Turnbull interview with Alan Jones (Radio 2GB) - Ruddbank, ETS, Fair Work Bill, alcopops tax, employment, people smuggling

The Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP
Leader of the Opposition (to 1 December 2009)

E&OE

JONES:

Malcolm Turnbull, good morning.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Good morning Alan.

JONES:

Can I put this to you? Look a few years ago before you went into parliament you were on the phone to this programme proclaiming fairly loudly and unapologetically the virtues of a republic. I was in the process of arguing for the monarchy in that referendum. And I put you straight on air and we had what you might call a less than polite ding-dong brawl, and I think I subsequently wrote a reference for you because even though we disagreed on that issue I admired your passion and your commitment to a cause. And I’ve said that’s what we need in public figures. We need people who believe and argue persuasively their beliefs. Where is that Malcolm Turnbull, the man of passion and forceful belief?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well he’s right here Alan with you this morning.

JONES:

But we don’t hear that Malcolm Turnbull standing up. I mean surely the current political environment ought to be a picnic for you. You’re a highly successful businessman, a Rhodes Scholar, outstandingly educated, you come from a poor background. But you speak and act as if you’re embarrassed by all that.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well Alan I don’t think that’s right but I mean you’re obviously free to your own opinion. But the reality is we’ve taken on the Rudd Government on a number of issues very forcefully, very passionately. We’ve taken on unpopular positions. We opposed the $42 billion cash splash. We’ve voted against this crazy idea to set up a new Labor Party bank – this Ruddbank – a son of Tricontinental and State Bank of South Australia, ready to waste billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on commercial property investments. You know we’ve seen what the Labor Party does when it gets into banking, it loses billions.

JONES:

But see I suppose people want to…

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

We’re standing up to them on their changes to the industrial relations laws.

JONES:

Yeah I’ll come to all that in a moment but I suppose people are saying look, we don’t want to know really what, in a sense, he’s opposed to, we want to know what he is for. I mean your only employment in life has been in the private sector. The Prime Minister’s only employment has been as a public servant. His solutions are public sector solutions, your solutions, people would think – which would be the virtue – would be about small business and business being productive to get us out of this mess. They want to know what you stand for.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well Alan everyone knows what I stand for. I believe government’s role is to enable Australians to do their best, not to tell them what is best. I believe the prosperity of this country lies in the individual initiative, the enterprise, the ingenuity of thousands of Australians, and that what we should be doing is fostering free enterprise and private initiative. I’ve talked about my father’s life, my own life, which has all been built around enterprise, having a go, not always succeeding, if you get knocked down dust yourself off, get up and have another go. That is our commitment.

And Mr Rudd is on the record now saying that he wants to put government, big government at the centre of the economy. So we oppose him when he says the answer to economic challenges is more government, bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, higher debt. Let’s face it Alan, what we have got from Kevin Rudd now is a terrible trifecta of traditional Labor Party mismanagement: higher unemployment, higher debt and more strikes. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

JONES:

But I suppose what I’m saying to you is what I said to you last time we spoke. If Kevin Rudd wants to throw money at everybody, which money belongs to the taxpayer, shouldn’t the taxpayer be able to go to Malcolm Turnbull’s website and say well look, what would Malcolm Turnbull have done. And he can turn up here and he can read on industrial relations, on emissions trading, on alcopops tax or whatever, this is what Turnbull is about. I mean there are millions of small businesses out there employing 4.5 million people – they want to know with clarity what Malcolm Turnbull would do for them, not what Kevin Rudd isn’t offering them.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well that’s right Alan and that’s why I’ve got a very good website and I’ve got an email newsletter list of nearly 40,000 people and they all know that I gave a speech on Saturday at the Federal Council of the Liberal Party, which was widely reported, about our opposition to Labor’s flawed emissions trading scheme. And they know that our commitment is that Australia should reduce its CO2 emissions but it’s got to do it in a way that does not destroy thousands of jobs and export both the jobs and the emissions for enormous economic loss to Australia and no environmental gain.

