Topics: Superannuation; ministry; Budget measures.
E&OE…
Jonathan Green:
But first, as we like to say in this business, federal politics and the rather unusual business of ginger groups in Parliament. Victorian Liberal Senator Scott Ryan, he’s up first. Then, well, have a guess at my star guest tonight.
Siri:
Who, me?
Jonathan Green:
Yeah, that’s right Siri, it’s you. Just about 6:30 tonight?
Siri:
That’s what I thought.
Jonathan Green:
No no no no, you don’t need to be so smug. If you have a question for Australian, Siri, send me a text. 0418 226 576, 0418 226 576. Questions for Siri. Here on RN Drive, on your radio, online, and on your mobile.
Siri, are we there yet? No. Siri later, around 6:30 tonight. I can’t wait to hear that voice in the flesh. 6 and a half past 6 on RN Drive. Nothing to see here. That’s the vibe from the Government as the election dust settles in Canberra. The Government … well, seems a bit of a duck at the moment. Calm on the surface, paddling furiously beneath. Backbench superannuation ginger groups, redrafted Coalition agreements, new Nationals ministries, muttering from the Coalition’s conservative right.
Things, in truth, seem nothing if not just a tad hectic as the new Government beds in, but through it all the seemingly confident Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, as the Coalition seat tally hovers around 77. Counting in Ewen Jones is Queensland’s seat of Herbert, is teetering on the narrowest of margins. It’s all going on.
Victorian Liberal Senator Scott Ryan, welcome back to Drive.
Scott Ryan:
G’day Jonathan.
Jonathan Green:
Minister for Vocational, Education and Skills Senator; but for how long and what might be in the offering?
Scott Ryan:
Look, the invitation to serve the ministry is always a gift to serve the Prime Minister. One always hopes it comes back, but one doesn’t take anything for granted.
Jonathan Green:
Well good luck with that.
Scott Ryan:
Thank you.
Jonathan Green:
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop today confirming that she warned the Prime Minister about voter anger on superannuation changes. PM says he’s standing firm. Is he wrong to do that?
Scott Ryan:
I think what Julie said was she provided feedback from, I think it was, she said, 80 electorate visits around the country during the campaign and that is a role of deputy leader. When you look at basic superannuation changes and geographically where people are hit by them and is that 4% of people at the upper end that will have to contribute a bit more. There isn’t a noticeable response in voter behaviour to be honest. I’m not going to say I didn’t get a complaint about it and I didn’t have members of the Liberal party raise it with me.
Jonathan Green:
Did you?
Scott Ryan:
I did, but that doesn’t mean that a policy shouldn’t be pursued. I like to remember that half the money from these measures gets redirected towards people at the lower end of the income scale to support superannuation and particularly to support those who have broken careers to allow them to catch up and that’s usually women who have broken careers for family reasons.
Jonathan Green:
How concerted is the backbench campaign that we’ve been reading about? How concerted is that ginger group been over these changes?
Scott Ryan:
I wouldn’t use either of those terms. I think that there are some people who have some concerns and there are people who probably provide some political feedback, but as the Prime Minister said, we took that plan to the election and we intend to present that plan to Parliament and hope that Parliament will support it.
There may be some discussion, and as Julie Bishop said during the campaign, there’s always discussion around implementation of the policy, but the policy stands.
Jonathan Green:
You’re trying to get a fair bit through with this Budget that you’ll present to the Parliament. Does sticking by those super changes put the Government at a disadvantage as it negotiates other Budget measures with the new Senate?
Scott Ryan:
I’ll say a couple of thing. Firstly, the criticism we get as a politician is that we walk away from our promises, not that we stick to them. I think it’s important that we remember that we just had an election. It was close. There were more than 800,000 more people who voted for Malcolm Turnbull than Bill Shorten and for our policies than Labor’s policies. That’s a significant difference but at the same time those who actually want to change these policies from the other parties, whether that be Labor who didn’t have a superannuation policy or cross benches.
They should also ask that question, that is what are we going to do about supporting those with broken careers and allowing them to catch up? What are we going to do about those who have lower incomes and supporting them together superannuation for a little bit more independence.
Jonathan Green:
It’s a bit unfair to say that both Labor has no policy. I mean they’d argued that you borrowed theirs.
