2GB Alan Jones
15 Feb 2012
Transcipt SUBJECTS: Labor leadership; Private health insurance rebate
E&OE………
Alan Jones: Christopher Pyne, good morning.
Christopher Pyne: Good morning Alan.
Jones: Where are we? What is the mood down there in Canberra like?
Pyne: Well the mood is very sombre on the Labor side of the house and on our side of the house it is one of disbelief mixed with when is the soap opera going to end. I think we are a country of 23 million people and we deserve to have serious leadership and what we have instead is a government absolutely focused internally.
Jones: This is worse than Whitlam and the whole Whitlam Government disintegrated didn’t it. I mean now this is what happened in Whitlam. Caucus members are all speaking out. I mean one caucus member is quoted as saying yesterday ‘this stuff of Gillard’s that I only tumbled on to it on the day of the challenge is patently untrue.’
Pyne: Well that’s right and that is what’s happening down here. Whether we have the cross-benchers paraded across our screens at night coquettishly saying ‘will we won’t we’ and then of course always ending up supporting the Government or whether we have Kevin Rudd and the other parade of Labor leaders - Smith, Shorten and Crean - all doing their auditions in Question Time each day. I think the Australian people deserve a great deal better than they’re getting and we should have an election so they can have an unambiguous government.
Jones: Well I mean as I’ve said before it was Tennyson who said that ‘near the end some work of noble worth may yet be done.’ Well she doesn’t want Kevin Rudd to be Prime Minister, he doesn’t want her to be Prime Minister. The dignified thing to say would be we’ll let the people decide who should be Prime Minister. Call an election. But I mean she said on Four Corners, the truth is I made the decision to run for Prime Minister on the day I walked into Kevin Rudd’s office and asked him for a ballot. I didn’t make that decision at any time earlier. Now she’s got her own people saying that this stuff I only stumbled into it on the day of the challenge is patently untrue and that she was handing her Labor colleagues copies of secret internal polling designed to undermine Rudd’s leadership.
Pyne: The Prime Minister’s remarks about most subjects are riddled with contradictions. I mean you get the impression that when a person starts telling stories they have to keep making them wilder and wilder in order to make people believe them.
Jones: Well if you’re a liar you need a good memory. She said in 2006, and there’s the story today of course that the private health rebate is going to go, she said when she was asked by the ABC in 2006 ‘are you going to look again at the private health rebate’ and she said ‘no the private health insurance rebate will be staying under Labor. We committed to that at the last election and indeed we committed to it at the election before. The private health insurance rebate will stay.’
Pyne: That’s exactly what she said.
Jones: That’s what she said!
Pyne: And you know she has no answer to that when that was put to her in Question Time. Let’s not forget, of course, she also promised the Australian people before the election there would be no carbon tax under a government I lead. She deceived them then. She deceived Andrew Wilkie into believing that she would go through with his pokie reform, she signed a contract with him. She was prepared to get rid of Harry Jenkins in order to get a vote on the floor of the Parliament. I mean, the Prime Minister is backed in to a corner. It is time for good members of the Labor Party to do the right thing and to remove the Prime Minister and put someone into the office that will restore integrity to the position.
Jones: Well they don’t have anyone in their sights. The public have to be given a say here, they have to be the final arbiters. I worked in a Prime Minister’s office, I was a speech writer for a Prime Minster. The concept that I would be preparing a speech, an acceptance speech, without knowing that my leader was about to become Leader and there’d be some coordinated movement is fanciful, absolutely fanciful which is a euphemism for saying dishonest.
Pyne: Well Alan, you’re absolutely correct. And we know that John Whelan was moved into the now Prime Minister’s office a month before she took over in the coup and he was the one that started writing the speech two weeks before she gave it, that was revealed on Channel 7 last night. And Laurie Oakes revealed on Channel 9 last night that the polling which she said she didn’t recall was being shared with Labor members of Parliament. This is 18 months ago.
Jones: They’re all leaking like sieves aren’t they. Everyone’s talking.
Pyne: It is a complete mess down here.
Jones: Well if it was sport there’d be one rule: maintain the pressure. That’s the key, you maintain the pressure. You might be leading 25-0. The exercise is to win 100-0. Good to talk to you.
Pyne: Thanks Alan.
ENDS