Radio 3AW, Sunday Morning

Friday, 23 July 2010

Subjects: 2010 election; Fair Work Australia; Labor’s wasteful spending

E&OE…

JOURNALIST    Julie we last met, it was Grand Final Day last year, at the North Melbourne breakfast. So much as happened in the political world since then and well an election is around the corner and a very busy time for you. Good morning. 

JULIE BISHOP    Good morning and do you know my team the Eagles won last night?

JOURNALIST    I know they did.

JULIE BISHOP    That is something that has changed since the Grand Final.

JOURNALIST    You see your team has improved and there is a chance the party may win, and what sort of plans do you have implemented for the next three weeks.

JULIE BISHOP    Well I tipped the Eagles last night, so I am going to tip the Coalition. It will be a very busy couple of weeks. The election is on in earnest. Now every election is about trust. Both sides will make promises and the question is who can the public trust to keep their promises and deliver on those promises. I believe the Coalition will win that trust. We will provide better government. Julia Gillard has a very recent track record of broken promises that she is desperately trying to run away from and so we will be holding her to explain to the Australian people why they should trust her now. After all Kevin Rudd couldn’t trust her, so why should we?

JOURNALIST    Ms Bishop yesterday I was fascinated by what Tony Abbott said. You and he and everyone in the Coalition have been bashing Fair Work Australia for the past three years and yet yesterday he committed to not changing it for three years. Surely that’s not standing up for what you believe in?

JULIE BISHOP    No this shows that we listen to the Australian people. But I think the fact that the unions are going to run a scare campaign again, they’ve shown the desperation of the Labor Party. They are trying to resurrect their scare campaign from the last election, it won’t work…

JOURNALIST    But shouldn’t you stand up and have the courage to say this is what we are going to do change Fair Work Australia and stand by it and fight for it?

JULIE BISHOP    What we’ve said, Tony Abbott said it, Eric Abetz, the whole Shadow Cabinet have guaranteed there will be no changes to the legislation brought in by the Labor Government. It has just recently come in, it hasn’t had a chance to work, in fact the award modernisation has only taken effect from the 1 July and any fine tuning of that legislation would be referred to the independent umpire to ensure fairness.

Now I have spent last week in Queensland, from the north to the south, and without fail business owners and workers complain to me about aspects of Julia Gillard’s new awards system, school students have lost their after school jobs because it is now illegal in this country to only work a two hour shift.

JOURNALIST    Get in there and change it then. If you become the government…

JULIE BISHOP    Hang on, just give me a go. Other workers have had their take home pay slashed. Now people are being hurt by the new award system and these are the types of complaints that we would send off to the Fair Work Australia umpire to determine as should the Labor Party if they won government again. So we’re motivated by helping people get a job, keep a job, and improve their standard of living.

JOURNALIST    I noticed yesterday that the rug was pulled from underneath those protestors because they were outside when Tony Abbott made the speech. They were outside protesting that the Liberals would bring back the old legislation. So in many ways you’ve pre-empted that.

JULIE BISHOP    Well we have said that we won’t reintroduce WorkChoices, we’ve guaranteed it. The only person talking about WorkChoices now is Julia Gillard, she’s obsessed with it. It seems she’s the only one not “moving forward” from WorkChoices.

JOURNALIST    Well what are the policies you’re really going to push?

JULIE BISHOP    We will first of all pay off Labor’s debt. Labor has spent all of the surplus, they ran up a debt that is likely to reach about $90 billion. The Government is currently borrowing $100 million a day to fund their reckless spending.

Now Australians understand the Labor cycle of borrowing, spending and then raising taxes, has to stop. You can’t keep spending what you haven’t earned and it is no good just raising taxes, like the super tax on mining or the emissions trading scheme tax, when you run out of money.

So the first thing we’ll do it cut out waste. We’ve already identified about $47 billion of excessive spending, we’ll cut that out. We’ve announced substantial funding that we will be able to pay for in mental health. We’ve also announced a policy for the environment including a Green Army. So we’re looking at health issues, we’re looking at environmental issues but overall it will be able economic management, competence in government, concerns over Labor’s tax and also stopping the people smuggling trade. Now we’ve done that before, we’ll do it again.

JOURNALIST    Ms Bishop I’ll try once more with this, I understand you say that WorkChoices is dead and I take you for your word on that. Has the standard of political debate got so bad that you cannot be subtle enough to go in and say, “WorkChoices is dead but these are the changes we are going to make to what we think is a flawed policy”? Because to me you are absolving yourself, you’re just saying we’re not going to do anything because it is just too hard to try and debate the point.

JULIE BISHOP    We lost the last election in part because of the unions scare campaign over WorkChoices. Much of it was misleading, much of it was based on falsehoods, but it was a perception that people had. And we’ve listened to the people.