We’ve talked about – and I’ve set out in another paper I gave in January which is also on my website and was widely reported – as to how we can reduce our emissions substantially and at the same time improve our environment by promoting soil carbon, biochar, carbon forestry, by encouraging businesses with accelerated depreciation and other measures, all of which we’ve announced to invest in energy efficiency.

JONES:

But did you make a tactical mistake though when you said that the Government had a mandate to get rid of WorkChoices and therefore you wouldn’t be opposing the legislation. Now there is a difference is there not…

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well Alan I – can I just cut you off there – let’s get the history straight here. The person who said WorkChoices was dead was Brendan Nelson after the election. Right, that was his decision as leader, he had the support of the shadow cabinet obviously of which I was a member. So we took that position straight after the election and I have maintained that and the party has maintained that that WorkChoices is dead. However when the legislation appeared late last year, in November, I said that while we recognised that WorkChoices was dead, we would seek to move amendments to their legislation in order to improve the efficiency of the legislation and we have done that. And in particular to hold them to account for any changes that go beyond their election policy, and most, or many at any rate, of the most objectionable parts of this legislation, such as their proposal on right of entry, giving unions the right to access the records, employment records of people who aren’t members of the union without their consent, those changes were not part of their election policy at all. Now we’re having some success with our amendments in the senate but we’re still battling away and we are fighting very, very hard I can assure you.

JONES:

But I mean WorkChoices, abolishing WorkChoices is quite different from institutionalising the power of the union movement. WorkChoices must have had something going for it. I mean we’ve held employment at 10.8 million or more, month after month after month in the wake of this so-called economic cyclone. Does someone defend that or do you just say oh well pretend it doesn’t happen?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well Alan there’s no question that the reforms to the labour market, to workplace laws to create greater flexibility have made a huge contribution to Australia’s high levels of employment and everybody acknowledges that. Glenn Stevens and his predecessor at the Reserve Bank were always talking about this as one of the reasons for Australia’s high employment. Now the WorkChoices policy however was a key part of Labor’s election platform, it was certainly one of the contributors to our defeat, and we as politicians recognising that we live in a democracy have to acknowledge that. But equally it is our responsibility, recognising that political reality, nonetheless to seek to amend the legislation to make it more effective and of course to reject Labor’s attempts to impose changes to the industrial relations laws for which they have not even the claim of an electoral mandate. And that’s what we’re doing and we’re battling away in the Senate at the moment.

JONES:

Now I’ve asked you before about abolishing payroll tax and the principle of taxing someone when they give someone a job is a nonsense when everyone seems to be saying jobs, jobs, jobs. And I’m sick of hearing about that rather than hearing from people who are going to do something that actually generates jobs. I’ve heard you say that but I mean why wouldn’t we abolish payroll tax and compensate the states? It would be a better way of using the money than giving $900 to people who don’t live in this country, who are dead or who are in jail.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well Alan that’s a very fair point. Now what I proposed – and I think we’ve discussed this on your programme before – as an alternative approach to Labor’s cash splash, one of the alternative measures is to give small businesses a rebate of a portion of the superannuation guarantee contribution. For example if you gave businesses with 20 employees or less, if you rebated a third of their superannuation guarantee contributions in year one and a sixth – half of that amount – in year two, it would cost taxpayers $5 billion over two years and it would all go to improve the cash flow of small businesses.

JONES:

But you’d still be taxing them every time they gave someone a job?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Let me go on Alan. The reason why we proposed that rather than reimbursing the states to reduce payroll tax was that many small businesses, most of them in fact, do not pay payroll tax because they’re below the threshold. In New South Wales I think you’ll find the threshold is a wage bill of $630,000 a year. So if you’ve only got a few employees you may not come within that envelope.

JONES:

But do people understand that’s what Malcolm Turnbull is saying?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well Alan they do. It depends how many people listen to me when I’m talking to you on the radio and on television. We’ve made this point again and again.

