Doorstop - Parliament House

SUBJECTS: Labor Leadership E&OE................................ Hon Christopher Pyne MP: Good morning ladies and gentlemen, overnight the number of illegal boat arrivals passed 45,000 since the Government has changed the laws in August 2008 and in the last twelve months there have been over 25,000 unauthorised arrivals. Really, the Government has failed monumentally to protect our borders and what the 25,000 in the last twelve months tells us is that people smugglers believe that the election is going to bring a new Government and this is like a closing down sale because they know that we will introduce the policies that will protect our borders and so we’ve had 25,000 people arrive illegally over the last twelve months swamping our detention centres and meaning that at least 10,000 of those …. light touch security clearance. It is the premier example of the Government’s failure. While policies are failing the Government soap opera continues the Hawke, Rudd, I’m thinking of the Hawke/Keating collapse. The Rudd Gillard forces are circling each other again; one calling out the other to bring on a challenge and the way to resolve this of course is for the Prime Minister to bring on a challenge and deal with it by the end of the week otherwise the soap opera will just continue unabated. Journalist: Will you bring on a No Confidence Motion if Labor does change leader? Is that an option? Pyne: Well, of course it’s an option. It’s always an option but we’re not going to play Labor’s parlour game. They are entirely obsessed with the numbers, who is up, who is down, who’s in which camp or not. Greg Combet for example appears to have been in both camps over the last twelve months. What we’re focussing on is policy and trying to get on with laying out to the Australian public why they should change government and if they do change to us we’ll be ready with our plan and so last night Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott released our plan for National Health and Medical Research Council grants for example. Journalist: (inaudible) Pyne: Well the Prime Minister has added to the general carnival atmosphere in this Parliament with her photograph in the newspapers today. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or if it’s a bad thing but I think what it shows is that we know that the Prime Minister is good at spinning a yarn and now we have the photographic proof of it. Journalist: What are your sources telling you inside the Labor Party about what the factions.. Pyne: Sorry? Journalist: What are your sources telling you inside the Labor Party about what will happen … (inaudible) Pyne: Well, they’ve gone strangely silent. I mean they’re very busy commenting on the terrible polls but there seems to be a general sense of despair amongst my sources. Journalist: (inaudible question) … get it wrong all the time … Pyne: I think it’s because they’re in the Rudd camp. I think this is the problem with my sources; they’re in the Rudd camp and I think they’re always over estimating their level of support but I noticed in the last few …. their mood has become blacker amongst people who send me texts from the Labor Caucus. Journalist: Why did seven Coalition Senators cross the floor last night? ..Twelve abstained from the vote. Pyne: Well, we had always planned to have ..vote “no” to the Referendum Bill to the Coalition in order to ensure that the “No” case is put to the Australian public. For there to be a “No” case, there have to be people who vote, the Bill has to be put to a vote and there have to people who vote “No”. So there were I think two voting “No” in the lower house and seven in the Senate and there are a number of abstentions. Can I say about this that the Government has made a total hash of the Local Government referendum from start to finish. Apart from the fact that they are funding one side to the tune of $10 million and the other side to $500,000. They’ve also not laid out the groundwork for why there needs to be a change. The public doesn’t know why we’re having a referendum on local government it just appears that the Government just wants another distraction from their own woes. And last night, the Senators showed their displeasure at yet another Bill being guillotined through the Senate. 53 bills were guillotined this week in the Senate with the Greens support; 214 bills in the last three years…(inaudible)…that compared with 32 when the Howard Government had control of the Senate…(inaudible)… party of freedom of speech, the Greens have united with Labor to guillotine 214 Bills. And on the local government referendum, I think some Coalition Senators felt that they would show their displeasure of Labor’s mishandling of this local government referendum from start to finish by abstaining. Journalist: Will they be reprimanded though? Pyne: No they won’t be reprimanded because the vote was essentially a micky division, in that there were 45 votes in favour of it and 8 votes against it. So the referendum was always going to, the legislation to allow the people to vote in a referendum was always going to be passed and therefore there was no harm in them not voting. Journalist: It’s true though that there is disunity in the Coalition ranks of this issue isn’t it? Pyne: No it’s not true because we have a position where we have in-principle support for recognising local government in the Constitution, but it’s up to the Labor Party to try and get the referendum passed. Our job is to remove a very bad Government and there is plenty of evidence for that. And that’s what we’re going to do. We’re not going to campaign on the referendum because it’s up to the Labor Party to get that passed as they wanted to put it. Journalist: … (Inaudible) Pyne: There are some State divisions like Western Australia, which have a very strong view against the referendum, and Victoria as well as, at a state level and I think there some state Liberal Premiers that have come out against it like Barry O’Farrell is against it. And there isn’t a stalinist view in the Liberal Party about party discipline on a referendum that we haven’t planned to put and that they have to make the case for which they haven’t done. They’ve made another hash of this as they have on so many other occasions from start to finish and I said last week and I’ll say it again that the Local Government Association should ask the Government to withdraw the referendum in order to ensure that it has chance of passing it in the future, because the way the Government is handling it, it will not pass this September and this will be the third time it’s been defeated. So if I was running the Australian Local Government Association, I would ask the Labor Party to remove the referendum and return to it at a more auspicious time. Journalist: … (Inaudible) Pyne: Well that’s a bizarre statement because in fact the cost of…(Inaudible)… as we’ve said in our announcement that we will protect the National Medical Health and Research Council grants from any cuts. So I don’t know which costing’s Tanya Plibersek is talking about given we didn’t announce any new spending proposals, we simply announced that there wouldn’t be any cuts to Medical Health and Research grants, but I would say that Tanya Plibersek has presided over $1.6 billion worth of cuts to public health and $4 billion to the private health system over the next four years. Okay, thank you. ENDS.