Transcript - Lateline ABC - 12 Nov 09

Leigh SALES: The unemployment figures gave something of a mixed blessing to the Government today, but it's asylum seekers policy that is still drawing heavy fire from many quarters. The Opposition's been on the attack, but managed this week to once again shift the spotlight from the Prime Minister's woes to its own internal divisions over climate change. Joining me tonight is the Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner in Melbourne and in Adelaide the Shadow Education Minister and Manager of Opposition Business, Christopher Pyne. Welcome to both of you.

Lindsay TANNER: Good evening, Leigh.

Christopher PYNE: Good evening, Leigh.

SALES: Let's begin with the asylum seekers on board the Oceanic Viking. Lindsay Tanner, isn't the deal being offered to the 78 people on board far more generous than what they would have got if they simply went through the standard processes?

TANNER: Well Leigh, I am not in a position to comment about specifics of any negotiations that are occurring. This is a very difficult and unusual situation. We have got, obviously complications with respect to the fact that the Indonesian authorities are involved as well as Australian authorities, and the asylum seekers who are on board the Oceanic Viking have obviously pursued a pretty robust agenda of their own. So that certainly makes it very complicated and difficult. But the Australian Government is committed to getting an outcome that's in accordance with our legal responsibilities, as the nation that's been responsible for the rescue, in waters that are Indonesian search and rescue responsibility, it is very complicated.

SALES: But it is the case isn't it that they are being offered a special deal if they get off the boat?

TANNER: Well I don't necessarily know that's the case, Leigh. There's obviously a range of specifics that are potentially involved here, because of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees processing, that does involve various possibilities and clearly what the Australian authorities are seeking to do is to negotiate both with the Indonesian authorities and also with the asylum seekers on the vessel to try and get them to disembark from the vessel voluntarily, so they can be processed in accordance with normal arrangements. Now whatever specifics are involved in the discussions, I am not party to, and I obviously can't comment on.

SALES: Christopher Pyne, whatever you think of why these people have ended up onboard an Australian boat in Indonesia, the reality is that that is where they are now.

Given that, isn't pragmatically a deal like this the only way to go at this stage?

PYNE: Well, the Government has got itself in a terrible bind, Leigh. First of all they announced three weeks ago, through the Weekend Australian with great fanfare, that they had the Indonesian Solution. The Indonesian Solution doesn't seem to have worked out very well, so they then proposed the Philippine Solution. That lasted about a day, and they announced the New Zealand Solution, and the New Zealanders have said no they don't want to be part of this so-called solution. So the Government has managed to get itself into a terrible bind. They have now offered, apparently, a special deal to the 78 asylum seekers on the Oceanic Viking. I think Lindsay Tanner has obviously been left out of the loop. But most of us who'd been reading today's papers and listening to the news have noticed that the Prime Minister and the Government have clearly offered a special deal to the 78 Oceanic Viking asylum seekers, and they need to come clean with exactly what that deal entails. If it entails getting off the boat so the Prime Minister can save face, and then being driven around to the airport to be flown to Australia, then that's not exactly what the Australian public was expecting, when the Prime Minister said that he had a tough but humane policy, which is turning out to be anything but tough and is clearly not humane, because it's encouraging people to come to try and come here in an unorthodox way.

SALES: Lindsay Tanner on Monday the Prime Minister said, "When it comes to Australia's border protection policy, let me be absolutely clear, that that policy will not be changed in response to any protests, any threats of harm, any threats of self harm." How is that consistent with a deal being made to the people on the Oceanic Viking?

TANNER: Well first Leigh, I'm not conceding any of the suggestions Christopher Pyne has put. It's a gross misrepresentation of what's been occurring. What happens in the normal course of events is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees deals with very large numbers of asylum seekers, processes them, and then those that are successfully attributed as refugee status, are then distributed to various nations that take a given number of refugees each year, including Australia. So the notion that people who are categorised as refugees then go on to nations such as Australia or New Zealand is entirely normal, it is entirely reasonable. And so the discussions the Government has been having are all within that context of how the actual system is going to function in this instance. There's nothing wrong with that. The kind of gloss that Christopher Pyne is seeking to put on it, I suggest to you is a complete misrepresentation and I warn him, not everything you read in newspapers is necessarily accurate.

SALES: Christopher Pyne, what course does the Opposition recommend at this point? Should the asylum seekers go to Christmas Island, should they be forcibly removed from the boat and made to stay in Indonesia, what course do you recommend?