JONES:

See you’re accused in the parliament, they were throwing stuff at you yesterday about being an agent for binge drinking because you opposed the alcopops tax. Now where have the Opposition made firmly the point that under the alcopops tax, beer would be cheaper than alcopops and these are people purporting to be opposed to binge drinking.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well Alan we make it relentlessly and of course you’ve just been making it on the radio. I think Australians understand this alcopops tax is just a tax hike. The hypocrisy has been staggering. This has got nothing to do with health. All of us, everybody knows, whether you’re looking at the official statistics or whether you just go down to your local pub or your bottle shop, and you go down there and ask the guy at the counter and he’ll tell you that, yes they’re selling less of some of these alcopops but they’re selling a lot more straight spirits. And I remember being…

JONES:

That’s quite right.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

I remember being on radio a couple of days after the tax was announced and there were people calling in from all over Sydney with bottle shop specials with vodka and whiskey…

JONES:

That’s quite right.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

…being sold with a few bottles of soft drink thrown in. So the reality is all it has done is made a shift between one form of alcohol and the other. It’s a tax hike. But let me put this to you, if the Labor Party was fair dinkum about doing something about binge drinking they would accept our offer to validate the collection of the tax that’s already been paid – this is about $290 million – so it doesn’t have to be given back to the distillers and the liquor companies, and use that money for health programmes and advertising and other measures to promote responsible drinking.

JONES:

What about the poor retailer, the poor small businessman, the retailer and the customer who has paid the damn tax? It’s been passed on to him and it’s illegal.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well ultimately it has been paid by the consumer of course.

JONES:

Of course.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

It’s charged to…

JONES:

Are they going to get it back?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

This is the difficulty Alan, this is the practical difficulty. The money can only – in practical terms – can only go to the distillers.

JONES:

Go to the distiller.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

That’s right. And so our proposal is responsible but Labor has rejected that.

JONES:

Did the former Queensland Labor treasurer and fellow Rhodes Scholar I might add – no dunce – this David Hamill, the chairman of Envirogen, write to the Opposition saying that the emissions trading scheme would put current investment of $455 million and 100 jobs at risk? And his company wouldn’t be in the position to make planned new investments if the emissions trading scheme proceeded as planned?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well he most certainly did and I raised that in parliament.

JONES:

And will you be then campaigning in Queensland this year in the days leading up to the election in a state which is energy rich which is going to be decimated if this comes into place?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Alan we have raised these issues about jobs in Queensland relentlessly. Both the Envirogen example and an even bigger example of Xstrata have been front page news in the Queensland papers, and the Courier Mail in particular, and we’ve raised these in parliament. Xstrata which is one of our largest coal companies has said that if the emissions trading scheme is introduced in the form that it has been designed by Mr Rudd, and it is a very badly designed scheme, it will cost them 1,000 jobs now, three or four mines will close now, projects will not go ahead worth up to $7 billion, and 4,000 new jobs won’t be created. And most of them are in Queensland. You see Queensland…

JONES:

And have you made that point though, in the election campaign in Queensland?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Alan, absolutely it has been made up there and I said we raised it in parliament on Monday and it covered the front page of the Courier Mail…

JONES:

Alright, we’re running out of time but in January we had our first intake of refugees since the Rudd Government eased these rules on asylum seekers. 28 boat people we were told would resettle in South Australia. Now another boat carrying 52 suspected asylum seekers has been intercepted off the north east of Darwin, the ninth vessel to be detected by Australian authorities since last December. All this is a result of tough rules on asylum seekers being eased. If we’re about jobs, jobs, jobs, who do you imagine is going to give these people jobs?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well Alan I think they will struggle to get jobs and this is part of the problem that the Labor Government has changed the rules and they have sent a signal to the people smuggling industry that Australia is less forthright or less stalwart in its resistance to unlawful immigration. Now that has been the message that has been received, this is not my opinion but this is the opinion of organisations operating particularly in Indonesia, expert organisations, the Organisation for Migration – I think we discussed this earlier in the year – and the fact of the matter is that that perception has been created. It’s very unfortunate that it has been created and we’re starting to see an increase in unlawful arrivals.

JONES:

Okay we’ve got to go to the news, we’ll talk again soon.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Thanks so much Alan.

JONES:

Malcolm Turnbull, Opposition Leader.

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