2GB Sydney

WARREN MOORE: And here they are, Christopher Pyne good afternoon.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Warren, nice to be with you.

WARREN MOORE: Likewise, and Anthony Albanese good afternoon.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: G-day Warren, what have you done with Ben?

WARREN MOORE: He’ll be back next week tomorrow I think. He’ll be back with you guys next week. There we go – the odd couple.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: I thought he might have been recovering from our rigorous session last week in Canberra,

WARREN MOORE: Yes, it was a rigorous session last week.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I don’t think we should do it in the same studio again Anthony…

ANTHONY ALBANESE: [Laughs]

WARREN MOORE: Arm’s length

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: He kept trying to turn off my microphone!

WARREN MOORE: Arm’s length is much better.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Someone had to. It was in the interests of the listening public. If you turn off his microphone, your ratings will go up.

WARREN MOORE: [Laughs] let’s get to some issues. The Federal Government is warning that Australians’ could face higher taxes if proposed welfare cuts aren’t passed and the Turnbull Government has introduced the Omnibus Bill which has got those 16 different changes to dole payments and child care assistance and so forth. They aim to claw back $5.6 billion in welfare payments and as we’ve been hearing, the Government is having trouble passing the bill. They’ve got Labor and Mick Xenophon opposed to it. Anthony Albanese, is the Omnibus Bill dead?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Well it would appear that that’s the case. This rotten legislation that target those low and middle income earners who can least afford it and cut peoples payments of some million people and also punish young people living without any income at all for a period of weeks. Yesterday, Scott Morrison was threatening the National Disability Insurance Scheme unless it was passed. Today, he’s promising higher taxes, be it, I don’t know whether it’s a GST increase, or higher income taxes for low income earners; whatever it is, it’s entirely inappropriate.

WARREN MOORE: What do you think Christopher Pyne?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well Warren, unfortunately Anthony has just told a litany of red herrings. The reality is we have never threatened the National Disability Insurance Scheme; in fact, we are the Government that is funding the National Disability Insurance Scheme after Labor lost office and didn’t have enough money to run it. It’s a good scheme, we support it 100% and it’s got to be paid for and we are the ones who are finding the money to pay for it. Listen to Anthony; it’s old, old Labor, yet again. Labor who says you can spend more money but you don’t actually have to find any savings. What we’re trying to do is expand child care to make it more affordable and accessible to a million more Australian families, particularly low income ones, but we say you have to be able to pay for that. And what we would like to do is take away a supplement that was introduced to be able to pay for the carbon tax, to compensate for the carbon tax, the carbon tax doesn’t exist anymore and the compensation is still being paid! So this is quite inconsistent with good government and Labor always says they can spend more money, we will increase your taxes, and we’ll borrow more money. The last election, they ended up, after everything they said with $16.5 billion more going on the national credit card. We on the other hand say enough is enough; someone has to show where the savings are in order to be able to make these spending changes.

WARREN MOORE: Anthony Albanese I suppose to pull the line from Scott Morrison; do you accept that if this bill doesn’t go through that it’s necessary to have tax increases?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Well look, we’ve put forward a range of savings as well. We’ve put forward proposals like dealing with housing affordability by having a fix and winding back some of the generous concessions that are there for negative gearing and capital gains tax. That’s a sensible proposition and the Government was last year was saying they acknowledged excesses when it came to negative gearing and that they were going to deal with them. Then of course we came out with a specific proposal one year ago, this time last year they reversed and just said, well Labor’s put it forward so we’re against it. So that is an example of a practical solution that we have. And we’ve also said, don’t under the current circumstances proceed with the 50 billion dollars of tax cuts to the big end of town.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Which you’ve already counted. So Labor counts tax increases as savings when of course they’re tax increases, they’re not savings. Savings are when a government makes the hard decisions to stop giving people money that they’ve received for one particular compensation which doesn’t exist anymore. But of course, at the election, Labor banked the corporate tax changes and had that as part of their own policy. Now the election is over, they are trying to pretend that they had nothing to do with it. So they’ve already spent that money.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: During the election campaign we made it very clear that we were opposed to the tax cuts for the big end of town and what’s more, when it comes to negative gearing and the housing affordability measures that we would peruse, what that would mean is that the tax concessions that are currently there would be less. That’s what it means. And currently for your listeners who have kids, or grand kids who are out there wondering how they will ever get into home ownership in a market in Sydney; they know that the current position is simply unsustainable. Former Premier Mike Baird certainly, that was his view. We’ll wait and see what the new, unelected Premier has to say about those issues, but Mike Baird supported reform to negative gearing.

WARREN MOORE: But just generally with the Omnibus Bill, back to that. Christopher Pyne, do you think it’s just going to be a necessity or a reality that it will have to be un-wound and put through in separate pieces, not just in one bill?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well we are very committed to the savings measures and the spending measures in the bill. We are continuing to talk to the cross-benches about what they see as the parts of the bill they support and how we can modify if necessary any other parts of the bill but we are not giving up on these savings measures because it’s critically important to households out there among your listenership who use child care, they know its critically important to reform child care but you’ve got to be able to pay for it. That’s what good government do, so we’re certainly not giving up on the savings measures and spending measures in this bill.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: What good government’s don’t do is continue to attack pensioners; a whole lot of pensioners had a reduction in their payments in January this year. Reductions that they didn’t see coming; reductions that they had not budgeted for. They had retired expecting a certain level of income; it was ripped away from them and now these changes would impact families and people on benefits right across the board and it’s not just about the energy supplement, it’s about supplements that would be taken away from people who reply upon that to survive from fortnight to fortnight and this government is just out of touch. It was out of touch with its 2014 budget and they themselves got rid of Tony Abbott. Malcolm Turnbull is committing the same mistakes.

