Topics: Nielsen poll, cuts to industry R&D
Lyndal Curtis: Hello and welcome to Capital Hill, I’m Lyndal Curtis. On a day the Labor Government would have hoped to be greeted by newspaper headlines on its package of help for Australian industry, it was instead greeted, in the Fairfax press at least with another opinion pool. This one, with movements all outside the margin of error, was not pleasant reading. Labor’s gone backwards in this one poll and Tony Abbott is now the preferred prime minister, all on a day where the reaction from business to the industry statement was reasonably positive. To discuss the day, we’re joined by Labor MP Graham Perrett and Liberal Senator Scott Ryan. Welcome to you both.
We’ll turn first to the reaction from two of Labor’s cabinet ministers to the Neilsen poll.
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Graham, if I could come first to you, polls are backward looking. They’re not necessarily a measure of what will happen. Some say the only poll that counts is election day, are you one of those people?
Graham Perrett: Well yes. I do know that you can put a bet on who’s going to win the grand final now. You can make some judgements based on pre-season form now, but you can’t get a bookie to pay you for the grand final today. That’s the reality. We’ve got an election date, we’ve got a lot of policies to sell and we’ve got the leader who’s going to take us through to that election. For me, in a marginal seat, I’ve always seen polls differently. They either give me a half a smile or half a grimace, but they don’t change anything that I’m doing because a marginal seat means every day is a day where you do what you can, to get out and convince people to vote for you. That’s just the reality of marginal seats.
Curtis: Scott, is the only poll that counts the one on election day or is the only poll that counts the one you’re in front in?
Senator Scott Ryan: I think Graham and I will probably only agree that the only poll that counts is on polling day. What I’ve seen over the last couple of months, and over the last couple of weeks, is yet again, people are frustrated that the Government is obsessed with itself; it’s naval gazing. People want the chaos to end. They want a government that’s focussed on their cost-of-living, their family, their small business and that’s not what they’re getting. They’re getting a government that is obsessed with leadership, obsessed with internal machinations or a prime minister that tries to play political tricks by announcing an election nine months out.
Curtis: Graham, Simon Crean called it a discussion about the “internals”, the debate within the party about the situation it is in. Is that having an impact in your seat?
Perrett: Any day where we are talking about ICAC [the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption], or the Member for Dobell Craig Thomson, is a day we’re not talking about our great economy, our great plan for the future, our investments in education and the NDIS and that is a distraction. The reality is it’s quite scandalous some of that information that has a slight hint of Labor on it. The reality is it is far removed from what Julia Gillard is on about, far removed from what the cabinet and caucus is about, but there is still that bit of history. Then throw in that mix of other things that is in the mainstream media in terms of speculation and it detracts and distracts from the message we’ve got to sell to get over the line, which is basically, pretty simple: are people comfortable with the way we’re managing the books? There’s no point talking about our AAA-credit rating from three rating agencies, we need to convince Australians we have the best possible plan for the future. We’re not doing that well.
Curtis: Are there problems though with some own goals Labor has scored, having to ditch the surplus having promised it so strongly, and the fact that the mining tax raised a very small amount of money in the first six months of its operation?
Perrett: We certainly did create an expectation out there about the surplus. That is something we ran pretty hard on and we don’t resile from the fact that a surplus is good for the economy, but obviously when the revenue coming in from so many fronts failed to deliver as per Treasury predictions, we had to recalibrate that. That’s what good, sensible government is about. But obviously with that recent poll, that perception would have rattled people quite a bit so the good thing is we’ve got around seven months until election night. We can explain this story, whereas obviously the misinformation that is out there will not play into our hands at the moment.
Curtis: Scott, is the Coalition effectively coasting at the moment? Not having to put out finely detailed, costed policies; having to focus only on the Government; and in some cases, having to step back from the public debate?
Senator Ryan: Graham then just highlighted why people are so frustrated with Labor. He mentioned ICAC, he mentioned Craig Thomson, he mentioned the failure to deliver a budget surplus, even though he says it’s important – he just can’t deliver it and his Government can’t deliver it. The Opposition and Tony Abbott, since the start of the year, have been talking about what we plan to do. Our plan for the manufacturing sector, our plan for the services sector, our plan for agriculture – that’s what we’ve been doing since the start of the year because people crave a government that is interested in them, not itself.
Curtis: But you also haven’t outlined, for the most part, some of your big spending policies, like the value of tax cuts you’re offering and indeed how you’ll pay for things, and plans, such as the discussion paper on northern Australia, aren’t even policies yet.
