ABC Sydney - Richard Glover Drive - Monday Political Forum

SUBJECTS: United States Financial Crisis; Carbon Tax; Malaysia Solution.

Richard Glover: Here’s part of the Standard & Poor’s report announcing the downgrade, our opinion, they said is that elected officials remain weary of taxing the structural issues required to effectively address the rising US public debt burden. In other words they haven’t got the ticker in America to do it. America’s always been the home of optimism, the can do attitude, how deep is the problem, will it last, Christopher Pyne.

Hon Christopher Pyne MP: Well, Richard the demise of the United States has been predicted many times in the last 100 years and I think it was John F Kennedy that said there was a question mark over weather democracies could defeat totalitarian regimes because  they had to consider the will of the people and often the will of the people is to not make the tough decisions that are necessary and I think that what we’ve seen in the United States is that the politicians are finding it very hard to cut their cloth to suite their circumstances so we say. That’s not to say, however, that the United States is in a malaise, I don’t think it is. It is still 40% of the world’s economy, of course it’s 50% or more of the world’s military spending, it is a very significant power and financially I am very, very optimistic that it will recover. It’s going through a very difficult time and that is affecting the rest of the world financially but to predict the demise of the United States is both premature and unnecessary.

Glover: I think this is right, someone said today that they spend $24 for every $16 that comes through the door.

Pyne: Well, they have too much debt and the Congress recently started down the road to reducing that debt, to stop the exponential increase in it, they and a lot of the west have been living beyond their means for a very long time. Europe is in an even worse state in terms of the Euro Zone and obviously they need to make some painful decisions and that also has to be married with the political considerations. But the downgrade of the credit rating is obviously a very significant event, it’s not catastrophic, it’s very unhelpful but I’m very confident that the Untied States will get its act together, it’s very important that it does.

Glover: Christopher Pyne, can I bring you in there because some people say that there is a terribly divisive thing in politics happening both in America and in Australia and of course your man Mr Abbott gets some of the blame for that in some people’s minds.

Pyne: Well, Richard, the reason why there is a lack of respect for the current Prime Minister is because she told a bald faced lie during the election about the carbon tax and you can cut it any way you want it, and the inner-city elite can sort of snigger behind their hands but the truth is the vast majority of the Australian people feel terribly cheated by Julia Gillard introducing a tax that she specifically ruled out during the election. My view is that when John Howard was the Prime Minister and even when Kevin Rudd was Prime Minister, there was a greater respect for the office of the Prime Ministership than there is today, I’ve never seen the Prime Ministership being held in such low regard.

Richard Walsh: well we’ve never had a coalition mate, and it’s weird hearing what you’re saying, but in England right at this moment there’s a Coalition and would you believe the Tory’s have had to alter some of their platform in order to negotiate power and if you guys had gone into a coalition with these independents you too would have had to compromise some of your platform.

Pyne: There is a bastardised coalition at the moment. The truth is that the coalition in Australia at the moment is the Labor Party, the Greens and conservative independents. It gives the government a sense of illegitimacy.

Glover: No no no, you guys were prepared to do business with these guys.

Pyne: We were more than prepared to accept the support of Oakeshott and Windsor because they represent conservative seats.

Kathryn Greiner: Christopher, I’m sorry to interrupt you for being so rude, but can I just bring it back to the position of the Prime Minister. Once upon a time the Prime Minister, because of the status of the office had a degree of gravitas, the 24 hour news cycle has robbed the position, whoever is occupying it, has robbed the position of Prime Minister from some of the gravitas and I think if I was the current Prime Minister I would just step back from being on the news every 5 minutes.

Pyne: That’s what Julia Gillard promised that she would do.

Greiner: Well I think we’re just starting to see, her interviews now are with the gravitas of the office behind her rather than wearing a fluro suit out on a building site and of course if I see Abbott again on a factory full of men, I’ll vomit.

Glover: John Howard used to do an awful lot of talkback radio in which he would entertain all sorts of topics.

Greiner: Yes I know, but visually you always saw him behind the lectern with a flag. Now some might say that that has a big of an Americanism about it, but I do think that there is a lack of the construct of the importance of the office of the Prime Minister.

