Jamie Briggs MP

 

Thank you for joining me on our Monday panel now. And from Melbourne, the Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Richard Marles and from Adelaide, we have Liberal MP Jamie Briggs. Gentleman, great to see you both. Richard, we saw Martin’s analysis there, very negative about the budget and the numbers in response to the budget and his analysis there at the end as well that the government shouldn’t have been talking about asylum seekers in the week of the budget, they should have used that as a catalyst to shift attention away from the difficult issues that you have faced.

 

I will say it again, as you have heard me say many times on this program before, this is not about polls week to week, it is about running the country and that is what we have been focussed on doing. And I don’t think anyone thinks this is going to be anything other than a really difficult budget to hand down. We are very committed to getting the budget back to the black by 2012 -13. You only do that by making difficult decisions, which is what you see embodied in this budget here. But you know, I think that the number that really counts and that we want to be focussing on is that this has been a job budgets, delivered by a jobs government and half a million people over the next two years will have a job created for them by virtue of this budget. That is what really matters, but I think the other interesting thing and I don’t know whether you see George Megalogenispiece in The Australian this morning, but what is clear from that piece, is that we are very responsible managers of money. We have kept real spending growth to its lowest level in political memory, much lower than what we saw from Peter Costello in the Howard years. And that is really important, because we do take the responsibility of managing public money, in a very serious way and we are very committed to getting this budget back into the black next year.

 

 

Why then can’t you sell that? I will bring in Jamie Briggs in a morning. But Richard it just seems that everything you do at the moment, that the Government does, even when it is a budget that gets the thumbs up from most economists, it still sees no improvement in fact, the Prime Minister’s approval rating has gone backwards. Well let’s see how this is judged in the fullness of time. This is a difficult budget and economists are giving it the thumbs up, we are back on track to get the budget back into the black but you don’t do that without making some very difficult decisions, and I think that is pretty natural that you see that reflected in the kind of research and analysis that we are talking about. But at the end of the day, it is not now. Next election is not until 2013, at the end of the day, I have enormous faith in the fact that Australian voters will exercise their vote based on core outcomes and we will give this budget back to the black and we are going to do it with a price on carbon and they are going to be the critical issues in 2013, not the you know particular circumstances of the political psyche opera as it was in May 2011.

 

 

Okay Jamie, you know this poll is a tremendous poll for Tony Abbott; he has made some great ground on the preferred Prime Minister. I think that is undeniably a good result for the Coalition, it is easy to see why he is calling for an early election, but really what can he do to bring it about? There is not really anything he can do to make that happen is there?

 

Well I think what he is trying to do is shame the Prime Minister into doing what she should have done in the first place. If you step back into the last election campaign, the Prime Minister made very clear that under a government she leads there will be no carbon tax. Yet, just after the election when Bob Brown told her that he wanted a carbon tax, she was in the prime ministerial court yard announcing there would be a carbon tax. Richard would say, ‘Oh well, it was always our intention to have a price on carbon everyone knew that’. Well no actually this time last year Kevin Rudd was forced by Julia Gillard to back away from that promise and a promise in the election campaign was actually to have a forum of 150 people tell them what the climate change policy should be. So that is why there should be an election and we have been very clear about that. Now I just want to pick Richard up on one point, I know it is Monday morning, but we have got to be a bit careful with fiction. Richard says that this government is a responsible spender of money, well roof batts would say that is not the case, $1.7 billon dollar blow outs on the boat people would say that is not the case, over priced school halls would say that is not the case. And now we have got a new scheme where Harvey Norman managers to install set top boxes for about half the price at what the Federal Labor Government is able to do. They are not a responsible manager of money, thus we have a $50 billion deficit this year, we have over a $100 billion of net debt and we have another deficit of over $20 billion next year and I would say this to you Kieran, look at what they do, not what they say.

 

Richard, if we look at that perception, which is out there and as Jamie has pointed to in terms of the Government’s record, the pink batts and so on, but that has whether you say it is right or wrong there is a perception out there and then the digital set top box, we have seen reports today that the ACCC through the scam watch website saying that it is open to be rorted as well. Was it really clever to be pursuing that sort of measure, given the perception out there already about the Government on spending?

