E&OE……………………….…………………………………………………………………

 

Tony Abbott, good morning.

Thank you, Alan. That was quite a rap, thank you.

It was inevitable, of course, you had to raise the issue of the class war and you made the point that the Budget was “deliberately, coldly, calculatedly” playing the class card. That normally only diminishes those who play the card rather than those against whom it’s played.

I think that’s right, Alan. There was a very interesting piece in The Australian yesterday by a fellow called Troy Bramston who is a Labor man, he’s worked for Labor leaders, but he seems to be a decent bloke and he certainly writes well and he made the point that great Labor leaders like Bob Hawke and before that, Ben Chifley, reached out for everyone and sure, not everyone agreed with them but I think it’s possible to respect someone who is trying to bring the nation together. You can appreciate what they’re trying to do, even if you don’t necessarily think they’ve got it all right and this has been the problem with the current Prime Minister. It all seems to be about her and her political survival. You can never imagine Kim Beazley, for instance, were he in the top job acting in quite this way and I think, as I said last night, a lot of decent Labor people are embarrassed by all of this.

ALAN JONES:

Yes, I think an excellent word used, “ignoble.” It is an ignoble piece of work. Some interesting lines here, though, which resonated, “governments should be at least as interested in the creation of wealth as in its redistribution.” 

TONY ABBOTT:

That’s right, because we all talk – as we should in public life – of building community but you can’t have a community unless there’s an economy to sustain it and economies need productive businesses and this is what people in government so often forget. They think that money is just there to be taken by government and used for government’s purposes but someone’s got to make it first.

And you said you do that by “fostering more self-reliant citizens.”

That’s right, because many of us from time to time do need assistance from government. All of us, to some extent, rely on government services but in the end it’s the quality of our people as much as the quality of our government which determines the strength of our country.

ALAN JONES:

Yes. I like the line – which people forget – “the small businesspeople who put their houses on the line to create jobs deserve support from government, not broken promises.”

This is one of the things that many people forget and it’s understandable enough but just about every small business that you go into – whether it’s a dry cleaning shop or the newsagency or the café or the local garage – to get that business started, the proprietor has had to take out a loan and inevitably the house has been the security for the loan. Now, all those businesses that employ millions of Australians ultimately rest on the preparedness of the proprietor to put his or her house on the line and I think that has to be respected. I mean, if the head of BHP loses his job, well, he normally gets a payout. If the small businessman who runs the garage loses his business, he often loses his house as well.

ALAN JONES:

Absolutely, and hence your point that people earning $83,000 and families on $150,000 are not rich.

Well, particularly where you’ve got a big mortgage – and it’s impossible to live in Sydney or Melbourne or any of our major cities and not be paying, these days, mortgages in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you need a big income to sustain all that.

ALAN JONES:

A lovely line here: “Australia needs more successful people and more opportunities for people to succeed, yet this government’s message is the harder you try, the harder we’ll make it for you.”

And this is why I am so down on the carbon tax, Alan. I mean, the carbon tax is just gratuitous economic self-harm. It’s a reverse tariff and a lot of people…

ALAN JONES:

That’s a good image you use, but explain that reverse tariff. It’s a very good point you make.

Well, the thing about a tariff is it is designed by its authors to protect Australian jobs by making imported goods more expensive. Now, people argue the toss as to whether tariffs are good or bad, but this is a reverse tariff. It’s something that we do here in Australia to make the imported good cheaper than the domestic good, and that’s the incredible thing about this carbon tax. That’s why I think it is just an act of economic lunacy and the government is rightly in all sorts of trouble over it: firstly, because it’s bad policy but secondly, because it is – as we all know – a bad tax based on a lie.

ALAN JONES:

Yes, but of course a budget speech brought down, and the carbon tax was only mentioned once and as you highlighted last night, telling people it wouldn’t affect them. You then said, and I just quote from your speech, “If the carbon tax won’t hurt anyone, why is the Government topping up compensation in the budget? If the carbon tax won’t hurt anyone, why did the Prime Minister promise six days before the last election there would be no carbon tax under the government she led? If the carbon tax won’t hurt anyone, why are Labor members of parliament now frightened to go doorknocking even in their heartland?”