WARREN MOORE: But surely there has to be some cut back in the welfare sector for the budget deficit to have any hope of being cleared up.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: We’ve supported changes and we put forward changes last year. Indeed in an omnibus bill that was passed with suggestions from Labor that actually added to the amount of savings that was originally proposed in the legislation. But this legislation no one has seen coming some of the measures. Some of them are the same measures that have been rejected time and time again. There’s a reason why our national anthem is called Advance Australia Fair, Australians believe in fairness.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: They also believe in sensible government Anthony and the problem with your position is that Labor is putting the AAA credit rating at risk, that the government has protected for the last three and a bit years and is making sure that it’s almost impossible to govern properly in terms of fiscal management unless we spend more money in terms of taxes but we’re not prepared to spend money and increase taxes as Labor would do. We are doing the hard yards of finding the savings necessary in order to be able to improve the lives of Australians and that should be the job of good government.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Under you growth is down. Full time employment is…

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Growth isn’t down. We’ve created 500,000 new jobs in the last three years.

WARREN MOORE: Let’s move on. Liberal Party internal polling doesn’t read well for the Government in Western Australia with the state election next month showing a swing against the WA Liberal Government of about 14%. Now that result would have the Labor party with more than 20 extra seats and put them in government. Christopher Pyne worrying polls?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Look the only poll that matters of course is the Election Day. Before the last election I was behind in every poll in my seat in Sturt and the only one that I won was on election day and that’s actually the most important one and won it quite comfortably in the end thanks to the people of Sturt. So this poll shows that Labor is a real chance in Western Australia of winning. They have the wrong policies for Western Australia. They’ll set the state back decades. They have the same crazy renewable energy target of 50% that Federal Labor has which will mean higher electricity prices. It will mean more unreliable electricity in that state, driving out businesses jobs and investment so I think by Election Day Colin Barnett would have explained all that to the Western Australian public and I’m hopeful that the Western Australian public will see that they’ve got a good government.

WARREN MOORE: Will the word Coalition in Western Australia one day mean with the One Nation not with the Nationals based on the preference deals?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well of course not but the One Nation preferences in Western Australia is a matter for the West Australian Liberal party but the Labor party are quite happy to preference the Greens. In your state you’ve got Lee Rhiannon, lethal Lee Rhiannon, who of course has proudly talked of her connections to the Australian Socialist Party and those people who used to support communism in Australia and yet the Labor Party has no qualms about preferencing the Greens and the Greens preferencing Labor so Labor is not in a position to lecture us and a number of their members of parliament got elected on One Nation preferences at the federal election, particularly in Queensland.

WARREN MOORE: Anthony Albanese you must like these polls?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Well the Coalition are a mess in WA. What Christopher says is right, the only poll that matters in on March 11 but you have circumstance where by the Liberal Party are putting One Nation above the National Party in WA.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Only in the upper house; not in the lower house…

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Only in the upper house. Well that’s ok then. That’s where there’s a riot over there from the nats. But you have circumstances where by you have this huge mining boom and Colin Barnett managed to lose the AAA credit rating. I mean they talk about economic management in the Coalition but there just no good at it. Just like federally they’ve got an increasing deficit, they haven’t built the infrastructure that’s required in WA, they don’t have a plan for the future and they’re a mess internally. They tried to knock off the sitting Premier last year. There was an attempt to do that that was unsuccessful and I think that West Australians are saying you know, ‘we’ve had enough of the Barnett Government’ but we’ll find out in a few weeks times.

WARREN MOORE: Ok just before we wrap up today gentleman what about your views on ditching the gold pass for ex PM’s or ex MP’s for that matter. Christopher Pyne?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well of course that is the Government’s policy, to remove the life gold pass for members of parliament. I can tell you I’ve been in parliament for 24 years and when I finally retire or get thrown out I guess by the Australian public the last thing I’m going to want to do is get on a plane. I’ll be staying home with my family and potentially one day maybe grandchildren and looking after them rather than travelling around Australia.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: I think most MPs would agree with Christopher that we’d be very happy to not get on a plane for a long period of time I’ve gotta say. But I think with regard to former PM’s we’ve got to have some respect for the office of Prime Minister and if people, whether it’s John Howard or Kevin Rudd or Paul Keating, Bob Hawke, whoever, get invited around the country I think that there is no time where a former Prime Minister is clocked off, is not on the job, you know that’s the truth of the matter, we’ve got to be a bit sensible about this and we’ve also got to acknowledge this for what it is, the bloke who last week turned his back on the party

WARREN MOORE: As in Cory Bernardi…

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Yeah…that’s provided him with his livelihood for a long period of time. He wouldn’t have gotten elected were it not for the Liberal Party. He’s struggle for relevance even after one week of changing his allegiance and I think that’s why he’s come up with I think, frankly, an absurd proposal.

WARREN MOORE: I’ve got to leave it there. Thankyou for being gentleman for the guest host, apparently it was a bit robust last week.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: We had to go easy on you.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: We’re nice most of the time. Ben was provoking us.

WARREN MOORE: Oh is that it?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Ben is the common ingredient in this.

WARREN MOORE: We’ll hear from you next time.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: I think you should just occupy the seat now that you’re there.

WARREN MOORE: Don’t start that – this isn’t Canberra!

[laughter]

WARREN MOORE: Anthony Albanese and Christopher Pyne, it’s called the odd couple, it’s 9 to 5.