Mix 104.9 with Pete Davies
Friday, 10 September 2010
Subjects: 2010 election result; the Independents; Labor’s National Broadband Network; Kevin RuddE&OE…
PETE DAVIES Joining me on the line now is the Federal Deputy Opposition Leader, Julie Bishop. Good morning.
JULIE BISHOP Good morning Pete, how are you?
PETE DAVIES Not too bad. Good to talk to you again and firstly congratulations on your reappointment yesterday as the Deputy Opposition Leader.
JULIE BISHOP Thank you, I am honoured to take on the role again. It has been a pretty tough three years but I am certainly up for the challenge again.
PETE DAVIES Just quickly touching on Tony Abbott, remarkable performance from a bloke who was supposedly unelectable.
JULIE BISHOP Well I didn’t ever think that. The Liberal Party chose him as our Leader nine months ago and in that time he has held a very popular Prime Minister, at the time, to account, so much so that he exposed his failings and his own party dumped him.
He certainly cut short Julia Gillard’s honeymoon and then Tony Abbott ran a remarkable campaign where he was incredibly disciplined and focussed and the Labor Government lost its governing majority.
So I think Tony Abbott has earned his place in political history and we were delighted to re-elect him unopposed as our Leader yesterday.
PETE DAVIES He very much caught Labor with their pants down didn’t he?
JULIE BISHOP He’s an incredibly disciplined and energetic person. He is relentless. I think that last 36 hour marathon captured the imagination of so many people but that is how Tony is. He is hard, he’s focussed, he’s disciplined and that 36 hour stint at the end of the campaign really said it all. It characterised the way he campaigns and his focus.
And a lot of people, on that last day I was handing out how to vote cards at the Perth railway station on the Friday morning, and early morning commuters would come up and say is Tony still awake? Is he still running? And they were really quite amused by it all, so he is quite brilliant in campaigning.
We didn’t quite get there but we could not have asked for any more from our Leader in Tony Abbott.
PETE DAVIES Julie I was going to say that you didn’t quite get there but the actual result, surely internally in terms of morale and in terms of energy and in terms of what lies ahead, surely that must have a very strong polarising influence internally?
JULIE BISHOP We are very united. The atmosphere in the partyroom meeting yesterday was very positive. The Coalition won the primary vote by a margin of some 700,000 and we remain in front on the two-party preferred vote and that is a recognition that a majority of Australian people thought the policies we took to the election were right for Australia.
Now Australians want good government that helps to deliver a strong nation and a better life for the Australian people. We hope that we will have an opportunity to do that.
The Labor/Green/Independent/Country Independent Alliance is inherently unstable and as one of the Independents said, it is a government without a mandate. It is a government that was selected not elected. So the Coalition’s mood is very positive.
And might I say about your representative Natasha Griggs? She has already made quite an impression among her colleagues after her one short visit to Canberra and I’m sure she is going to be an outstanding representative and a passionate advocate for the people of the Top End.
So I was very impressed with Natasha during the campaign and I would expect her to be your representative for a very long time.
PETE DAVIES Okay, going back to when it got down to the wire when the Independents supposedly sat down with a blank piece of paper, put a line down the middle and they kept coming back to the NBN, the National Broadband Network.
Tony Windsor in particular came out yesterday, he doesn’t even have a computer and now he is an expert on broadband.
We’ve done a little bit of homework and we’ve just found out that the Prime Minister’s National Broadband Network at the moment is going to set the country back $43 billion, there are some punters who suggest it will be a lot more than that. That means that it is going to cost every household in Australia between $6,000 and $10,000. That is just the beginning.
The frightening part about it is when you go above a certain speed with this stuff you actually have to have the right hardware and the bottom line is most household hardware is not going to handle the increased speed.
JULIE BISHOP That is absolutely right Pete. We all want faster broadband but at what cost? Now the Coalition’s policy is to utilise existing infrastructure and upgrade it as necessary to use a mix of technologies such as fibre, copper, wireless and satellite. And so we believe that faster speeds can be delivered with greater private sector involvement and at much lower cost to the taxpayer.
