Turnbull interview with Lyndal Curtis (AM Program) - Rudd Government’s reckless spending and bungled schools stimulus....

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

Subjects: Rudd Government’s reckless spending and bungled schools stimulus; women in the Australian Defence Force; Liberal Party.

E&OE

LYNDAL CURTIS:

Mr Turnbull, welcome to AM.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Good morning.

LYNDAL CURTIS:

The G-20, the IMF, the Reserve Bank, major business groups and many economists agree that the stimulus spending shouldn’t be wound back yet, who agrees with your position that it should?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well many economists have expressed concern about the quality of the spending and the real issue – Warwick McKibbin for example right at the very outset earlier in the year who is on the Reserve Bank board – but the real issue is what value is the tax payer getting for this expenditure? It’s the quality of the spending.

LYNDAL CURTIS:

But isn’t your issue also that it should be beginning to be wound back because the economy is picking up?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well the Government certainly has to recalibrate its stimulus spending as economic conditions change. You have to remember that right at the beginning of the year we did not say there should be no stimulus. Our point of difference with the Government was about the quantity, we said they were borrowing and spending too much money, and the quality – that the spending was not well targeted. And we are seeing in the press again today examples of poorly targeted spending on schools – these Julia Gillard Memorial Assembly Halls going right around the country – and one example where a school is actually proposing to knock it back on the basis that they’re being told that they have to knock down four perfectly good classrooms in order to build four more, in order to gratify Julia Gillard’s ambition to have a big sign outside the school saying that the Labor Government has built some buildings there.

LYNDAL CURTIS:

You said though that the spending should be recalibrated, do you believe it should be cut back or would you be happy if it was… decisions on where the money was spent were changed, but not the quantum of the spending?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

The two are linked, Lyndal. You see the real problem we have here, as Lindsay Tanner candidly conceded in Question Time yesterday, is that the Julia Gillard Memorial Assembly Hall program, lets call it for what it is, was undertaken not following an cost-benefit analysis, it was not undertaken following consultation with school communities as to what they wanted or needed – which of course was the approach we took in government – it was undertaken simply because it was money they could spend quickly and they did that because Mr Tanner said the Treasury had said the economy was on the edge of an abyss.

Now it turns out that the Prime Minister’s description of our economic circumstances as the economic equivalent of a rolling national security crisis were if you like too pessimistic – I’ll be quite objective about it and not try to be rhetorical.

So he had an overly pessimistic view. We can see that now with the benefit of hindsight. Now that being recognised what we need to do now is make sure that government spending does not put upward pressure on interest rates, because we know that the fact of the matter is that the more the Government spends and borrows the higher taxes will have to be to pay it back and of course more pressure will be on interest rates – and it’s going to be cold comfort for homebuyers if they end up having to pay more on their mortgages because of the Government’s reckless spending and borrowing.

LYNDAL CURTIS:

Your party has mounted a strong attack against the trappings that go with the stimulus spending, the signs on road sides and on letterheads, the opening ceremonies that have to include the Minister. If you get to be Prime Minister will you ban those signs and ceremonies marking government funded projects?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well look, I think the real issue here is just the scale of it and the cynicism of it. I mean consider that the outer date for the next federal election is March in 2011 and isn’t it just an interesting coincidence that on all of these schools that have the benefit, so-called, of a Julia Gillard Memorial Assembly Hall, they have to have a great big sign advertising that fact right up until March 2011, even if the school…

LYNDAL CURTIS:

So you’re happy to have the signs just maybe smaller and more modest?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well look the signage when we… the Investing in Our Schools programme we didn’t make signs on the exterior of schools mandatory or compulsory at all. The fact of the matter is that everybody often puts up a sign when a building work is in progress just so people know what is going on, but when the building is completed the sign is taken down.

What Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd are seeking to do is to ensure that right up to polling day on all of these schools, every one of which almost without exception will be a polling both, is going to have a sign there and that is why the Australian Electoral Commission has, quite properly, characterised them as political advertisements and we have really got to ask ourselves what are we trying to achieve. Is this just another example of the Rudd Government, addicted to spin, having no economic strategy but just a political strategy?

LYNDAL CURTIS:

We’ve heard that the Defence Science and Personnel Minister Greg Combet is pushing for women to be able to serve in all roles across the Defence Force, including front line combat units. Do you agree with that? Do you support that?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well look, I think this is very much a matter for the Defence leadership, the leadership of the Defence Forces. I just heard the president of the Defence Association there speaking earlier about issues of physicality and physical strength. These are all very relevant issues. The primary objective has to be the safety and the effectiveness of our armed forces and that’s something that I’m sure we will have an informed discussion, but it should be led by those with real knowledge, real front line experience in the field.

LYNDAL CURTIS:

One of your backbenchers Judith Troeth crossed the floor yesterday to ensure the bill ending immigration detention was passed. She made the point that she could do it because she’s coming to the end of her political career, that others who may have wanted to do a similar thing were worried about harming their own careers. Are the party structures on both sides too rigid to allow politicians to act on what they really believe in?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well the party structures on the Labor Party side certainly are. On our side, we have a very long tradition of allowing members and senators to exercise their individual conscience and to, if in circumstances such as the one you just described with Judith Troeth, to vote against the decision of the party room and…

LYNDAL CURTIS:

Without it having a detrimental effect on their career if they’re early in their political career?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

There are a number of leading members in our party, and Senator Robert Hill was a good example and there are many others, who had very distinguished ministerial careers not withstanding having crossed the floor on a number of occasions in the past. So it is obviously a question of extent and degree, and clearly politics is a team exercise. I mean we have to work together to be effective, but we in the Liberal Party recognise the importance of members and senators being able to express their individual conscience on issues like this in a way that the Labor Party does not.

LYNDAL CURTIS:

And finally, just returning to the issue we started with, you say economists agree with you, some economists agree with you that the stimulus spending should be wound back. Is there a chance though you might be wrong?

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Well Lyndal, everybody will agree that we should only be spending money in a way that has a demonstrated positive benefit, a net benefit. So the issue is here, right here and now, we have got this massive school spending program, every day we get evidence of money being spent in a poorly targeted way. In other words, the taxpayer is not getting enough bang for his and her buck.

And of course it raises big questions of priorities. I mean if you are out in the Murray-Darling Basin in an irrigation area wondering why there is no Government money being spent on lining channels, on replacing open channels and inefficient methods of irrigation with more efficient ones, you have got to ask yourself what are the priorities of the Government?

I mean they have chosen to spend over $14 billion on assembly halls in primary schools with little or no consultation with those schools at all, with no opportunity for those schools to express what they want to do, and they have done that as opposed to many other initiatives that could have been undertaken and they have done it because they could spend the money quickly – so they thought – and because there was an immediate political payoff with those big signs on the schools which double as polling booths come election day.

LYNDAL CURTIS:

Malcolm Turnbull, thank you for your time.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

Thanks Lyndal.

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