Topics: The new Senate, Budget, climate change.
E&OE…
Kieran Gilbert
This is AM Agenda, thanks for your company this morning. The Parliamentary Secretary for Education, Senator Scott Ryan, and the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Matt Thistlethwaite. Gentlemen, good morning. Senator Ryan, first to you. July 1, the new Senate; it’s a really uncertain future. You’ve been in the Senate now six years, happy anniversary incidentally, but it’s going to be an uncertain few months ahead, particularly for the Government’s Budget agenda. How do you go about getting through some of those measures or do you simply draw a line under it now and say ‘ok, we’ve got to move on and find other revenue’?
Scott Ryan
Thanks, Kieran. Firstly let me congratulate Matt; I think we started on the same day six years ago. I’d also like to congratulate my new Senate colleagues. I know a couple of them well, Bob Day and David Leyonhjelm, but to all people who were elected this is a very big day. Today they’ve joined the Australian Senate and they have an important role to play in the future of our country. With respect to our Budget measures, as the Prime Minister and Treasurer have made clear, and as I have mentioned before, we will deal with all the crossbenchers with respect. We will respect the fact that they have been elected to exercise their judgement in the interests of the Australian people and the national interest. But we also ask them to respect the mandate we were given to balance the Budget, to end the carbon tax and to fix up Labor’s mess.
Gilbert
Matt Thistlethwaite, to you now on, I guess, the broader Budget challenge – the revenue problem. Does Labor need to be more constructive in all of this in the medium term as you try to rebuild you economic credibility in the eyes of the electorate?
Matt Thistlethwaite
Well Labor’s job is to hold the Government to account, Kieran. This Budget, and elements of it, particularly the GP Co-payment, changes to the pension, the cuts to health and education, weren’t mentioned during the election campaign. Labor sees those as lies, broken promises and election commitments that shouldn’t be proceeded with. That’s why we’ve said we’ll oppose these measures. They’re also bad for our economy and they’re grossly unfair; they target the most vulnerable in our society. And I think your characterisation is right, at some point the Government is going to need to have to draw a line in the sand on these issues and move on and look at other things like the unaffordable Paid Parental Leave Scheme, like some of Labor’s proposals while we were in government, to make the Budget more sustainable.
Gilbert
Let’s look at the broader debate about the Budget, a couple of very interesting interventions last night and yesterday. First of all Malcolm Turnbull, he had this to say in a leadership conference at the ANU just down the road. Let’s have a look.
(Clip of Turnbull)
Gilbert
And so indicating there as well, Senator Ryan, that the Commission of Audit should have been released earlier, that the Government hasn’t been doing as well as it could have done in the selling of the Budget. Do you agree with him?
Ryan
Well no I don’t, Kieran. I think we’ve got to put into context the scale of the Budget challenge we’re dealing with. I mean even if you exclude the senior citizen’s age pension, the standard pension, almost one in five dollars the Commonwealth collects is actually a transfer payment. So one in five dollars of tax you pay, on average, is transferred to someone else. Now we made it clear that all Australians would bear the burden of bringing this Budget back into balance, because the ultimate in fairness is actually making sure we don’t leave a debt to our children, and that is going to have its challenges. The scale of that is much larger than it was in 1996, when you look at the number of people who in some way have some degree of income dependence upon the Australian Government and fellow taxpayers…
Gilbert
So what is it specifically you disagree with Malcolm Turnbull on then? Because he didn’t argue against that point.
Ryan
The Henry Tax Review also included some measures that the Government has indicated that it is opposed to. It outlined the mining tax that we opposed, it outlined things like congestion charges, taxing people’s movement around cities on roads that have been there for more than a century, and we’ve made clear that we have no truck with those proposals. The Henry Tax Review has some pretty ordinary proposals in it too, so I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as to say that the Henry Tax Review represents the gold standard in policy reform.
Gilbert
Martin Parkinson, the Treasury Secretary, has criticised Labor and others, those who are opposed to the Budget, Matt Thistlethwaite. And I’ll read a little bit of what he had to say, the Treasury Secretary. He says, in effect those who are arguing against the Budget are supporting the unsustainable status quo, consigning Australia to a declining future. He says that, he’s basically saying that the vague notion of fairness to oppose any sort of reform is going to do that. What’s your response to that?
Thistlethwhaite
Well the first thing to say, Kieran, is that much of the Budget is broken election commitments and Labor took our election commitments to the public, and we expected the Government to do the same. They’ve broken their election commitments, so that’s the first point to make. The second point is that Labor had a plan to ensure sustainability of our Budget, and that included over $180 billion worth of savings measures, including an expenditure cap. And it included new revenue measures, such as the greater taxation of high-end superannuation contributions, changes to novated leases on cars. We had the mineral resource rent tax introduced during our terms in parliament, we had the carbon price. These are all measures that ensured the future sustainability of our Budget. So Labor had a plan, but it wasn’t based on broken election commitments and hurting the most vulnerable in our community through changes such as the pension, the GP Co-payment and cuts to health and education.