Well, that’s right and these are the comments that we have been getting all week from Labor members of parliament speaking on background to journalists and, I guess, lamenting to their Coalition colleagues just how tough things are. The other point about the Budget, Alan, though, is that even though the Treasurer talked a lot about the wafer-thin surplus, the Government is still out there increasing its borrowing limit.

ALAN JONES:

Now, that’s a big issue.

It is a big issue. I mean, it’s like me saying to my banker, ‘Oh look, I’m going to keep my spending under control, but by the way would you please lend me more? Would you please allow me to spend more onmy credit card?’

ALAN JONES:

Well, I think you made a very, very good point last night which hasn’t been picked up and it should be. You’re saying that this proposal to increase the debt ceiling by $50 billion has been hidden in the appropriation bills. You challenge the Government to take that out of the appropriation bills and allow an open parliamentary debate on whether the debt ceiling should be increased.

Well, that’s exactly right. The Government should be forced to specifically justify this, not to just sweep it under the carpet and allow it to go through in the appropriations becauseby convention the Opposition doesn’t oppose the appropriations. I think we do need to take a very, very seriously critical look at this question of the debt ceiling. I’m not saying that, having looked at it critically, we would necessarily oppose it, but the Government has to justify this. Our money, our future, is too important to be mortgaged like this without the Government giving us the strongest possible arguments for it, because every dollar that they borrow has got to be repaid.

ALAN JONES:

Absolutely – for years and years and years ahead. Julia Gillard, she didn’t know where to hide but you quoted her two months ago: “If you’re against cutting company tax, you’re against economic growth. If you’re against economic growth, you’re against jobs” and then suddenly, two months on, in the budget, she abolishes the company tax promise.

And that’s because she wants to pitch this as the battlers versus the billionaires and we are supposed to be on the side of the billionaires and against the battlers which, of course, is absolute nonsense. Now, I don’t begrudge the decent people of this country additional benefits, particularly when they’re about to be hit with this toxic carbon tax, but I do think governments shouldn’t make commitments in one budget and then just blithely scrap them in another budget and expect to be taken seriously, and that’s the problem with this Prime Minister.

ALAN JONES:

Yes, and the other thing is, the $50 billion. Your critics, of course, say, ‘Oh well Abbott is not documenting where the $50 billion in cuts would be.’ My God, a sixth grade student can find them – NBN alone, there’s a start, isn’t it?

Well, that’s right. The Government will be spending something like $5 billion in the next financial year digging up streets. Now, I mean, I just don’t think that’s necessary. We can have 21^st century broadband without digging up every street to have…

ALAN JONES:

Six billion dollars to pay off power stations to make them close.

Exactly, Alan. I mean, this is just, again, economic self-harm, spending gargantuan amounts of money not to create jobs but to destroy them. I mean, it’s just madness.

ALAN JONES:

And because of the carbon tax there are going to be six new federal government agencies administering 20 new programmes. What?

TONY ABBOTT:

It’s an absolute explosion of bureaucratic jobs and an absolute implosion of jobs in the real economy and look, it is extraordinary. The carbon tax is designed to close down the brown coal industry and yet the brown coal industry is the foundation of the manufacturing industry of Victoria. Cheap power is what started all these manufacturing businesses in Victoria and they want to cut the cheap power off. We should be the energy capital of the world, Alan, yet the Government is making that almost impossible with this carbon tax.

Just one final thing I want to touch on. We could talk forever, but an excellent sentence, “If Australians are to make their way in the world, we cannot rely on other people speaking our language.”

You know, the extraordinary thing, Alan, is that 40 per cent of year 12 students or school-leaving students back in the 1960s took a foreign language. Only 12 per cent do these days and Asian languages have suffered a precipitous decline in the percentage of people taking them. There’s been a 21 per cent decline in Japanese study over the last decade. There’s been a 40 per cent decline in Indonesian language study and yet these are countries which are vital to Australia’s future and we should be able to speak their languages.

ALAN JONES:

Ok. We could go on, we’ll leave it there. Good to talk to you. Congratulations and thank you for talking to us this morning.

Thanks so much, Alan.

[ends]