So the Government has introduced a new workplace relations system. In some instances it’s just got off the ground on 1 July. Let’s give it a go. Let the people decide whether they think this is a good system.

Now there is a new awards system, I am already aware of some complaints about that and that is precisely the kind of thing that we would refer to the independent umpire, Fair Work Australia as should the Labor Party if they won government again.

JOURNALIST    I just think that if you are going to stand by your convictions, you should actually present a different policy, you should present the policy you like rather than say, “we’ll stick with the flawed one because it is too hard to debate it”.

JULIE BISHOP    Well it is interesting that Julia Gillard is now adopting, or trying to adopt, our policy on asylum seekers and people smugglers. We’re the ones who said that we would have offshore processing and Julia Gillard said the government will never have offshore processing. That is what she said in 2007. They closed down Nauru, they closed down Manus Island, and they said that Christmas Island would be a white elephant. So Labor has now adopted the Coalition policy, or trying to adopt Coalition policy, on people smugglers.

JOURNALIST    You’re reinforcing my argument. Both sides are moving towards the middle and it’s hard to distinguish between the two of them.

JULIE BISHOP    We are trying to reflect the views of the Australian people, and we’re travelling around the country, Tony’s in Sydney today, I’ve just come back from Queensland and I am in Perth today. We get feedback every day, all the time, about what people are thinking and we try and meet their concerns. As I said we are motivated by helping people. We want people that have a job and keep a job and improve their standard of living and provide opportunities for the young people in this country. And if we can come up with policies that do just that for small business, for the environment, in health, in education, well then we are achieving what we set out to do.

JOURNALIST    I find it interesting that they keep referring to “working families”. I am sure there are some people, zillionaires, that don’t have to work but most people do and I find that absolutely insulting that they keep talking about “working families” as if some of us are sitting around drinking champagne and eating caviar all day and we don’t work.

JULIE BISHOP    It is just a slogan.

JOURNALIST    It’s a slogan, its insulting!

JULIE BISHOP    I know it is, and so is “moving forward”. I mean how many times did Julia Gillard say, “we are moving forward”?

JOURNALIST    48.

JULIE BISHOP    I was told every time she said it if people took a step they’d end up out in the street in their pyjamas. “Moving forward”. Honestly I think the level of debate could be improved beyond just a slogan. Last time it was “working families”, this time it is “moving forward”. The Australia people expect a little more detail. They are not silly, they don’t like being treated like mugs.

JOURNALIST    Do you think it is still an issue that many people who may be non-committed voters, middle of the road people, are really upset about the [inaudible] waste of money over the last two and a half years, the billions of dollars that have disappeared into the nether regions that we’ll never see again?

JULIE BISHOP    People are deeply concerned about that, particularly that home insulation program. Billions of dollars wasted on a program that has left about a thousand roofs across Australia electrified, thousands of roofs are still unsafe, there have been 170 fires, tragically four deaths of young people who are just trying to earn a dollar out of a government scheme and it was so incompetently managed and all that wasteful spending.

The other one is the school building program and I think that is the worse case of waste and mismanagement in Australian history.

JOURNALIST    So are you going to stop the school building program as soon as you get into power? Are you going to stop it?

JULIE BISHOP    Julia Gillard was personally responsible for that school hall program.

JOURNALIST    Are you going to stop it? If you get elected will you stop that program straight away?

JULIE BISHOP    There is apparently $5 billion left in that program and what we’ve said we will do is we will assess which schools haven’t yet had a building and if they can put forward a submission for a building we will provide the money to the school to run the program. The school will get value for money. We trust the parents and the teachers in the schools to get value of money. What Labor did was just give it to state governments and we’ve seen something like $8 billion in value wiped off that program. $8 billion. I say it is one of the worst, if not the worst, cases of waste and mismanagement in Australian history and Julia Gillard had personal responsibility for it.

JOURNALIST    And the rorts, the people who were with the pink batts, genuine people, people who have genuine firms are waiting to be paid and go into the wall. And I am not talking about the shonks that got in to it, but the genuine firms are going into terrible financial problems because of this.

Then the school building thing, we know that shonks got into that. They were not building what the schools required. If you get into office, will there be some sort of investigation into the sort of scams and rorts that went on.

JULIE BISHOP    Absolutely. The Australian people deserve answers for this massive waste of taxpayer money. The programs have been a disaster from the outset. The design was all wrong. It just shows the inexperience and the incompetence of the Government and yet the Ministers involved have still got their jobs. I mean if this happened in the private sector, if this happened in a company, the directors would be sacked, the company would be wound up. Yet these Ministers get promotions. We will hold an inquiry into both the home insulation scheme and the school building rorts because the Australian people deserve to know who was responsible for this massive waste of taxpayer money.

JOURNALIST    Julie thanks for joining us this morning. Enjoy the win as we mentioned at the outset, and good luck for the next three weeks.

JULIE BISHOP    Thank you. Delighted to be with you today.