12 September, 2011
Sky News – AM Agenda
Ashleigh Gillon and Andrew Leigh MP
12 September 2011
8:45am
E & OE
Subjects: Asylum seekers, Nielsen Poll, Craig Thomson, Future Fund
ASHLEIGH GILLON:
Welcome back. Joining me this morning on our panel of politicians the Liberal Senator Mitch Fifield and the Labor MP Andrew Leigh. Good morning to you both, thank you for your time.
Andrew, shortly in 15 minutes time, you’ll be walking into the caucus meeting, and we’re expecting quite a fiery session with the left faction making it very clear they’re going to put their view to the Prime Minister that the Labor Party should support onshore processing. After all that is the Labor Party’s national platform that was decided a couple of years ago. How fiery are you expecting that to be, and do you think in the end the Prime Minister will prevail and we’ll see the Malaysia solution again adopted as Labor policy?
ANDREW LEIGH:
Ashleigh, we’ll have robust discussions in caucus, but they’ll stay in caucus and I’m not about to start pre-empting what’s going to be going on there. And there’s a good reason for that, and that’s that like a sporting team has a robust discussion in the locker room, goes out and plays the game, that’s exactly what we do in the Labor Party.
GILLON:
Well not all of you, because a lot of your colleagues in the left faction have been very public in their views that Julia Gillard has got it wrong when it comes to Malaysia.
LEIGH:
I can tell you my perspective Ashleigh, and that’s that I don’t pre-empt caucus discussions and I don’t talk about them beforehand or afterwards. I respect the importance of the caucus discussion and that’s what’s made the Labor Party function so well, it’s why it’s the oldest political party in Australia.
GILLON:
What is the mood though among your colleagues? Are people wanting to embrace offshore processing again or is there a shift away from it?
LEIGH:
People recognise that this is a challenging issue, that there are 15 million refugees in the world, that we need regional solutions to what is a global problem. Australia will always take only a small share of the world’s asylum seekers. But what we’ve done through the Bali process is to set in train a regional process here which takes into account the nearly hundred thousand asylum seekers in the Thai camps, in the Malaysian camps and tries to recognise that we’ve got to shut down this trade of people smuggling. No one wants to see little kids being put on boats, that’s an incredibly dangerous thing and Australia can be more generous in the number of refugees it takes in.
GILLON:
Senator, in terms of how Tony Abbott plays this in the next few days, he is walking a fine line, isn’t he? He’s said that he wants to work with the Government but as you heard Scott Morrison earlier, he says this isn’t a blank cheque, and he certainly isn’t guaranteeing that the Coalition is going to support any legislative changes to the Migration Act.
FIFIELD:
We can’t guarantee anything at the moment because we simply don’t know what the Government is going to do. The Government don’t have a policy. Doug Cameron has a policy, I’m not sure if Andrew has a policy, but the Government itself does not have a policy. So we’ve got to wait and see what their plan is. We are of a mind to be helpful – that if they put a sensible proposition forward we’re happy to be of assistance. But the thing that continues to amaze me is that the Labor Party used to say offshore processing was immoral and ineffective. But apparently it turns out now that it’s only immoral and ineffective when the Liberal Party’s doing it. If the Labor Party was doing it, apparently that would be virtuous and effective.
GILLON:
But the Coalition isn’t exactly being helpful if you’re saying that you really only support Labor if they do end up embracing your own policy of Nauru and TPVs. That’s not really the sort of helpful bipartisan support that Tony Abbott first suggested.
FIFIELD:
It would be helpful if the Labor Party adopted a policy which was tried and tested and proven…
GILLON:
Which the Immigration Department says now wouldn’t act as a deterrent.
FIFIELD:
…which is Nauru and and Temporary Protection Visas. It worked before. We still are of the belief that it would work again. It’s not just one measure it’s not just Nauru it’s a package of measures. But as important is a Government’s resolve. The people smugglers know that this Government isn’t serious that they don’t have the resolve. And we’ve got to remember it’s this Government that actually put the people smugglers in business. They talk about breaking the people smugglers’ business model, but it was actually this Government that in effect designed that business model by abolishing offshore processing at Nauru and abolishing Temporary Protection Visas.