Gilbert
Senator Ryan, do you agree with Mr Turnbull at least to the extent that the Government could have done better in selling the Budget? As you look at the Newspoll today, which has the Coalition’s primary vote back at 35; it seems that a lot of the electorate does.
Ryan
Well this Budget was always going to be a very difficult task. I remember the 1996 Budget; I remember the decisions that were made in the early years of the Kennett Government, Kieran. Cleaning up Labor’s messes is never popular, just once the Coalition would like to government with some of the budgetary situation that the Coalition has left for Labor governments. I need to correct Matt on a couple of things he said there. Firstly Labor didn’t have a plan; Labor had a slogan to balance the Budget. The mining tax hasn’t collected any revenue; the measures which they announced, some of which they’re stopping us implementing; $5 billion in savings. The superannuation changes they announced, they never legislated, they never even drafted because you can’t implement them. And when it comes to broken promises, Labor lied before the last election when they said they were going to terminate the carbon tax. Well today the carbon tax increases under the laws Labor put in place with the Greens. So Labor can’t be trusted, and on the Budget balance, on the situation that we’re going to leave our children, Labor’s record speaks for itself.
Gilbert
Well there’s something that Bill Shorten’s going to say to this same conference at the ANU today, Matt Thistlethwaite. I think he’s going to concede, you know very forcefully for the first time for a Labor leader, that you dropped the ball when it came to climate change when in government, particularly in that period around 2009 that I discussed with Christine Milne and the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Is this a mea culpa that Labor needs to have with the Australian people on this issue?
Thistlethwaite
Well look Kieran, Labor in government, I think, faced a unique set of circumstances, and that is this fact; that we were probably one of the only governments in the western world that faced opposition to taking action on climate change. If you look at most of Europe, it’s accepted that there needs to be a price on carbon and that’s the cheapest, most efficient way to reduce emissions within our economy. And you had bipartisan support in those economies, in many Asian economies you’ve got an approach that is widely accepted. In the US, even in New Zealand, one of our closest neighbours there’s a bipartisan approach. Labor faced a unique set of circumstances and that is an Opposition Leader that was completely obstructionist, that saw a political opportunity to knock something over on the basis of trying to win an election rather than what was in the best interests of our nation. I think, you know in hindsight, we probably would have been justified in looking at a double-dissolution election on this issue when the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was unfortunately knocked over by the Liberal Party and the Greens, but there can be no doubt that Labor had it right in pricing carbon. That’s the way the world is moving, we just faced that unique opposition from Tony Abbott.
Gilbert
Senator Ryan, what’s the Government’s position when it comes to Clive Palmers proposed ETS set at zero dollars? Will you block that or will you let than one through given that Mr Abbott and others have said repeatedly that we would only take action when the rest of the world does? That does seem to fit in with that message.
Ryan
Well I think a number of those discussions are still under way but we remain committed to that statement you referred to from the Prime Minister, which was the same statement John Howard made before the 2007 election. We are not going to impose taxes upon Australia that are the equivalent of economic self-harm when our trading partners do not. And the truth is that our trading partners, people we export to and people we import from, are not imposing the same burdens; the world’s highest carbon tax that the Labor and the Greens imposed on Australia. We’ve had the story about aluminium smelting in the news recently; well the carbon tax means that you can import aluminium from overseas that doesn’t have a carbon tax. But if you want to make it here, and smelt aluminium here, you do. That economic self-harm is not justified.
Gilbert
Yeah well the Renewable Energy Target is the context that the aluminium industry’s been referred to. Is that going to be changed? What’s your sense? Will the cabinet do that?
Ryan
Well the review is under way, it’s a legislated review, and despite the noise Labor and the Greens are making, it’s a review occurring under the legislation they put in place when they were in office. The important point about the review to note is that we do need understand the cost burdens it is putting Australian business…
Gilbert
Do you think it should be excluded?
Ryan
The point is that the promise to the Australian people was about a 20% target for renewable energy. And if it’s true, if that target is actually going to mean you’re looking at a much higher rate of cost being imposed, up to 26% or 27% of the target being renewable energy, then that’s something the Australian people need to know about.
Gilbert
So you support the expulsion of it then?
Ryan
We support the 20% target and we’ve got a review under way to look at how best to get to that.
Gilbert
Alright Senator Ryan, Matt Thistlethwaite. Gentlemen, have a good day. Appreciate it.
Ryan
Thanks Kieran.
Thistlethwaite
Thanks Kieran.
(Ends)