2GB - Ray Hadley
31 Jan 2013
Transcipt SUBJECTS: Eight month election campaign
E&OE................................
Ray Hadley: Liberal Frontbencher the Manager of Opposition Business is Christopher Pyne. He’s on the line right now. G’day Christopher.
Hon Christopher Pyne MP: Good morning Ray.
Hadley: Just need some help with a stack of questions I’ve received this morning.
Pyne: Sure.
Hadley: Given the Prime Minister’s pencilled in September 14, people are saying is that now locked in? Can she go earlier if she wants to or go later if she wants to?
Pyne: She can go anytime she likes as long as she advises the Governor General to what they call “issue the writs” for an election and the Governor General agrees, then she could do that tomorrow if she wanted to for five weeks from now. The only requirement is that there be 33 days from the time the writs are issued to the day of the election. She said it would be September the 14th but it could be any time before that or even after that quite frankly, if she chose to change her mind.
Hadley: Would you agree with me that many people are saying it’s political suicide including you, I think, to do what she’s done which is unprecedented, but if she were to do that, either delay it or bring it forward that would also be political suicide.
Pyne: Well look, it’s a bizarre decision and I think the Prime Minister has entered the fifth dimension. One of the Labor members of parliament described it as a political blunder of historic proportions. If she now brought it forward, of course it would be another broken promise from the Prime Minister. People are pretty used to those. Of course the only reason you’d think she’d bring it forward was because she was either facing a challenge from Kevin Rudd, which is possible or because the polls improved to such an extent that she thought she could win but the Australian public are pretty cynical or sceptical and now that she’s locked in a date, we’re stuck in this nightmarish eight month election campaign.
Hadley: Given you’ve been around for awhile and a student of politics, I mean it’s unprecedented as we said, were you surprised by it? I mean, did it catch you on the hop to extent saying ‘well that’s a weird to do? Why would they have done that?’
Pyne: Well that’s certainly what I thought, but you know the Prime Minister’s judgement has been skew if for some time. The way she handled the axing of Trish Crossin to put Nova Peris into the Senate has hampered Nova Peris from the beginning, now unfortunately Nova Peris is in the position where anyone knows that she was placed in the job because she’s an Indigenous Australian and I think that unfortunately means that she starts with a disadvantage of not being seen to have been elected through a proper pre-selection process and through a proper election so that was bad judgement and yesterday I thought , well she’s done a number of things, she’s elevated Tony Abbott to the same status as the Prime Minister for the next eight months. She’s given away the advantage of the Government being able to set the date and have five weeks notice. She’s given the Liberal Party an entire eight months to plan our election strategy and she’s made sure that every single – and this is the most important thing – every single decision the Government makes will now be seen through the prism of a cynical electoral ploy all to stop Kevin Rudd from challenging her.
Hadley: One other opinion came from the Australian Catholic University Professor Scott Prasser who says Gillard’s unprecedented move would benefit the Government because it would keep campaigning with Government resources. In other words – I mean, know you’ve got resources available to you but not the same resources available to a government .
Pyne: That raises a very important issue that Dr Prasser has raised and that is you know how much of the Government will be allowed to be spent on the Prime Ministers re-election campaign. Every time she climbs on a VIP jet for example and flies to Queensland for the floods that she has apparently last night or whatever she’s doing how much of that will be campaigning and how much of it will be Governing and I think this is a very serious question because should the Leader of the Opposition be given the same benefits that the Prime Minister will be given in order to be able to campaign equally with her which is the normal course of events.
Hadley: Its funny reading the editorial pages and the comments by the various people in newspapers, it goes from being a stroke of genius, described by someone in The Australian, to being, as you’ve indicated even from within the Labor Party as a blunder of unbelievable proportions.