Scott Ryan:
No remember just before the election actually went and said they would take out savings, but they weren’t going to announce the detail. They’re going to look at that in government. That was their policy they talked in the last week in the campaign. Take the Liberal party and the Coalition’s savings, but not actually announce the detail of how it would work.
Jonathan Green:
They are now suggesting an independent umpire in this vexed issue of retrospectivity. Is that an idea worth looking at?
Scott Ryan:
I’m not quite sure how it works. Whether it’s the Grattan Insittute or or (inaudible) lawyers who said it’s not retrospective. I mean I think what we’ve got here is the Labor party not living up to the promise that Bill Shorten made last Sunday, which was to try and make the Parliament work. What’s an independent umpire going to do? Pull out a different dictionary?
Jonathan Green:
As Judith Sloane said today in the Australian, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, maybe it is retrospective.
Scott Ryan:
I have a lot of time for a lot of things that Judith writes and I know Judith, but I don’t think this qualifies as retrospective. There’s no penalty that’s applied and there’s significant ways of opinion that backs that up.
Jonathan Green:
PM is clearly alert to the difficulty of the struggle before him.
Audio of the Prime Minister: …and obviously we don’t have a majority in the Senate and finally we will…there is always going to… as you know, there is always debate and sometimes compromise in this place, but we took a very clear set of policies to the election. We campaigned on it very clearly and that’s what we’ll be presenting.
Jonathan Green:
Scott Ryan, will the double disillution triggers get through do you think? The ABCC legislation, for example?
Scott Ryan:
To go through the Parliament, what they need to do is to go through the House and then they’re presented to the Senate again, and then the joint seating is only called if the Senate refuses to pass the bill again after the election.
Jonathan Green:
Is that the normal process post double disillusion?
Scott Ryan:
It is, yeah. Section 57 requires the Senate have another chance effectively. We’re a long way from knowing the final make-up of the Senate to be honest. It will be a couple of weeks at least.
Jonathan Green:
The country has clearly been clamouring for the ABCC legislation to pass through the high exposure it has received through the campaign.
Scott Ryan:
To be fair, I mean Michaelia Cash the Minister did debate her part, did do a debate about this at the Press Club. We did have advertising on it and while the CFA dispute did sort of take over a bit towards the end. That was another industrial matter. I don’t think anyone could say that we didn’t actually talk about it when given the opportunity during the campaign.
Jonathan Green:
I think the Prime Minister mentioned it twice, but we’ll move on from there.
Scott Ryan:
I think it was a few more times than that.
Jonathan Green:
Senator Scott Ryan is a Victorian Liberal. He’s Minister for Vocational Education and Skills joining us here on RN Drive. The Coalition Agreement, Senator, has been something which has been getting a lot of attention. Are there been any concerns on the Liberal party backbench over the content of that agreement with the Nationals?
Scott Ryan:
I’ve got to say that I’ve found this a little bit fascinating Jonathan, because this is probably the oldest agreement in Australian politics, at least the oldest one I can think of going back well before I was born. John Howard described it as one that’s governed by the iron laws of arithmetic and he changed his ministry in accordance with the change in balance between Liberals and Nationals, sometimes in difficult circumstances. The Coalition Agreement is basically a procedural issue. The policies of the Coalition are the ones we took to the election because unlike Labor who did a deal with the Greens after the election that changed policy, we’re in Coalition before the election. We’ve been in Coalition all but for a handful of years of my life.
Jonathan Green:
Yet these agreements renegotiated subsequently, and if it is just a matter of mathematics, why not make it public?
Scott Ryan:
Well I think I’ve never actually seen one myself.
Jonathan Green:
Would you like to? What are you signing up to?
Scott Ryan:
The thing is, what we’re signing up to is simply, this is a ministry arrangement, the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister National party come to.
Jonathan Green:
How do we know that?
Scott Ryan:
It’s longstanding. This is something that has been going on for decades. There’s no change to our policies. When are policies are the ones we had before the election. That’s what the Prime Minister was talking about today in the press conference.
Jonathan Green:
This is the thing isn’t it, Scott Ryan, we just don’t know. If the Government were suddenly to, as some have speculated today, to start taking a stick to the family court. Would that be because of some detail of the Coalition Agreement, or because it was policy?