 

 

Well, they are cute lines on the part of Jamie. And we always appreciate when Jamie comes up with those lines, but if you want to judge us on what we have done. What we have done is delivered an economy which is the envy of the developed world. What we did during the global economic crisis was put in place stimulus spending which supported two hundred thousand jobs in this country and they are the same jobs that the Opposition were against when they opposed the stimulus spending. And we have done all of that by the same time as keeping real spending at record lows, now that is simply the fact of it. If you want to go to the specifics of set top boxes, I think Jamie is quoted in the Parliament himself, as saying that it is important that in the switchover to digital that pensioners are not left behind and what we do have are schemes in place which makes sure that low income Australians are able to manager this particular transition, it is a sensible thing, Jamie is quoted himself in the parliament as saying it is a sensible thing.

 

 

Let’s get Jamie’s response to that, Jamie? Jamie if you have spoken in favour of it, why not now?

 

 

No, no, no, no, no be careful. Look, Richard is excited this morning because his beloved cats had a big win on the weekend and I understand that but he needs to calm down a little bit. They are going to face the blues on Friday night, which is a real problem for them. But you know he just needs to calm down. What I have said is that in 2009 mind you, is that there should be some assistance for people particularly the lower end of the income scales, pretty much the exact quote, but what I didn’t say was go and spend double the amount of money that Harvey Norman would be able to offer you. This is the problem with the Government, they cannot implement a program. They announce these wonderful things, but they can never implement them properly. You have just got to look at roof batts which sounded like a great idea at the time. You have just got to look at the over priced school halls, you have just got to look at the billions of dollars which have been wasted by the government, year in and year out and you see yet again another program where they just don’t manage it properly. It is on the scam watch website, for goodness sake. I mean this federal government is really…

 

 

Look gents, I have got to interrupt. I have got to take a quick break, I am being ordered by the studio to get to a break and pay some bills with the ads, we will be right back, stay with us.

 

(BREAK)

 

 

Welcome back to the program, with me in Adelaide, Jamie Briggs and in Melbourne, Richard Marles. Richard you have been, we are going to turn our attention to the asylum seeker debate and Nielson poll today says that 60% of the people surveyed oppose the Malaysia deal, even though that the same number think that it is not going to do any harm, they are not hostile to the idea. Doesn’t it show something that we were discussing earlier with Martin O’Shaughnessy that people are simply cynical about anything the Government puts up?

 

 

Look, this is a very complex problem. No one is saying that it is anything other than that, we are going about this with our partners in the region. We have got 40 countries signed up to the Bali process, we are about trying to break the model of people smuggling, but do it in a which gives rise to much better humanitarian outcomes and I think the announcement that was made by Chris Bowen and Julia Gillard the weekend before last outlines how we are going do that and I think it is a really positive step forward. You have got to give time for this to work, but it will work and when it does, I have great faith in the fact that the Australian people will judge us at the end of the day, based on the policy outcomes.

 

 

Jamie, Thailand is apparently interested. Yesterday the Thai Foreign Minister said he was interested in the idea and something they might be interested in taking up as well? This could be a model for regional cooperation, might it not?

 

Sure, why wouldn’t you be if you were one of these governments, and you have seen the Australian Government willing to do a five for one deal, where you can get off five of yours and take only one in the return. No wonder people are cynical about the Government, the problem with the Labor Party on this issue is that simply they are trying to be everything to everyone and they are stuck in the middle. They are trying to appeal to the Greens voters and look like they are all humanitarian and soft and nice and have a nice humanitarian approach to this issue but on the other hand, they are trying to talk to the rest of the electorate and say we are strong, strong on people smugglers and the truth is, they are neither and that is why the boats keep coming. The people smugglers see this as a government with no leadership, as a government that doesn’t know how to handle this government properly. Under the Howard Government, the boats stopped coming, there was less than a dozen people in detention when the Rudd Government came to power in 2007. Since they changed the laws in 2008, let’s not forget there have been about 11,000 people who have arrived. We have seen the building the detention centre revolution across the country, we have had one in my electorate in Inverbrackie. Any defence land near you will be used, because the Government is running out of space. We saw reports on Channel 7 News last night of an airline refusing to transport people from Christmas Island for fear of TB. I mean, this government has lost control of this issue completely and it is little wonder why people are cynical about their latest announcement.