PYNE: Well Leigh, the Opposition and its position on the 78 asylum seekers on the Oceanic Viking is not the issue today, and why would we allow ourselves to take the focus away from the Government who are, in fact, in Government. Now, some people have said...

SALES: You are criticising what they are doing though, so I'm just wondering if you have an alternative, a constructive suggestion as an alternative?

PYNE: Our alternative, of course, was not to put in place the pull factors that the Government has put in place since August 2008. Our alternative is that they should not have diluted the strong border protection policies of the previous Government as they have.

TANNER: So you are going to bring those measures back, you'll commit to bring them back?

PYNE: In the fullness of time you'll hear the Opposition policies in relation to border protection. People have criticised the Opposition since the election, accusing us of not getting over the election result. I'm actually starting to wonder whether the Labor Party realises they actually won the election and that they are in Government. Government is a lot more than managing the media cycle Leigh from one day to the next. They actually have to make difficult decisions and tough decision. They are so busy trying to spin the politics of this, that they are actually allowing the policy to get out of hand, and the Australian public can see that for what it is.

SALES: Lindsay Tanner, is it the case that if the boat had gone to Christmas Island in the first place, you would have had a couple of days of controversy about it, probably, but instead with the route you have taken, you have had almost a month of controversy with no end in sight at the moment. And Australia's relationship with Indonesia has been dragged into it. How can this situation, given all of that, be seen as anything other than mismanagement by the Government?

TANNER: Well Leigh, the test of mismanagement is not whether there's controversy or not, that's simply a political consideration. The test of mismanagement is whether you are actually complying with the law and fulfilling your obligations as a Government. That's the thing we have to be measured against, not what is the most politically convenient approach. All along we have been fulfilling our legal obligations in this case. What we have got is a situation where there's a boat is in distress in Indonesia's search and rescue zone, there's no Indonesian vessel able to rescue the people aboard the boat. Indonesia asks Australia if it can help, we assist, we're then confronted with the problem of what to do with the people that we have rescued. Now they don't have any automatic right to choose to obtain asylum in Australia as opposed to any other country, simply as a result of being rescued by an Australian vessel in the waters that Indonesia is responsible for search and rescue in. So we've simply been complying with our legal obligations. Yes, there are obvious political dimensions to this, that are tricky to deal with, but they are not the things we have to have uppermost in our mind in dealing with the issues.

SALES: OK, let's turn to the Rudd Government's decision this week to keep protectionism in place around the publishing industry, in spite of a productivity commission inquiry recommending reform. Lindsay Tanner, has the Government caved in to the beneficiaries of protectionism at the expense of book-buying public?

TANNER: No, I don't think so Leigh. There's a couple of key points to be made here. One is, the evidence about the price impacts of changing the current arrangements was, in my view, pretty inconclusive, and there were some very strong arguments being put on either side with distinct lack of serious substantive evidence, in my view. So it was very, very hard to get a clear picture of what might happen, were these changes to be made. But more importantly, this industry is in the early stages of being hit by a huge tidal way of technological change: electronic books and Amazon are already starting to be felt. Nobody knows how quickly that will unfold, but it's likely to resemble what happens with CDs, as a result of music downloads and iPods. In our view we are about to see a very powerful intensification of competition in this sector, and that will drive downward pressure on prices very strongly.

SALES: I'll pick up on the technology points in a minute, but first of all, if I can ask Christopher Pyne, if the Opposition were to win the next election, would you act to open up the publishing industry in line with the productivity commission's recommendations?

PYNE: Well Leigh, one of the very first issues that I got involved in after I was elected in 1993 was to actually lift the ban on the parallel importation of compact discs. I pursued that in Opposition a long time ago, and then in government until it was brought about by Richard Alston. So the Opposition actually has in government a real record of microeconomic reform at this level. And Allan Fels, former chairman of the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission, gave the Government a zero out of 10 today for its record in micro-economic reform. The Productivity Commission's report on lifting the ban on the parallel importation of books provided a way forward for book sales and for consumers in Australia. The Opposition has looked at that. We would not slam the door in the face of consumers, of books in Australia, we would open up the market further. How we would do that, in terms of the mechanism for that, George Brandis will announce at the appropriate time, which is his job as the Shadow Attorney-General. But we certainly wouldn't do what the Government has done, which is to cave in to special interests, yet again, in spite of the fact that Craig Emerson, its reported, the Minister for Small Business very much wanted to go in a different direction, and was comprehensively slayed by the Cabinet and the party room.

SALES: OK. Lindsay Tanner you raised technology before, and the big change that is coming to this industry, and the way that people are already buying books online. By keeping these protections in place, though, are you not hastening the speed at which people are going to be purchasing books online, particularly when the dollar is at 93 US cents?