Now I have been concerned, as have been all my Coalition colleagues, we have been concerned, about Labor’s broadband plan from day one.
You will recall that Labor mismanaged the original tender process for a $4 billion broadband proposal and to cover up the mistake they announced this $43 billion plan. But there has never been a business case or a cost benefit analysis or any research into its viability.
And one Labor Minister said recently that that kind of research was a waste of time and money. Well sorry, I do not simply trust the Government to roll out such a massive program when they failed to manage much smaller and much less technical programs like building school halls or putting insulation in a roof.
PETE DAVIES Now Julie there was a group of seven telecommunications executives who labelled themselves the Alliance for Affordable Broadband. Now over a week ago they actually urged the Independent MPs to carefully weigh the benefits of the NBN before delivering their support to either the Coalition or Labor.
Now they actually urged the Independents to demand a stringently costed public/private NBN model and offer and alternative plan called NBN3.0, which is a play on the name that Labor gave its fibre centric plan of NBN2.0.
NBN3.0 would mimic the Obama Administration’s proposed 4G wholesale only access network which covers 98 percent of the population at a cost of around $3 billion.
JULIE BISHOP Well our concern has always been that this $43 billion plan had never had a cost benefit analysis and it is putting all of the technologies in one basket. It is only having fibre, whereas we know that technology moves at a speed of light. I mean the changes we see year by year are phenomenal and that is why we believe we need to utilise existing infrastructure but use a mix of technologies – fibre, wireless, satellite.
And another concern is that the Government’s broadband implementation plan shows they need to connect 4,000 homes per day for the next seven years to meet their schedule. Now just think about that - 4,000 homes every day for the next seven years.
And the media is reporting today that about 10,000 new workers will have to be attracted to work on the roll out and that is going to mean massive cost increases. The media is saying every 1 percent rise in labour costs adds a further $1.4 billion to the total bill.
So I think the cost blow out will be phenomenal, and are we going to get better broadband? Are we going to get faster broadband? And more importantly what is it going to cost the nation?
PETE DAVIES Okay, moving on quickly I know you are very busy, I am a bit of a Question Time tragic. Of course the Federal Parliament sits again in a couple of weeks time.
It is now quite obvious that Kevin Rudd is going to return to the frontbench at the expense of Stephen Smith. I find that fascinating because I think Stephen Smith has been one of their outstanding performers and yet it would appear to satisfy promises that Julia Gillard made prior to the election he is just going to get moved sideways.
JULIE BISHOP It is interesting that Labor thought that Kevin Rudd was so bad as a leader that they removed him from office in the most brutal fashion. Yet to keep him quiet and to stop leaking against the Government during the campaign they’ve obviously offered him a frontbench position of his choosing.
Now I agree that Stephen Smith is an effective politician. We have seats next door to each other here in Western Australia - I’m in the seat of Curtin, Stephen’s in the seat of Perth so I know him well - and I know him to be an effective performer. But it seems that Kevin Rudd’s ego and having to keep Kevin Rudd in the tent is more important than acting in the national interest.
I understand that Kevin Rudd is demanding the foreign affairs portfolio. Well I wonder if he is going to apologise to the Chinese Government for the abusive language he used about the Chinese negotiators at Copenhagen? Kevin Rudd has quite some form in foreign affairs and it would be a very brave Prime Minister indeed to put him back into foreign policy. Although maybe she just wants to keep him out of the country.
PETE DAVIES [laughs] Bugger you Julie, you just stole my thunder. That was meant to be my closing question to you.
JULIE BISHOP [laughs] Well we are obviously on the same page with that one there Pete.
PETE DAVIES [laughs] Listen, good to talk to you and as I said I am a Question Time tragic and a look forward to the first one.
JULIE BISHOP I think it is going to be an interesting Parliament, I can guarantee that. I don’t think there is anything else I can guarantee about the stability and certainty of this Government but I can assure you that Question Time will be interesting.
PETE DAVIES Julie Bishop, good to talk to you.
JULIE BISHOP Thanks Pete, bye.
