11 October, 2010
Sky News AM Agenda
Ashleigh Gillon and Senator The Hon Kate Lundy
11 October 2010
8:40am
E & OE
Subjects: Afghanistan visit, election costings, NT Intervention, the Australian dollar
ASHLEIGH GILLON:
Joining me now here back at home from Canberra is the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Kate Lundy, good morning to you.
KATE LUNDY:
Good morning Ashleigh.
GILLON:
And from Melbourne joining me is the Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate, Mitch Fifield.
MITCH FIFIELD:
Good morning Ashleigh.
GILLON:
Now Mitch, we just saw then that Tony Abbott was very well behaved in that chat with Adam Boulton, but he’s had some more controversial comments to make in Afghanistan, he’s quoted today as saying “when it comes to Machiavellian bastardry, she’s with the best of them.” Is that an appropriate way, do you think, for an Opposition Leader to talk about a Prime Minister?
FIFIELD:
Well I think Tony is right. Julia Gillard has pursued the low road. She did engage in an act of political bastardry. She’s done something which we haven’t seen an Australian Prime Minister do before, and that is to seek to inject politics and to seek to gain partisan advantage from the visit to our troops of an Opposition Leader. It’s something which you never would have seen John Howard do, Kevin Rudd never did, but Julia Gillard has set a new low. She was well aware of the circumstances of Tony’s impending visit to Afghanistan, well aware that he was doing the right thing by not flagging that he was going there. She could easily have brushed off the issue, but she chose to compare her travelling arrangements and her circumstances with those of Tony Abbott’s, and it was to gain political advantage, and that’s extremely poor form.
GILLON:
Kate Lundy, we did see Julia Gillard muddy the waters when it came to this story. Was it an act of “low bastardry” on her part?
LUNDY:
Look absolutely not, and I reject the way that Mitch Fifield is trying to characterise it. I think we’ve made very clear right from the start that Mr Abbott’s travel arrangements and his plans to go to Afghanistan are his business, I think clearly they have different style, Mr Abbott is looking to do things that perhaps Ms Gillard didn’t, wasn’t going to do, that’s really up to them, and I don’t think there’s anything going on here other than, it’s very important I think that both the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader go to Afghanistan and see our troops. They’ve both done that now and I think that’s very positive but I totally reject this allegation by the Opposition Leader that there was some, some low act involved, I think it’s, he would know better than many, perhaps, that there’s a place for robust debate but I think it’s being a bit precious the way he’s presenting this.
GILLON:
Well Julia Gillard did weigh in on those “jet-lag” comments, comments that Tony Abbott now acknowledges were probably a little bit dopey at the time. But this is exactly what Julia Gillard did say in reaction to that:
JULIA GILLARD (file footage):
“Well I’ll let Mr Abbott work out his own sleeping patterns. For myself obviously as you know I went to Afghanistan, then to Zurich, then came here and did manage to get eight hours sleep last night and that prepared me for a very long day.”
GILLON:
Kate Lundy, shouldn’t Julia Gillard have just stayed out of that all together? Wasn’t she manipulating the media, knowing the press would jump on this story, and that Mr Abbott wasn’t allowed to really respond and explain that he was actually going to Afghanistan on his way home?
LUNDY:
I think Mr Abbott has conceded that the comment he made in the first instance was probably not the best comment, so I think we’re all guilty of saying things that we later regret, and I think this is a lesson that Mr Abbott has learned the hard way. It is very important, particularly in relation to when we’re reflecting on and supporting our troops who are at war, there’s no place to be flippant in that regard and I think we can all come away from this episode a little bit wiser and a little more circumspect about how seriously all Australians take our war effort in Afghanistan.
FIFIELD:
Julia Gillard should apologise. I mean clearly, she was intending to leave the impression that in her view, Tony Abbott couldn’t be bothered going to Afghanistan, when she knew that wasn’t the case, when she knew that he had plans.
