TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH ALAN JONES RADIO 2GB SYDNEY

Subjects: Kevin Rudd’s broken promises; Kevin Rudd’s ‘war on everything’; Kevin Rudd’s great big emissions tax.

ALAN JONES:

Well, the man Bob Ellis called the amiable, contentious buccaneer is on the line, even though he’s trying to have a family holiday for a week. Tony Abbott, good morning. 

TONY ABBOTT:

G’day Alan. How are you?                            

ALAN JONES:

I’m well, thank you. Only yesterday Mr Rudd’s minders were talking about the Government devising a clear plan for the country’s future with real action on the ground. Does that mean to date there’s been very little real action and no plan?

TONY ABBOTT:

It seems like a confession of failure, doesn’t it, and anyone who read Mr Rudd’s speech last night would have found that it was typical Rudd – talking about what we needed to do but not talking about how we were going to do it; talking about what ought to happen by 2050 when Mr Rudd will be long gone, not talking about what he’s going to do this year that will actually make a difference, and I think people are starting to get the impression, Alan, that the Prime Minister is all talk and little if any real action.

ALAN JONES:

The former Prime Minister Paul Keating said of the Rudd Government that they can’t get out of bed without consulting a focus group. Do you think the Labor Party research now is telling Mr Rudd that he’s more perceived as talking about problems than fixing them?

TONY ABBOTT:

The fact that they’re now talking about taking concrete, practical, specific action shows that they know they’ve got a problem and if you actually ask yourself what has Mr Rudd done in the two years of his Prime Ministership, well, he signed Kyoto and he apologised to the Aborigines, which were both significant symbolic measures; he spent an enormous amount of money, but all of that was given to him by his predecessors and arguably much of it’s been wasted; and he’s brought the unions back into the game, and I don’t know that that’s really a very strong record…     

ALAN JONES:

He constantly talks about taking tough decisions. I mean, are the polls holding up for him because he actually has thrown a lot of borrowed money at every problem he confronts?

TONY ABBOTT:

Well that’s a good point and on this tough decisions thing, it’s not tough to spend money, particularly when the money was raised by someone else. It’s not tough to give in to people, particularly when those people control your own party, the union movement. So I think it’s very hard to think of anything that Mr Rudd has done which has upset anyone very much and he seems to be a Prime Minister who is desperate to maintain his popularity, but worrying about your popularity in the end is bad for your popularity and I think that’s what Mr Rudd might be starting to find.  

ALAN JONES:

He promised to reduce prices by introducing FuelWatch and GroceryWatch – that’s gone by the way. He said he wouldn’t means test the Baby Bonus. He said he wouldn’t means test the private health insurance rebate. He promised to take over public hospitals if their performance didn’t improve. Where are all these issues going to finish up?  

TONY ABBOTT:

Well I think they’ll all become election issues because in the end the credibility of the Government is probably the most important single election issue and particularly when you think of things like health, Alan. Health and education are probably the two things that most concern people. Everyone knows that the public hospitals system, particularly here in New South Wales, is going from bad to worse and it’s not the doctors’ and the nurses’ fault – they’re doing a terrific job under great pressure – but they’re being strangled by bureaucracy and unfortunately Kevin Rudd is addicted to bureaucracy and anything that he tries to force on the states will inevitably involve more red tape not less. So I think that people are going to be very, very anxious about just where this Government is going and I think we’re starting to see some signs of that in the polls.  

ALAN JONES:

He was going to stop Japanese whaling. He was going to take Japan and the President of Iran to the international courts. It sounded all very hairy-chested at the time. We’ve heard nothing since. 

TONY ABBOTT:

Well that’s right and this is where you’ve got to make sure that the promises you make in opposition are deliverable and these weren’t really deliverable promises. I haven’t made too many promises as yet but I think we can have a referendum on the Murray-Darling Basin – I don’t see why we can’t do that in one term of government. We can make a good start on a standing green army, and these are things that will make a difference. These are things that over time will change the culture. There’s almost nothing that Mr Rudd has done that is actually going to make a long term difference. You take the school halls programme, for instance. I mean, school halls are great, Alan, but in the end a new school hall is not going to fundamentally change the culture of our schools or…       

ALAN JONES:

Or change our educational outcomes. 

