Mornings with Jon Faine
774 ABC Melbourne
8.35 am
13 September 2016
E & OE
FAINE:
As has been much remarked it’s – tomorrow – the anniversary of the elevation of Malcolm Turnbull to the Prime Ministership of Australia. The rest of last year, from this point in mid-September onwards, was pretty much caught up in settling down a new ministry. And then it was expected early in 2016 there’d be an election. But no, as we all know now it was held in the middle of the year and the Government only just squeaked back. So yesterday, Parliament got down to the serious business of running the country and it was an embarrassment. Last session, two weeks ago, the House of Representatives saw pandemonium when the Labor Party ambushed the Government on the adjournment debate. Yesterday, the Senate was similarly unsettled.
Senator Mitch Fifield, Victorian Senator for the Liberal Party and Minister for Communications and the Arts, is the Manager of Government Business in the Senate. It’s very much on his watch that yesterday’s debacle took place. Senator Fifield, good morning to you.
FIFIELD:
Good morning, Jon.
FAINE:
What went wrong yesterday?
FIFIELD:
What happened yesterday is that Labor were playing silly buggers in the House of Representatives. In order for the Senate to deal with a piece of legislation, obviously it first has to pass through the House. And what Labor sought to do was play procedural games in the House of Representatives, Jon, with of all things, the Registration of Deaths Abroad Amendment Bill 2016. Probably the most uncontroversial piece of legislation that will ever come into the Parliament. And so we were in the Senate. Ready to deal with legislation. Wanting to deal with legislation. And Labor were playing games in the House.
FAINE:
Were you outmanoeuvred?
FIFIELD:
It’s not a case of being outmanoeuvred…
FAINE:
Well it is, because you’re the Manager of Government Business, and the Government’s supposed to have control of legislation through both Houses of the Parliament. That’s how it works.
FIFIELD:
In the House of Representatives, regardless of the size of your majority, any Opposition can use procedural tactics to delay the consideration of legislation. Now typically, that does not happen with pieces of legislation that are in no way controversial. But Labor’s sole objective yesterday was to play games, to delay the consideration of legislation in the House, in order to hold things up in the Senate. So Labor were talking out of both sides of their mouth. In the House of Representatives they were playing games, and then they would say: “Oh gee, look at the Senate. They’ve got nothing to deal with.” When it was their fault for playing games in the House of Representatives. Look, it’s not clever. It’s not smart. It’s just petty.
FAINE:
Well it may be that that’s your perspective; but from the point of view of the voters, the citizens of Australia, the taxpayers, we expect our Parliament to get on with the business of running the country.
And here we saw yesterday nothing short of embarrassing scenes of Senators on their feet, sometimes for inordinately long periods of time, talking absolute waffle.
FIFIELD:
Well, no Senator can talk for more than 20 minutes and the…
FAINE:
Tell that to Senator Hinch.
FIFIELD:
Well other than the first speech of a Senator where the Chamber is very indulgent. But Jon…
FAINE:
To the point where he doubled the usual quota and had to be given a gentle nudge in the end by the President.
FIFIELD:
It was a very gentle nudge. But the point is, management of the Parliament in both chambers, whether you have a majority in that chamber or not, is a shared responsibility of both Government and Opposition. If an Opposition is determined to cause grief, to play procedural games, well they can do that. Even in a Chamber where the Government of the day has the numbers. This is a shared responsibility. And sadly the Opposition are not accepting their part in making sure that the Parliament operate, at least on those bills where there’s agreement. The Registration of Deaths Abroad Amendment Bill, Jon, is a bill that the Australian Labor Party supported. But, that didn’t stop them playing games in the House of Representatives. We’re not interested in playing games. We want to get on and transact the people’s business.
FAINE:
I’ll come to the Budget and ‘jobs and growth’ in just a moment. But yesterday for the anniversary this week of the elevation of Malcolm Turnbull to the Prime Ministership, I rang around and spoke to in fact, half-a-dozen senior Liberals. People who are no longer in the Parliament but are quite often in the media talking about their magnificent political careers or whatever else it might be. None of them really wanted to say a kind word about Malcolm Turnbull and your Government sadly, Senator Fifield.
In fact one of them said to me: “My mother told me if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
FIFIELD:
We’re focussed on delivering our agenda. And it’s a full one. We’ve achieved a lot…
FAINE:
What is it?
FIFIELD:
We’ve achieved a lot over the last 12 months…
FAINE:
Like what?
FIFIELD:
There’s our Innovation and Science Agenda…
FAINE:
Well fabulous, just words on a sheet of paper.