LUNDY:
But Mitch…
GILLON:
But Mitch Fifield is it really Julia Gillard’s place to have to reveal Mr Abbott’s travel plans? As she said, they’re his business, and it was really something that had to wait until after he had gone there to be revealed, wasn’t it?
FIFIELD:
Well of course you can’t reveal that he’s going beforehand, that’s the protocol. But Julia Gillard, in talking about sleeping patterns and her own arrangements, she was clearly trying to leave the impression that Tony Abbott couldn’t be bothered going, which wasn’t the case, because she knew that he was intending to go. She was deliberately leaving a misleading impression. And that’s wrong.
GILLON:
And do you think that impression has damaged the Coalition’s position on Afghanistan? That voters might have seen that as being something that Tony Abbott doesn’t actually believe, that doesn’t actually pay enough attention to the cause there?
FIFIELD:
No, I think what the public will take out of this episode is that Julia Gillard isn’t always straight, and that even a previously sacrosanct issue such as political figures visiting our troops is now something that Julia Gillard sees as an opportunity to gain political advantage. That is what I think the Australian people will take from this episode.
GILLON:
Okay Mitch Fifield…
LUNDY:
Ashleigh…
GILLON:
Okay last word Kate Lundy, very quickly.
LUNDY:
Look it was Tony Abbott who said “jet-lag”, not anybody else. He needs to take responsibility for the words that he used. He could have said ‘I will make my own arrangements, as the Prime Minister knows,’ or something like that. He chose to say “jet-lag”. It was inappropriate, it was foolish and he paid a political price for it.
GILLON:
Yes and this saga is still continuing, it’s been going for a week so I think everyone’s probably getting a little bit sick of this whole thing! We look forward to Mr Abbott coming home and having more to say on that, no doubt when he touches down this morning. We will have more with our panel after the break, and we’ll also take a look at the prospects of the Aussie dollar this week. Stay with us.
Break
Welcome back to AM Agenda, Kate Lundy and Mitch Fifield are on our panel of politicians today. Mitch, today the Opposition is again under fire over its election costings, this time in an SMH report which claims that Joe Hockey lied when he said the costings had been audited by an accounting firm. You’ll all recall that this was a big deal in the last week of the election campaign. Now that firm actually says that its work for the Coalition was “not of an audit nature.” So, Mitch Fifield what’s your response to that? Joe Hockey wouldn’t have deliberately misled Australians over that, would he?
FIFIELD:
Certainly not. This is a bit of a semantic debate. We indicated during the election campaign that we had engaged one of the Big Five accounting firms to verify the accuracy of our costings. The accounting firm did that, and we released that information to the public. We pursued that course because there was a question mark over the government’s costing arrangements; you’ll recall that there was a leak of information from that process, so we thought it was the right thing to do to get an independent accounting firm to check the accuracy of our costings. And that’s what they did.
GILLON:
But it wasn’t an audit, was it, Mitch Fifield? So this was an oversight, perhaps, from Joe Hockey when he said that an audit had been conducted of your costings.
FIFIELD:
Well I think Joe was using the word audit in the colloquial sense, in the common sense which the public would understand, which is having your numbers checked, and that’s what happened.
GILLON:
Is that a fair enough explanation, Kate Lundy?
LUNDY:
Look even the local treasurer at the junior football club knows what audit means. I think this was deliberately misleading by the Coalition. I think to listen to Mitch Fifield now use words like ‘oh, it’s semantic’ and ‘we verified those accounts,’ it’s just not good enough. The stakes are so high, Ashleigh, in the week before an election, and this to me is a, um, prima facie case of lying to the electorate and trying to get through on the back of a very, I think a very important untruth because it was about the state of the budget and the Liberals’ costings. Nothing could be more serious in the last week of an election campaign.