TANNER: Well that will ultimately be something the market determines, irrespective of what happens to the regulatory regime here Leigh. We are not talking about removing the fundamental regulatory framework, because that's copyright law. The proposal that was put in place is to actually modify how copyright law applies. You have still got a major intervention in so-called market forces here, that everybody's conceding should stay in place. It's just a debate about exactly how it should be administered. None of us can tell what the impact of technology will be, how quickly it will unfold. But if the example of CDs is a guide, you have a situation that, if you go back to what Christopher referred to, the price impact of that deregulation that his former government put in place is very hard to quantify because it's been overwhelmed, taken over or surpassed by the impact of iPods, downloads and so forth. We suspect that something fairly similar will happen in this instance too. Different dynamics, different detail, but the broad pattern is likely to be similar.

SALES: Christopher Pyne, the Opposition Leader in the Senate Nick Minchin said this week that he believes a majority of his colleagues in the Liberal party are climate change sceptics, is that true?

PYNE: Well I don't know where that information is available in a empirical way. The only evidence that I can point to of the party room's position on an emissions trading scheme, is that when we were in Government in 2007, we proposed an emissions trading scheme, and we began the legislation for an emissions trading scheme, and the party room had met ...

SALES: But if I can ask about the basics of the science, though. You must talk to your colleagues, you must have a sense of how many people believe that human activity contributes substantially to global warming and how many don't believe that.

PYNE: I believe that the overwhelming view amongst my colleagues, and my view is that human beings are adding to climate change, that is where the weight of evidence applies. And that is why we believe in action on climate change, and that is why we have allowed Ian Macfarlane to negotiate with Penny Wong amendments to the emissions trading scheme, and I hope and believe the Government is negotiating in good faith, as are we, to be able to bring about an important change to Australia's economy, and the way we are an industrialised nation into the future. I would hate to think...

SALES: How did you think it is that you've formed the view that the majority of your colleagues do accept the majority science on global warming whereas Nick Minchin has the exact opposite view?

PYNE: All I can point to is the Liberal Party room and Coalition party room has given the green light to Ian Macfarlane to pursue amendments to improve the emissions trading scheme, and I assume, if they are adopted by the Government, it would be hard pressed for the Opposition to then turn around and not support the emissions trading scheme in its amended form. That's the party room's decision, it was an overwhelming view of the party room that that should be allowed to happen, and that's the evidence on the table. As for what people say over the dining room table upstairs in the dining room, in the corridor or at the gym is a matter for them. But I don't pick up from my colleagues an overwhelming view that we should not be negotiating in good faith about an emissions trading scheme. That is a clear decision that we have made as a party room a few weeks ago.

SALES: Lindsay Tanner, Penny Wong said last Friday that the Government wouldn't be able to meet all the Government's amendments on the ETS, because of the Budget bottom line. But given that the bottom line seems to be improving month by month, and we are having lots of positive indicators, does it mean that the Government might have a bit more money to play with and negotiate on what the Coalition is asking for?

TANNER: I can't predict where the negotiations will head. Obviously, we have got to consider any potential outcomes on their merits and deal with them as they are presented to us. The leading figures in the Liberal Party are starting to talk a bit like members of those nutty militias in the United States who go on about one world government and global conspiracies. Pretty soon they'll be talking about UFOs or something, it's really just off the planet, some of this stuff. I'd like to ask Christopher whether he was the unnamed frontbencher who described Nick Minchin as a fruit loop in the newspaper today?

SALES: That was on my list of questions too, I must add Christopher Pyne. Do you agree with that view?

PYNE: Do I agree with what view?

SALES: The view that Senator Nick Minchin came across as a complete fruit loop and that border control was going along like a treat and they came out behaving like total f'wits.

PYNE: Well I think senator Minchin is a very longstanding colleague of mine. He and I have had a very strong professional relationship going back over 20 years. I would never describe him in those terms, I think he's a tremendous contributor to our team, and I hope he thinks that I am. And I'm surprised that anybody would say that, it certainly wasn't me that said it, and of course Lindsay doesn't get to ask the questions, but since you put it on the table, I can rule myself out categorically as the source for that quote and I know that Nick is a team player, as we all are, and our primary responsibility is to remove this rancid Government at the next election and put a decent Government in place.

TANNER: I'd hate to see what his behaviour was like if he wasn't a team player.

SALES: OK. Gentlemen, we are out of time. Always a pleasure to have the pair of you on. Christopher Pyne and Lindsay Tanner, thank you