 

 

Richard, you have been working on another measure with PNGin your capacity as the Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, now we read that there might be some divisions within the PNG Cabinet about this proposal, what is the latest, are you going to have that agreement or not?

 

 

Well as you know Kieran, I was up in Papua New Guinea a week or so ago and I spent a far bit of time up there and there is certainly interest in Papua New Guinea about hosting a regional processing centre and you would have seen that in a lot of the reporting which has come out of PNG over the last few days. But negotiations are on going and when there is something substantive to say in relation to PNG, then we will be saying it. But I think going to Jamie’s points, so suggest that there is equivalence between the regular humanitarian intake which we would have increased and sending back the irregular maritime arrivals who come to this country, just absolutely conflates the issuesand gets it completely wrong. I think Australian’s would expect our country to play a role in sharing our burden of an increased number of refugees who are out there in the world, compared to the time when John Howard lost government. But at the same time, they do want to see us put in place a position where irregular maritime arrivals are slowed down and hopefully bought to an end and that is what we are talking about doing.

 

 

Jamie, just quickly before we move on…

 

 

Yeah, can Richard explain how for months for months we have heard from the Labor Party that Nauru was not an option because they had not signed on to the UN Convention, yet Malaysia now, we are happy to send five to one to Malaysia and Malaysia has not signed on to the UN Convention, why is it okay for Malaysia but it is not okay for Nauru?

 

 

Well if you follow the debate, the fact of the matter is that as part of the agreement that Malaysia has signed with Malaysia, they have agreed not to return any refugees who go to Malaysia to there country of origin to face persecution. Now they have signed up to that for us.

 

They haven’t signed the UN Convention.

 

 

That is the fundamental tenet of the UN Convention, so there is an improved humanitarian outcome by virtue of this agreement. That is the grounds that we are…

 

 

Why not do the same deal with Nauru then? You don’t want to look like you have copied the Howard Government?

 

 

We are completely, I will tell you why we are different to the Howard Government, we are trying to break the model of people smuggling, but we are trying to do it in a way which gives rise to a much greater humanitarian outcome, let’s see whether it does work at the end of the day. It is not right to be judging it now. But can I say, John Howard went at it alone. We are doing it with our regional partners.

 

 

Gents, we only have two minutes left. I want to get your thoughts on Peter Costello’s comments yesterday, ‘Prime Minister Gillard is dead politically’. Jamie, is this premature? As I asked you before, there really is no way that the Coalition can expedite an election. To say that she is dead politically, what do you make of Peter Costello’s assessment?

 

 

Look, he is a private citizen these days and he is someone that should be listened to. I thought his comments on the budget yesterday were very insightful and look we don’t get into the business of commentary, we get into the business of good public policy and of raising the issues with the inability of the Government to manage the country properly, the country is leaderless, the minority government is not working and Julia Gillard, if she is genuine with people, she will take a carbon tax proposal to an election, before she foists it on people. She promised the exact opposite at the election, if she has any integrity at all, she would call an election and put to test of the people her proposal for a carbon tax. 

 

 

Richard, what is moral like? Is there a concern within Government ranks that you just won’t be able to turn things around that the mountain is too big to climb.

 

 

Look morale is really good within the Labor Party at the moment, because we know that at the end of the day we are going to be judged on policy outcomes, we know that this country needs to have a price put on carbon, we are going to do it. We know this country needs its budget back in surplus; we are going to do that too. We know this country needs a national broadband network; we are busily rolling it out. All of these things will be there come the next election, that is the way the voters will cast their judgement. Well look I am pretty excited about the fact that Geelong is on the top of the ladder now, but I am not proclaiming that we have won the premiership just yet.

 

 

Yeah, that would be wise not to I think. There would be a few other contenders and the clash on Friday should be great as well. Good to see you both, Richard Marles and Jamie Briggs, thank you a lot for that.