Pyne: I think that that’s a bit of an excuse though, Kathryn, to be honest, I mean the reason why the Prime Ministership is held in such low regard is because the people have a Prime Minister that they really, really don’t like and you only need to look at the myriad of polls to see that. Reaching for the idea that somehow Julia Gillard is suffering because of the 24 hour news cycle, Kevin Rudd put up with that, John Howard put up with that, the truth is that Julia Gillard has demeaned the Office of Prime Minister by holding it with a coalition that is not a reasonable one in the people’s minds because it contains conservatives who represent conservative seats and also because she is introducing a carbon tax which is based on a lie and is a complete fiasco.

Glover: Even if all of that’s true and people have obviously got a right to believe so things, is there a point in the discourse when we start using terms like Julie-liar and things like that, pretty demeaning expressions, and I’m not saying that you or Mr Abbott have done so, but is there a point where we should almost counsel each other to say look, let’s keep it clean, let’s keep it honest, let’s certainly criticise the lie, good, but to counsel each other on the language we use towards the Prime Minister and indeed the Leader of the Opposition.

Pyne: Yes I do and I think terms like ‘Juliar’ and so on and Bob Brown’s Bitch which were used are completely unacceptable and Tony Abbot said so and I think publicly did counsel people who are being extreme and I think that’s a fair point to make. The problem is that the public are feeling that the government got elected on the basis of a lie and it’s two years from an election. They feel that the Prime Minister should call an election if she wants to introduce a carbon tax. She obviously refuses to do so because she thinks she’d lose it and so people are very, very frustrated by the current political process.

Walsh:  There was a new paradigm; the reality of the political situation is that there was a coalition government as you would have done and that that, by definition, means that you have to change your policies, you can not go then into power with exactly the thing you took through the election because it is not your own government anymore, it’s a coalition.

Pyne: Well, I do think this talk of a new paradigm is quite frankly dirge, politics has always been the same and the reality is the opposition wants to replace the government because the government is very bad. You only need to look at the Malaysian debacle to recognise that it not only can’t get anything right, but it also lies about it. It wasn’t very long ago when Julia Gillard was saying that she wouldn’t have any kind of arrangement with any kind of country that hadn’t signed the Refugee Convention, she’s now sending asylum seekers to Malaysia which has according to the United Nations one of the worst records for dealing with refugees in the world. So the public get very cynical about that and the opposition has a responsibility to point that out.

Glover: Let’s go to Malaysia now and this decision that’s made by the High Court and people that have just joined us might not have heard this, but a single High Court judge was asked to rule upon it today and he decided that it really needed the whole full court of the High Court to assess whether this Malaysian solution fitted the law. So that’s really going to put the whole thing off for about two weeks before they can do that. Do you feel some hint of sympathy, Christopher Pyne for the government in that they’ve go the court meddling in their solution? They are the elected representatives that determines the better or worse.

Pyne: No I don’t because the government is the legal guardian of unaccompanied minors under the law and there is a very serious question about whether sending unaccompanied minors, as in children, to Malaysia is fulfilling their duty as these children’s legal guardian and I think the point of contention, and I think that most fair minded people would recognise that it is the role of the High Court to ensure that the government is fulfilling its responsibility.

Glover: What about the government’s point on this which is that if you allow a loophole whereby unaccompanied minors are allowed to make this most dangerous of journeys then you will encourage that and you will have deaths at sea of children.

Pyne: Richard, this is the whole problem with the Malaysian solution, it is the stupidest policy imaginable because it makes children the platinum kind of asylum seeker if you are a people smuggler to send, and that’s why the sending of asylum seekers to Nauru where we know where they are, we can make sure that they’re at school, we can look after their health needs and process their applications is by far in a way a better policy.

Glover: So you’re accusing them of being harsher than your own government when you sent people to Nauru?

Pyne: I’m accusing them of being stupid and introducing a dumb policy which Blind Freddy could have worked out would mean that unaccompanied minors would become the platinum standard of asylum seeker and in fact we were so certain of that, it was the second question we asked in Parliament in Question Time the day they announced the Malaysian Solution.

ENDS