FIFIELD:
No – there are incentives for start-ups in the IT and tech sector…
FAINE:
And what difference have they actually made? Who’s got what money to do what that’s actually happened?
FIFIELD:
Jon, look at the score card. Through the year we’ve got growth of 3.3 per cent. That’s faster than the G7. It’s above the OECD average. We’re growing twice as fast…
FAINE:
Largely attributed to State Governments spending money on infrastructure.
FIFIELD:
We’re growing twice as fast as the US and Canada. My point here is that you can’t rest on your laurels. You’ve always got to be looking for ways of making sure that business can grow and thereby employ people. We’ve got our reforms to competition law. We’ve got our defence industry plan. We’re cracking down on multinational tax avoidance. We’ve got my media laws which I’m very keen to get through the Parliament. We’ve also got tax cuts for small business, which Scott Morrison has introduced into the House. We’ve also got legislation to address bracket creep for average income earners. These are all important parts of our economic agenda. Every bit of which is focused on jobs and growth.
FAINE:
If you descended from another planet and arrived in Australia and Tuesday the 13th of September was your first day here, you’d think the biggest issue confronting Australia was marriage equality.
FIFIELD:
The Parliament has to deal with a range of issues. And we went to the last election with a commitment to have a plebiscite, to give the Australian people a voice on this issue.
FAINE:
Sure, but my point is a different one. Is the marriage equality tail wagging the economy and Budget and ‘jobs and growth’ dog?
FIFIELD:
You’ve got to walk and chew gum at the same time. You’ve got to pursue serious economic reform but you’ve also got to address social issues as they arise. And what we want to do is get legislation through the Parliament to have a plebiscite into same-sex marriage. The Australian Labor Party are wanting us to break our election commitment. They should get out of the way and allow us to pass this legislation so that the Australian people can have their say.
FAINE:
Has the Liberal Party even within its own ranks found consensus on reforming superannuation or are you still ripping each other’s throats out over that?
FIFIELD:
There’s no ripping of throats in our Party Room, Jon. Scott Morrison…
FAINE:
Alright then, I’ll take out the hyperbole. There’s certainly dissent. There are strongly held views and there’s a bit of an insurgency.
FIFIELD:
Scott Morrison is working through a good process to make sure that we can give effect to superannuation changes that will make the system fairer.
FAINE:
What does that actually mean when it boils down to it? Are you or aren’t you going to leave the retrospectivity so claimed, it’s controversial whether it actually is or not. Are you going to leave it there, are you going to leave the $500,000 caps, what’s actually going to happen?
FIFIELD:
We took a superannuation policy to the election. Scott Morrison is working through the details of that. And we’ll have a package that will go through the usual Cabinet and Party Room processes.
FAINE:
And just finally, I don’t usually bother asking politicians about opinion polls, Senator Fifield, because we all know the answer you’re going to give me is that the only poll that counts is the next election. But, it is intriguing yet again on the anniversary of Malcolm Turnbull becoming Prime Minister, a worse approval rating than Bill Shorten.
FIFIELD:
I’m not fussed by opinion polls. What I want to see as Manager of Government Business in the Senate is our agenda transacted. That includes, Jon, important things that we took to the election, like the re-introduction of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. Setting up a Registered Organisations Commission so that unions face the same regime as company directors. And Jon, for our Victorian listeners, it’s important that we get the legislation through the Parliament that will protect the volunteers of the CFA.
FAINE:
And indeed, we will watch closely to see what happens with that legislation as it makes its way eventually. Do you know when that is actually going to make its way through the Parliament?
FIFIELD:
It’s already passed through the House of Representatives but unfortunately the Senate decided that it wanted to refer it off to a committee. So we would like to be dealing with it now, but we’ll have to wait a little bit longer.
FAINE:
How long will the committee take?
FIFIELD:
It’s about three or four weeks that the Senate Committee will be looking into the Bill.
FAINE:
So there’ll be some hearings?
FIFIELD:
There will be public hearings and submissions taken. But we think we should just get on with the job of protecting the CFA volunteers.
FAINE:
But there will be public hearings, there will be submissions, then there’s a report, then it comes back to the Senate and eventually there might be a vote this year? This calendar year?
FIFIELD:
Absolutely. Jon, we’re determined to have a vote on that legislation as soon as possible. Definitely this year.
FAINE:
And we’ll tie that in with the progress of the litigation of the volunteer fire brigades Victoria, in the Supreme Court here in Victoria, where they say the CFA should be stopped, should be restrained forever from signing the EBA because it’s contrary to their statutory obligations. We’ll see what happens on that front as well. Thank you indeed for your time this morning.
FIFIELD:
Thanks indeed, Jon.
[ends]