GILLON:
Andrew, does the hypocrisy worry you? Labor did rail against offshore processing for such a long time, then we saw Julia Gillard initially not even rule out Nauru, or still going along the PNG line as well. Today, the left faction obviously arguing what the platform is, as Mitch points out, there’s been a lot of different positions over recent years.
LEIGH:
Ashleigh we know that Nauru on its own is not a solution to this.
FIFIELD:
We’ve never suggested it was.
LEIGH:
We know it cost a billion dollars.
FIFIELD:
That’s not true.
LEIGH:
We know that when the Coalition put in place the Nauru solution, nearly 20 people a day continued arriving by boat for that first hundred days. But we also know that there’s been a bit of a change of play here as a result of the high court case. That’s not new I was a High Court Associate to Michael Kirby when the excise case came down, dramatically changing what the Howard Government understood to be the position in relation to excise taxes, and the Howard Government then had to turn to that issue and look at it afresh. That’s happened to us in the case of migration – there’s been a major high court decision and we’re working through that. You’d expect that a major High Court decision has an impact on what the Government does. And that’s what you’re seeing here.
GILLON:
What we’ve also seen here today is yet another poll, the Nielsen poll this time, showing again that Julia Gillard is deeply unpopular, again that the Labor Party is struggling at 27% primary vote, which you know is pretty devastating. It also shows that if you brought back Kevin Rudd as leader, then you’re position in the polls could turn around to the extent that you could be in an election winning lead. Is it hard for Labor MPs to ignore those sorts of numbers?
LEIGH:
Asheligh, I did some work when I was at the ANU, looking at the predictive power of polls two years out from an election with Justin Wolfers, and it turns out they have none. So it’s not worth…
GILLON:
That’s wasn’t my question though my question is about the backbenchers’ mood when they open papers, see this poll showing that there’s someone else who’s preferred as the leader of your Party, and it’s not Julia Gillard.
LEIGH:
Look, I’m not in the habit of quoting Sarah Palin, but she did say that polls were for firemen and strippers and I think there’s something in that. I think there’s a sense that we ought to be focussing on the long game. We ought to be focussing on the big reforms things like putting a price on carbon pollution, something that will make a difference for us and make a difference for our kids. Making sure that Australians get a fair deal on the minerals that are their’s. Building the National Broadband Network. If we woke up every day, looked at the opinion polls and said, ‘oh, we better change course based on that,’ you’d be right to turf us out immediately. That is not the way in which we intend to govern.
GILLON:
Mitch Fifield, looking at these numbers, how does the Coalition approach this? Is there a back-up plan for how you might tackle Labor if they did swap leaders and go back to Kevin Rudd?
FIFIELD:
We’re not terribly focussed on the leaders. We saw that when Labor changed from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard, not much changed in policy, other than the fact that Julia Gillard said that she wouldn’t introduce a carbon tax before the election and then did. But apart from that massive exception, Labor’s record of incompetence pretty much continued uninterrupted. I do agree with Andy that polls don’t have a predictive capacity, but they do give you a snapshot in time, and basically what the Australian Labor Party is trying to do is to flog a product that the public don’t want to buy. They’re intent on forcing a carbon tax on the voting public, and the voting public are saying every way they can, including through polls, that they don’t want it.
GILLON:
The carbon tax legislation is going to be presented to the Parliament tomorrow, so we’re going to be talking about that a lot more this week. The debates for that will kick off on Wednesday. Last time we were all in this place, Mitch Fifield, the Coalition’s relentless attack over the Labor MP Craig Thomson, but now we know that New South Wales police aren’t investigating him despite George Brandis’ letter to the New South Wales Police Commissioner suggesting that he was culpable of fraud among other things. Is the Coalition going to continue that attack on Craig Thomson today?