Scott Ryan:
Every policy…when we consider policies jointly in the Coalition, because the joint Party Room, where all ministers attend that considers policy jointly, so there’s no capacity for something like that to happen.
Jonathan Green:
The Nationals are playing their hand here. Two new ministries is now the offer.
Scott Ryan:
I think that’s what John Howard said with the iron law of arithmetic. It’s essentially done in proportion to how much National Party are to a proportion to the joint party group. They won an extra seat from retiring a board member and we obviously lost a few seats, so the ratios are changed.
Jonathan Green:
How tricky will the factional (inaudible) balance be in the remnant of this new ministry the rest of the Coalition and Liberal members in particular?
Scott Ryan:
I have never found it troubling at all and I think it’s…I actually revel in the fact that the Liberal Party is a very, very broad church. You have some conservative members. You have some probably progressive Liberal members and you have some very, very dry members like myself. I actually like the fact that in our Party Room, you hear very different perspectives and you have a wide-ranging debate.
Jonathan Green:
Job for Tony Abbott?
Scott Ryan:
One of the things you do, especially when you’re a minister and you’re hoping you might get a phone call as to not provide public advice to the Prime Minister.
Jonathan Green:
As a dry member of the Liberal party would you welcome Tony Abbott returning to the Cabinet table?
Scott Ryan:
I’ve always had a policy of never providing public comment on who should be in the ministry. In our Party, it’s always been a matter for the Prime Minister and I think as someone who led us to an election victory, it’s respectful of that office to actually let the Prime Minister do that. Be a good public commentary.
Jonathan Green:
It would be a good signal though to those who argue that the drift to the centre that the Liberal Party cost you at this election?
Scott Ryan:
Again, I just don’t think it’s helpful if Liberal Party colleagues, or other colleagues offer public advice to the Prime Minister.
Jonathan Green:
(talking over) What about the general proposition though of the drift of the Party? Is that something that concerns you?
Scott Ryan:
I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think Liberal Party over the course of its life, just like the Labor party has, has dealt with emerging challenges, international challenges and the attitudes of the community in different ways. We’re always a part of the product of our times. When you look at the core beliefs of the Liberal party, I don’t think they’ve changed in most of the 25 years that I’ve been actively involved and that’s a commitment to balancing the budget, to national security, to strong boarders and strong immigration programs, strong controls on them. I think challenges change as policies change, as circumstances change. I think those values remain as they were for the last 2 decades.
Jonathan Green:
What’s your take on the decision overnight on the China and south China sea? Is there a more significant issue in international politics right now?
Scott Ryan:
I think as we saw from the comments that Julie Bishop made, that this is a very sensitive issue and Australia has no…officially has no, makes no observation on containing claims for sovereignty. We want international law followed and we want disputes and disagreements resolved peacefully, but we will also strongly support the maintenance of international law and the right of freedom of passage. At the same time, there are sensitivities around this and so it’s not something that we should be escalating with our rhetoric as Stephen Conroy did on radio this morning.
Jonathan Green:
When someone on whom the health of the Australian economy depends, ignores international law, where does that leave us?
Scott Ryan:
Let’s see how this plays out. The ruling that does apply to sovereignty, that applies to what I understand, maritime rights to use a technical term, that came out overnight, was a pretty strong one. Let’s see how that plays out. I know Julie Bishop is getting more Asian foreign ministers over the coming days, but I think everyone’s got a commitment to ensuring that these issues are resolved peacefully. I think that’s the prime concern at the moment.
Jonathan Green:
Peaceful would be good Scott Ryan, indeed.
Scott Ryan:
Absolutely.
Jonathan Green:
Look, I’m imagining that we’ll be waiting on the completion of the Senate camp before we get a new ministry?
Scott Ryan:
No, the Prime Minster alerted today that the ministry would be through our Party Room meeting in his press conference. The Senate count is probably going to take a while longer than that. The writs for the election are due back on August the 8th, so the Senate count should be completed in the days leading up to that. It will probably take slightly longer in larger states because there are simply more ballot papers that have to be data entered now than was the case.
Jonathan Green:
Scott Ryan, thanks for your time.
Scott Ryan:
Thanks Jonathan.
Jonathan Green:
Scott Ryan is Victorian Liberal Senator Deputy Manager of government business in the Senate and as we speak, Minister for Vocational Education and Skills.
(ENDS)