she did the deal.
 
JULIE BISHOP    No she didn’t Paul, she didn’t have to do a deal with the Greens. Is anyone really suggesting the Greens were going to vote with Tony Abbott and the Coalition? No of course not. She was clinging to power and this is why this tax is such a cruel hoax on the Australian people. It is a tax on electricity, it will make households worse off, it will cost jobs, it will send jobs offshore, it will hit our manufacturing sector. And not one other country in the world has an economy wide carbon tax and yet the government’s own modelling is based on the assumption that other countries will have an economy wide carbon tax.
 
PAUL HENRY    The government’s answer - whenever they are questioned on Tony Abbott, on you, overturning this tax - this government’s answer is they will not be able to do it. Are you worried that though you are out there with adverts and hoardings convincing people that that is day one, to overturn this tax, are you worried that in the end people will believe Labor and think actually they won’t do it because they won’t be able to?
 
JULIE BISHOP    Paul it is just a tax. It is a tax on top of other taxes so it is not as if it has replaced other taxes. This is just a tax on top of everything, on electricity. It is just another tax so of course we can repeal it. Governments repeal taxes all the time - not this one, this one adds taxes - but we can repeal it. It is a simple act of Parliament.
 
PAUL HENRY    Sure, but if you do that you will also have to repeal, you’ll have to pull that money, the subsidy for it, away from people and they will not like you if you take money out of their pockets.
 
JULIE BISHOP    We can deliver tax cuts by making savings. We’ll ensure that pensioners get a fair go. You don’t have to hit them with a job destroying tax in order to do that.
 
PAUL HENRY    Will you take the money away that they have been given to compensate them for the carbon tax?
 
JULIE BISHOP    If there is no carbon tax they won’t need that compensation, but we'll ensure there are tax cuts and that pensioners get a fair go.
 
PAUL HENRY    But you will take that money away from them?
 
JULIE BISHOP    They won’t need the compensation if they are not hit with a carbon tax.
 
PAUL HENRY    So you’ll take it away from them?
 
JULIE BISHOP    But we’ll have tax cuts. Well we won’t need the compensation for a tax that isn’t there. I mean that is just the con isn’t it? To say that you put a tax on and then you give them compensation.
 
PAUL HENRY    And then you’ll take compensation off them.
 
JULIE BISHOP    There will be tax cuts.
 
PAUL HENRY    You’ll take the money off them won’t you, that will come away.
 
JULIE BISHOP    There will be tax cuts but they won’t be paid for by the carbon tax.
 
PAUL HENRY    I love you Julie, I just do! Alright quickly let’s quickly talk about asylum seekers. What a nonsense that was in the House last week. Tears and time wasting basically. Nothing good came of it in the end of the day. You know I don’t want to pick on your man Joe Hockey, but does he understand how democracy works? It doesn’t have to be over his dead body. That is not the way democracy works. 
 
JULIE BISHOP    Emotions were running pretty high in the House, but one thing that we have to remember, in the three years after John Howard’s government introduced a range of deterrents the boats stopped. We had on average one a year. When Labor came into government there were only four people in the detention network. They changed the laws – and this is what is so frustrating and what makes people so angry – they changed the laws and have now seen 340 boats, 20,000 people, hundreds of deaths at sea and a multimillion dollars blow out, just because Labor won’t put back in place the laws that worked.
 
It is very simple Paul. Julia Gillard just has to admit she got it wrong, apologise to the Australian people for the appalling mess she has created and then put back in place the laws that have been proven to work.
 
PAUL HENRY    It doesn’t make any difference to you that clearly Labor were prepared to compromise and to be quite honest with you compromise quite considerably? Although you were absolutely staunch.
 
JULIE BISHOP    Well Paul we have a set of policies that worked. What is so difficult about putting them back? And the Malaysia solution will be exhausted after 800 people have been swapped with 4,000 people coming here. 800 people, it would be over in a couple of days.
 
PAUL HENRY    Yeah and we can’t have the Malaysian situation because it would require Joe Hockey dying first and we wouldn’t want that. Just very quickly…
 
JULIE BISHOP    I’ll tell you what it would do Paul. Paul I will tell you what it would do, it strips away any enforceable human rights protections for the 800 people we send there. It is walking away from our commitment to the UN Convention on Refugees and I am certainly not prepared to do that.
 
PAUL HENRY    Alright just quickly, Prime Minister obviously meeting over the next couple of days in Darwin with the Indonesian President. What will come out of that do you think?
 
JULIE BISHOP    Well I hope that she will have a meeting with the President that leads to an agreement that Australia and Indonesia can work more closely together in relation to the boat people who are coming to Australia. I am hoping that she’ll be able to get some agreement with the Indonesian President. I will be in Darwin tomorrow; I will be making the same plea.
 
PAUL HENRY    Alright Julie thank you very much for joining us. It is always great talking to you. Julie Bishop, thank you.
 
JULIE BISHOP    It is my pleasure.