FIFIELD:
We’re still very concerned that the hard-earned funds of the union which have been provided by their members have gone for inappropriate purposes. We think that that’s something that should not just be of concern to the wider Labor movement, but to the public as a whole. Day after day we’ve seen repeated examples of union funds not being used properly. Now you mentioned the New South Wales police inquiry it would appear that the evidentiary threshold to progress that matter further wasn’t reached. But Victoria Police are now looking at the matter. Fair Work Australia are looking at the matter. And there’s also the issue of funds which have been provided on the basis of a loan to Craig Thomson by the Australian Labor Party. What I’d be very interested to know is; what conditions there are on that loan to Craig Thomson. That’s something that the Prime Minister really needs to come clean on.
GILLON:
All of this is in the hands of the authorities now, as you say. Should the Coalition just back off and let the authorities do their job?
FIFIELD:
We are letting the authorities do their job.
GILLON:
You’re hounding someone who hasn’t been charged with anything and says he’s innocent.
FIFIELD:
We’re not hounding anyone. We’ve made some referrals to the appropriate authorities, something the Health Services Union has also done. And we’re very keen for those processes and inquiries to take their course.
GILLON:
We know that Craig Thomson put out a statement last week saying he would make a full statement, and we’re not sure if that’s going to be happening in Parliament or how that’s going to be happening, Andrew Leigh, but are you expecting there’s more to come on this or are Labor MPs hopeful that it’s dead and buried now and everyone can move on?
LEIGH:
There seems to be no statute or limitations on the number of allegations that George Brandis can dig up, and I think it’s up to the Liberal Party to start ending the muckraking and leave it to the appropriate authorities. If Craig wants to make a statement to Parliament, that’s his business, and I’ll leave that decision up to him. But for me I want to focus on putting a price on carbon pollution. All the scientists tell us that the world is warming and that we have to do something about it. All the economists tell us that the best way to do that is to go straight to the heart of the problem to put a price on carbon pollution. The Liberal Party is out there on their own they can’t find a single economist to back their subsidies for polluters plan. So we have to realise here that there are some big issues at stake in Federal politics some big policy challenges and we’re committed to dealing with them.
GILLON:
Well it looks like the voters are on the Coalition’s side as we’ve seen again in the polls this morning. I do want to touch on one final issue before we go, and that’s how the Government handling the future fund at the moment. Our colleague here at Sky News, Peter Van Onselen, has written a front page story in The Australian newspaper today, and he says that the Government is planning on raiding the Future Fund in order to reach its budget surplus it’s promised for 2012-13. Is that appropriate, Andrew?
LEIGH:
Ashleigh that’s not correct. We’re not making a raid on the Future Fund. We’re not making any withdrawals from the Future Fund. The Future Fund has asked for the assets in which it invests to be changed, we’re doing that. But all of the additional revenues will be going back into the Future Fund. The Future Fund is there untouched until 2020, and frankly it’s pretty rich of the Liberal Party to be bringing this up. Let’s face it, this is an Opposition with a $70 billion black hole in their costings at the moment. Last election they had an $11 billion gap, that’s clearly why they didn’t want to get their policies costed before the election. Now increasingly, because they’re squibbing the hard decisions and they’re making promises to absolutely everyone, there’s this yawning gulf between what they’ve promised and what they can deliver.
GILLON:
Mitch Fifield, is that explanation fair enough about the Future Fund?
FIFIELD:
No. Quite simply, Andrew is wrong. Labor effectively are doing a smash and grab on the Future Fund. $250 million is coming out to add to Labor’s budget bottom line. We always said that Labor would ultimately raid the Future Fund, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Full marks to Senator Cormann for uncovering this. And this won’t be the first time that Labor do this. This is the easy option for Labor, this is the soft option. We said they’d do it and they’re proving us correct.
GILLON:
We look forward to seeing the Coalition having a fighting session of Question Time over that, the carbon tax, asylum seekers there’s a lot going on in Parliament House this week. Thank you for your time and your insights into how it’s all going to play out. Andrew Leigh and Mitch Fifield, appreciate your time this morning.
LEIGH:
Thanks Ashleigh.
FIFIELD:
Thanks Ashleigh.
ENDS