Richard Glover Drive ABC 702

SUBJECTS: Roy Hill mine deal; Underage drinking; Craig Thomson saga

E&OE…………

Christopher Pyne: Well, of course permission should have been granted for the enterprise migration agreement.  Not only are there 1700 jobs for foreign workers, but this agreement will mean there will be 6000 jobs for Australian workers and the most surprising aspect of this whole debate is that there is any debate and that the Prime Minister has so mismanaged the communication of this announcement last Friday she’s managed to turn what should have been a good news story for the Government into questions about whether her leadership is safe. 

Richard Glover: Ok, but can we talk about the issue a little bit first because I think there is an argument on the other side isn’t there?  If you said no to these companies they would be forced to put either training in place to make Australians – to get Australian workers to be able to do these jobs or to provide housing, schools and community facilities to tempt people from places like Sydney to take these jobs. 

Pyne: Well, Richard that would be terrific in a fantasy world where those kinds of things would happen, but the truth of the matter is the $10 billion projects like the one at Roy Hill won’t go ahead and won’t even get financed from the banks unless they can guarantee the workforce and your suggestion would not guarantee the workforce in order to be able to ensure that project would go ahead.  So I think Martin Ferguson and Chris Bowen have got it right and the Prime Minister has got it wrong and on Friday she told that unions that she wasn’t really in favour of it simply because she’s so terrified of losing their support. 

Glover: Do you believe she didn’t know about it? 

Pyne: I think she knew about it.  She admitted today she received a full brief on the matter on the Monday last week and that her office and Chris Bowen’s office had been in close consultation for weeks about it.  So I think she knew about it.  I think she just didn’t want to admit to the union leaders on Friday that she knew about it so she’s got herself into this serious pickle. 

BREAK

Glover: Christopher Pyne, is this too much law, reaching into the homes? 

Pyne:  I think there’s two sides to the story.  I never usually fall onto the side where Government’s should be legislating for social mores.  I tend to think that too much Government is a bad thing and that Government is better.  I can understand the concern that legislators have that perhaps young people underage are gotten drunk are got drunk by adults who aren’t their parents and that I think does happen in some circumstances and that’s a very bad thing.  Whether governments should legislate this way I think is a very moot point.  I do think common sense should prevail in these circumstances and if a child does the wrong thing and gets themselves drunk then the child and the parents of that child should take responsibility rather than always blaming somebody else and I think the problem in our society at the moment is we assume Government can fix every problem and it can’t and I do think this is probably over stepping the mark, but I can understand why some people think somebody has to do something about a situation where a parent gets another child drunk.  I doubt very much a parent would be prosecuted for offering a glass of champagne to an underage youth, but I think there probably are circumstances where there is an encouragement of drunkenness amongst underage people, which is something that has to stop. 

BREAK

Glover: Christopher Pyne, it’s true that even with the most serious of charges the whole atmospherics would be different if it wasn’t a hung parliament. 

Pyne: I don’t think that’s true necessarily, Richard.  Certainly it’s heightened because we have a minority Government and the Prime Minister relies on being in office with the vote of Craig Thomson, but if she didn’t have his vote, the Government would still have a majority on the floor of the House.  So they would actually remain in Government.  They would have a one seat majority, I grant you, but for a very long time while Peter Slipper was not in the chair they only had a majority of one vote.  The reason why the circumstances surrounding Craig Thomson are as they are is because he is a legitimate person of interest.  He is accused by Fair Work Australia in findings – 150 findings – of being involved in embezzlement and fraud and the misuse of union funds

Glover: All those are findings.  They have to go to the next stage though and police have to get involved and decide whether or not it should go to court. 

Anne Summers: They have no standing. 

Pyne: Well, they do have standing.  They’re findings of the Fair Work inquiry into Craig Thomson and they are the basis of the Federal Court action that Fair Work Australia has confirmed as recently as today in estimates in the Senate that they will be taking these matters to the Federal Court for…

Glover: We do have a system in place don’t we?  It’s like all these elements of the Westminster system.  It’s been around for hundreds of years, probably for a reason and the system is you’ve got to be successfully charged with a crime, which has a jail sentence of a year or more in order to…

ENDS