TONY ABBOTT:

That’s’ exactly right. I mean, rather than spending 16 or 17 billion bucks on school halls, why didn’t he do more to encourage the best teachers? It’s the quality of the education not the age of the buildings which really matters, and if we get more of our best and brightest into teaching over time we’re going to get much better educational outcomes. If we have people in the education system who are on fire with trying to encourage their kids to be the best they can then we’re going to have better schools, but instead we just have this worthy but very unimaginative spending programme.      

ALAN JONES:

He said that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our time. When that was all torpedoed at Copenhagen we haven’t heard a word from him, and instead of proposing measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions he’s still taking about this great big tax that no one in his Government is prepared to explain.

TONY ABBOTT:

This is the interesting thing, isn’t it? I mean, he made this speech last night talking about the need to increase productivity. Well, we all want to increase productivity. He didn’t tell us how he was going to do it, but what he did say was that he was going to hit the economy with the great big new tax.

Now it’s very hard, Alan, to see any substantial improvements in productivity when business is being hit with yet more red tape and yet more tax. I mean, it’s not just the quantum of the licenses that businesses are going to have to buy under Mr Rudd’s emissions trading scheme – it’s the gargantuan bureaucracy to administer this new tax and then to run the handouts system which is going to accompany it and which of course is really what he’s depending upon.

I think a lot of people are starting to figure out that the ETS is a re-election slush fund as much as anything else.    

ALAN JONES:

There always seems to be a ‘war’ on something every time he speaks. There’s a ‘war’ on obesity, we’ve had a ‘war’ on binge drinking, a ‘war’ on homelessness, a ‘war’ on executive salaries, then you forget them. 

TONY ABBOTT:

Well this is right. It’s almost like he has to see himself as some kind of a heroic leader and the best way to put himself into that is to imagine that’s he’s a wartime leader, but I think people expect effort and results commensurate with a military campaign once you start using that language.   

ALAN JONES:

But we were going to get a national broadband rollout past, he told us, 98 percent of homes, costing 4.7 billion. I mean, that was presented to us as a certainty. The private sector then, when he got into government, said it’s not workable and so he then promised to spend 43 billion of taxpayers’ money – there was no business plan for the proposal – on a national broadband network to reach 90 percent of households. Where is all this?

TONY ABBOTT:

That’s a very good question, Alan, and to commit to spend $43 billion of taxpayers’ money and borrowed money without a business plan is just crazy and that in fact is another breach of promise because he did say – or Lindsay Tanner did say earlier in the life of the new Government – that they’d never do that kind of thing. This allegedly was one of the faults of the Howard Government, but the Howard Government wouldn’t have done anything like this in a fit.

It’s this kind of thing, Alan, which has prompted one respected commentator, Terry McCrann, who writes for the News group, to say that this bloke is worse than Whitlam. Now I think that’s a brave call at this stage, but certainly there are many indications that when it comes to being trusted with public money, he is really in the same league as Gough Whitlam because he is addicted, not just to bureaucracy, but to spending as well.

ALAN JONES:

He said that he’d quarantine the welfare payments of people whose children didn’t attend school. Now – except for the Northern Territory where automatic quarantine was imposed by the Howard Government and in Cape York where Noel Pearson has been the architect of the scheme – how many delinquent parents have forfeited access to their welfare payments?

TONY ABBOTT:

I think very few if any, because for that to happen the schools have got to give information to Centrelink and the child protection authorities have got to give information to Centrelink. Now I suspect that just isn’t happening and I suspect that even when it does happen Centrelink will then prove themselves very reluctant to impose these penalties because they often don’t see their job as being a policeman, they see their job as being an agency to allocate funding.

So, again, it’s a good idea and he likes to take credit for these good ideas. There’s no follow-through. There’s no actual administration to make the whole thing happen.

ALAN JONES:

Well, having talked to you about all of this and what’s wrong with the Government, next week we’ll talk to you about what you intend to do. Continue to enjoy your holiday. We’ll talk to you in a week.

TONY ABBOTT:

Thanks so much, Alan.

Source: TONY ABBOTT