GILLON:
Well Kate Lundy the Government is also the target of a negative newspaper report today, this time in The Australian. It says that the number of federal public servants in the Northern Territory has doubled since mid-2007. Is the Government confident that the NT Intervention isn’t just drowning in bureaucracy? Looking at these numbers it certainly suggests that. Are you sure that resources aren’t being wasted there?
LUNDY:
Well I think if you actually look inside those numbers, its very easy for The Australian to say that ‘well, you know, fifty here and a hundred here,’ the positions are things like Community Liaison Officers, people on the ground providing meals to school children, all sorts of direct jobs providing direct services. So again I think there’s a massive difference between Liberals lying about election budget costings in the final week of a federal election and a story about how Labor is delivering real services to Indigenous people through the Northern Territory Intervention program. They can’t be compared.
GILLON:
Mitch Fifield, the very nature of the Intervention does require a lot of hands-on help in the Territory, doesn’t it?
FIFIELD:
Of course it does. But I think it’s important to remember that Labor were far from enthusiastic when the Coalition in government embarked upon the Northern Territory Intervention. There was a crisis in child health, there was a crisis in relation to child abuse in the Northern Territory. So yes, it’s important that there was an intervention. Labor, since assuming office, have paid lip service to the Intervention, but there are now some serious questions marks over the efficacy of this program. Again, perhaps this is another case of Labor failing to administer properly, and we will take the opportunity of Senate Estimates to probe and ask the questions. Is it true that whole motels are booked out by government departments, to have only a few rooms taken up? That’s just good old-fashioned waste, if that’s the case. But the most important thing to bear in mind here is that we’ve got to make sure that rather than just have ‘welcome to country’s’ and apologies and smoking ceremonies, which are all fine, that we actually see real improvements on the ground in Aboriginal communities. We’ve got to make sure we do better.
GILLON:
Kate I’ll just let you respond to that, for example, the stories of whole hotels being booked out. It sounds like waste.
LUNDY:
Labor is not afraid of accountability or scrutiny, and the Estimates process is a good opportunity for that. What we are proud of is making a real difference, and I’m surprised the Opposition, given they did initiate the Intervention, aren’t looking more constructively in supporting Labor actually getting people on the ground and making a difference. So I think, you know, bring on the spotlight because everyone agrees that the Northern Territory Intervention is important. It’s incredibly important that it is transparent and people know what’s going on, and I just think it’s surprising that, you know, once again the Coalition will leap on, you know, a cheap story about the number of public servants when they know very well, through their own effort, that that equates to people on the ground and the job getting done.
GILLON:
Kate before we go, we all know of course the Aussie Dollar is right up there with the US at the moment. Is the Government concerned about the flow-on effects that it could have for exporters, for example?
LUNDY:
Look I think, I don’t want to speculate about the value of the dollar but I think we do understand that in areas where the prices aren’t also going up, for example, tourism, manufacturing, that there is an impact. That’s why we want to cut the corporate tax rate and with the Coalition expressing concern about this we’d expect them to back in that measure that Labor has put forward. They haven’t done so yet but we’d like to see them support our cut to the corporate tax rate.
GILLON:
Well Mitch Fifield the Coalition certainly seems to be going on the attack over the dollar. Are you suggesting the Government should be doing more to try to manipulate the dollar to bring it down?
FIFIELD:
Well we’re obviously concerned that exporters are doing it tougher with a higher Australian dollar. I don’t think anyone is arguing that we go back to a fixed exchange rate; having a floating exchange rate has been bipartisan policy for the best part of 25 years. But what we are saying is that it’s important to remember that when a budget is in deficit, when you’re running up debt, you do put upward pressure on interest rates. But there are also other downstream consequences for the economy of running those debts, and there is an impact on the dollar as well.
GILLON:
Okay. Mitch Fifield, Kate Lundy, thanks for your time on AM Agenda this morning.
LUNDY:
Thanks very much Ashleigh.
FIFIELD:
Thank you.
ENDS