Pyne: Well, yes well some people in the press gallery of course are great barrackers for the Prime Minister and the Labor Party and they saw it through the prism as they’d been told it by the Prime Ministers spin doctors that it was a stroke of, a master stroke of political genius. But listening to Graham Richardson last night and reading his column this morning in The Australian and I was on his program, you know most political professionals think it is a bizarre decision and for the reasons I’ve outlined, has given away a major advantage that the Government usually enjoys. But I think the desperation that the Prime Minister feels is to try and change the political climate. Over summer she’d hoped that there’d be a increase in her popularity and a bounce for Labor in the polls. Instead, very little changed and I think that calling an election is the first shoe to drop, the last shoe to drop would be for her to call the actual election and try and avoid Kevin Rudd’s challenge if indeed she brings that forward and, and has to call a snap election in order to avoid Kevin Rudd rolling her.
Hadley: I’m talking to Christopher Pyne, Christopher my listeners are pragmatic in the extreme. I’ve got an email here from one of them in the ACT listening on 2CC and we’ve been talking this morning because my weekends jobs calling a bit of football, that September 14 marks the first weekend of the NRL finals and Channel Nine telecast on Saturday night two games, and it’s the second week of the AFL finals. Now, Tim from the ACT’s offered this solution - ‘Ray, there won’t be a problem with the election interfering with the football on 14 of September , the polls close at 6.00pm, concession made by Gillard at 6.30pm the footy comes on at 7.30pm, all solved ‘.
Pyne: Well if only it turns out that way, I would be a very happy man on election night. But there is still eight months to go in this campaign and anything can happen so we can’t be complacent. Certainly we have the plan for a more secure Australia and a stronger economy. The other bizarre aspect of this of course Ray is she has launched this campaign in the middle of the Coalition’s mini campaign that we began on Sunday, where our ads were running on television and Tony Abbott is talking to his Real Solutions document. The direction will be about the economy about jobs, about costs of living and about boarder protection. The Prime Minister has to come up with solutions to those issues and they also have to explain where the money is coming from for their 120 billion dollars of unfunded promises they’ve already made.
Hadley: I’ve been suggested by listeners that the election may well be won in the South and South Western Sydney on the back of the ICAC which continues the startling revelations today from Moses Obead, the son of Eddie Obead, that he did in fact rely on his father’s influence to find out what was happening in the Bylong Valley and I’ve got in front of me the market from the sport operators, the sports betting operators, which would suggest they are in a stack of strife. Even the assistant treasurer has ranked an outsider for his seat of Lindsey, I think Fiona Scott’s a dollar twenty-five, David Bradbury a dollar fifty, that’s all the way through it. Now there may be some angst for your party in Queensland because of a back lash against the premier up there but it appears that the election may well be won where you launched it all with Tony Abbott as a party in the Western part of Sydney?
Pyne: Well the voters of Western Sydney are particularly concerned about two things. They are very frustrated that the Prime Minister changed our Border Protection laws which has led to a massive influx of asylum seekers. 500 votes, costing six and a half billion dollars could have paid for the Gonski Education reforms with that six and a half billion dollars. And the second thing that they’re very frustrated with is about their cost of living which is set to rise, the carbon tax has added to that, and yet they keep being told by the Prime Minister that they have nothing really to worry about and if you can’t pay electricity bills and you’re worrying about buying shoes for your children to go to their first day of school, your very frustrated by a Prime Minister who keeps patting you and the head and telling you you’ve never had it so good.
Hadley: I think the, now you mention the boat people will become a big issue. I think it was a very big issue in 2010 and it didn’t quite work out that way I thought it would. But we’ve already had this month and the month that’s almost over before 425 people arrive compared to 300 last January and after that start of 300 we ended up with over seventeen thousand with you know, an average of 2000 per month, through the middle of the year and then leading into, I think about eleven hundred in December. And I think that if that goes the same way that, that will be a very, very big pill for them to swallow, to try and explain the way the fact that they have failed again to solve a very important problem, protecting our borders.
Pyne: Well the silver lining on the cloud of an eight month campaign Ray is at least we know that from September the 14th onwards if the Government changes, the people smugglers will have lost their business model as we bring back temporary protection visas, off-shore processing and turning around the boats where it’s safe to do so and I think the voters of Western Sydney are very much waiting for that day.
Hadley: Thank you for your time Christopher.
Pyne: Thank you.
ENDS.