Senator Ryan: We heard in Senate Estimates last week that we simply can’t trust the numbers from this Government. We know the most recent update, which was the mid-year budget update, is already out-of-date. Wayne Swan himself said that. They’ve said they won’t give us any new numbers until May and they’re past record is that those have been out by tens of billions of dollars within months. So we’re not going to see, from the Treasury and Finance, independent numbers untouched by the hands of the Labor Government that we can trust and the Australian people can trust, until the election campaign. We’re not going to do what Labor does and promise the world and deliver smoking ruins. We are only going to promise what we can deliver, and for that we need real numbers that the Labor Party refuse to give us.
Curtis: Scott, does that mean the sorts of things you’ve promised already that you’ll have to scale back?
Senator Ryan: No, no. We’ve made promises, but we’re not going to complete our suite of promises and announcements until we’ve actually seen the final numbers. What we’ve promised we will deliver, but we’re not going to make promises that we cannot be certain we will deliver.
Perrett: Scott, that is an incredible slur to say the people in Treasury operate at the behest of the Labor Party. They are the same people that worked for John Howard and they are the same people who will serve the Australian people into the future. That’s an incredible accusation.
Senator Ryan: Graham, I wasn’t slurring Treasury at all. We know that the budget documents are the property, and they are signed off by, the Treasurer and the Finance Minister. The Department of Treasury and the Department of Finance has made that clear over and over again. The election update is purely …
Perrett: We rely on them entirely for projections, they are not political things.
Senator Ryan: They are signed off by the Treasurer and we heard that about the mining tax last week, when the Treasury said it wasn’t really involved in the negotiations and it wasn’t certain about the numbers.
Perrett: That’s a different process altogether.
Curtis: I might move on now to the issue of policy and the Prime Minister says the industry and innovation statement will help get more local industry work, help get them involved in the major projects. Here is what she had to say today.
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Scott, how is getting business and research institutions together to innovate regulation, how is getting at least the input of local industry into local projects regulation?
Senator Ryan: Well no, what the Labor Party has proposed is setting up a new bureaucracy to see greater local content in projects. Only a delusional Labor Party would think regulating the internal behaviour of business is going to create jobs.
Curtis: There is no compulsion on business to do so.
Senator Ryan: No, but it’s a regulatory burden. It requires them to have procurement officers in place to oversee their supply chains. But to go to the most damaging element of this: CSL, the champion in the Australian medicines industry that played a role in inventing the vaccine to cervical cancer, that’s going to lose its access to the R&D tax concession. That’s insane, to be nobbling our champions.
Curtis: Big business will lose access to the 125% tax concession, but they can still write off their own R&D spending on tax, can’t they?
Senator Ryan: Why would you actually take away from those larger businesses that not only have a fantastic track record, but also have a greater capacity to support R&D in Australia? We’re taking them out and saying you can’t access the R&D tax concession. But if you look at their track record – the big miners, CSL – they’ve got a fantastic record in R&D, it’s something they should be encouraging not stripping.
Curtis: In the effort to find savings in the rest of the package the Government has done that, taken away the big tax concessions from R&D from some of the biggest companies, would it have been better to leave some of the tax concessions there for the bigger companies?
Perrett: The reality is, and what Scott failed to reveal there, is Australian companies are some of the best in the world – our farmers are the best, our miners are the best and our manufacturers when it comes to innovation we will hold our own with the world – but we need to be on a level playing field. We need to be given a go. Now if a mining company comes into the north-west of Australia, and much of our manufacturing base is in Scott’s backyard, to say ‘look we’re just going to go straight to China or Singapore or India’ in terms of our production lines, that’s when we need to say, ‘have a look at Australian suppliers, give us a go’. Particularly as a Queenslander I understand this. I’ve got a background with the mining industry, I know that we have world-class innovation. I know that at the moment in Brisbane we are looking after the health and safety in mines in China. Why? Because we’ve got the background and the innovation and the throughput, which is very important to fund that innovation. I think this is a great initiative. We only dig these minerals out of the ground once, we should be giving Australian companies a chance to share in some of those profits and employing Australians and Queenslanders is a good place to start as far as I’m concerned.
Curtis: Scott, does the way the Government structured the package mean that the days of picking winners in Australia is over?
Senator Ryan: Well I think there is a consensus in Australia that the Government doesn’t pick winners. The issue with this package is a quarter of a million dollars has been stripped by the Government from R&D. They pull away a billion dollars and only hand back $750 million. Whether it is manufacturing or mining or medicine, R&D is not something that only happens in one sector. This package rebrands part of the Government’s failures, it institutes more bureaucracy and red tape for companies and it takes away money for R&D. For every test for supporting manufacturing in Australia it is a failure. On top of that, the single greatest barrier to Australian companies at the moment is the cost-base and the cost-base Labor has made worse under the carbon tax. You speak to any manufacturer and that’s what’s hitting them hard.
Curtis: And that’s where we will have to leave it. Scott Ryan and Graham Perrett thank you for joining Capital Hill today.