5AA Adelaide

DAVID PENBERTHY: It's a Wednesday mornings, it's the most powerful segment in South Australian radio. It's Chris Pyne and Anthony Albanese, they are both on the line ready to go, albeit Albo, he's a couple of hours behind. Anthony Albanese, you're in Perth this morning. Good morning to you.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Indeed, it's a little bit early out here.

DAVID PENBERTHY: It certainly is, and that gives Chris Pyne the tactical edge I think. How are you going there, Minister?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Oh, you've got to get up very early in the morning to beat Anthony Albanese.

DAVID PENBERTHY: [Laughs] Now look guys, obviously enough the big story internationally this week was Donald Trump's suspension of visas for people from seven Middle Eastern and African, predominantly Muslim nations. Now, we saw Britain, Canada, Germany, the leaders of other liberal democracies come out and very strongly distance themselves from Donald Trump's actions. To you Christopher Pyne, why was Malcolm Turnbull relatively silent on that point?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, firstly he wasn't. He basically repeated what Justin Trudeau had also said, which was to reaffirm our absolute commitment to a non-discriminatory immigration policy, but we also have two very important priorities at the same time. We want to make sure that we get everybody off Nauru and Manus and therefore we have a delicate arrangement with the United States, which now fortunately has been confirmed. We also wanted to make sure that Australian dual citizens were exempt from this executive order, which we have also managed to achieve.

So, sensible governments deal diplomatically with other governments, they don't lecture them, and Malcolm Turnbull's managed to pull off both the Nauru and Manus Island deal, as well as Australian dual citizens being exempt from the executive order, which is actually a tremendous achievement.

DAVID PENBERTHY: When you say delicate arrangement, are you sort of conceding there that if Mr Turnbull has been as forthright as some other leaders that the tactical risk was that Washington might have turned around and said well, you can stick your Nauru deal?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, the reality is that the deal we did with the Obama administration needed to be confirmed by the Trump administration. We have been in the midst of negotiations and discussions with them about that, and lecturing other countries about their domestic policy is not something that we should do. Now, I know that the left and the ABC are outraged because, you know, we won't attack Donald Trump, which they are determined to be opposed to, but the reality is he was elected president. He said he was going to put a ban on certain immigration into the United States. We don't agree with that, of course, but that is a matter for him and his electors. They elected Donald Trump, he's doing what he said he would do, and for all the left's outrage they can't deny that fact.

DAVID PENBERTHY: To you, Albo. Labor has been quite strong in its criticism of Donald Trump this week, and criticism has been levelled also at Malcolm Turnbull for, in your view, being somewhat supine on this issue. But isn't it a reality that Labor, when Kevin Rudd was PM, did do things like what Donald Trump has just done when it was in power? You did it with the Sri Lankans; you did it with the Afghanis, where for a while you were so worried about the situation in those countries that you put in these short-term bans on visas from those nations.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: No. Labor, and indeed, to their credit, the Coalition, have not had a racially discriminatory immigration policy in this country. In the past, people like Philip Ruddock crossed the floor of parliament over just those sort of issues. And for Christopher to characterise as just the left, last time I looked Chancellor Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister May of the United Kingdom, certainly weren't under any definition part of some left-wing ABC conspiracy. The fact is that world leaders have been standing up for their values and that's what's disappointing here.

I know Malcolm Turnbull pretty well, and I have no doubt that he would find, personally, the declarations that have been made under these presidential decrees quite abhorrent. He doesn't need to attack Donald Trump personally, but what he did need to do was call out bad discriminatory policy that does not make the world a safer place, and indeed divides people, and that's precisely the opposite of what we need to do. And I guess, for Mr Turnbull, the problem here is he wouldn't stand up to Mr Trump, he won’t stand up to Mr Abbott or Cory Bernardi – people in his own party. It's just this incredibly shrinking prime minister that we're seeing, and I think that's quite sad.

WILL GOODINGS: Albo, you guys are having a bob each way on Trump, though, aren’t you? Because on the one hand coming out and admonishing him, but on the other, you close your eyes or just read the transcript without the name attached to Bill Shorten's Press Club speech yesterday. In the parts he talks about 457 visas, he's tapping into precisely the sort of vein that made Donald Trump president, isn't he?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Well, that's not right. That's the sort of policies that we did. For example, labour market testing is something that we introduced into the 457 visas when we were in government. I think common sense tells you that where Australians are available to do work they should do it, rather than importing labour, particularly when we have rising unemployment in this state of Western Australia, for example. It has risen considerably in the last couple of years. So, the sort of importation of labour that you needed during the mining boom on a temporary basis simply isn't necessary anymore across a range of skills.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Let me introduce one particular fact into this: Bill Shorten was the Minister for Employment when 457 visas reached their peak in this country and, can I add, that most of those were in Sydney in precisely the kinds of jobs that he mentioned yesterday, and Sydney, the last time I looked, wasn't engaged in a mining boom. So, Bill Shorten is being his usual dodgy political self. He's just a dodgy political hack and trying to have a bob each way, being a populist, trying to tap into this so-called Trump effect at the same time pretending that he had nothing to do with 457 visas when he was the Minister for Employment.

WILL GOODINGS: Christopher Pyne, could I put it to you that we have a whole stack of listeners that would wish that your Government would tap into the Trump playbook a little bit more, and they have contrasted the- we've just had the news that Toyota are going to be leaving Australia.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: That's hardly news…

WILL GOODINGS: [Interrupts] Well, a date has been announced. That is news. We've had, in recent history, the situation with Holden and the criticism of how Joe Hockey dared Holden to leave the nation, and then our listeners are saying, hey, you've got Donald Trump in the US threatening these companies, threatening them if they leave they're going to have to pay a massive tax, and they've seen in recent days a couple reverse those decisions. Is it time to change tactic when it comes to how the Government deals with corporate entities leaving?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, Holden was General Motors Holden, it's an American company and the CEO said that no amount of money from the Australian taxpayer will cause us to stay in Australia. Toyota is a Japanese company, it's not an Australian company, and even the AMWU said today that it was a relief that they finally had a date, and it was the AMWU that took Toyota to court and had the arrangements that Toyota had made with their workers, who had voted overwhelmingly in favour of it, ruled out by the Fair Work Commission, so it effectively killed Toyota. And I, as the Minister for Defence Industry, are brining 5000 jobs to South Australia in the ship building and submarine building industry, so nobody could accuse me of not being Australia first, Australian manufacturing first, especially in high-tech advanced manufacturing, high-value jobs. Decisions that we've made to build 12 submarines, nine frigates, 12 offshore patrol vessels are decisions that Labor didn't make in their six years in Government.

DAVID PENBERTHY: Just before we let you both go, I just want to get your views if I could, Christopher Pyne, because this is a specific South Australian issue that relates to the success or otherwise of the federal Coalition in this state at the last election, about the revelations here this week that the Weatherill Government paid almost $1 million, or three-quarters of a million dollars, to a very pro-Labor group to put out seemingly innocent information on election day about your education policies.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Yeah look, Labor has been caught once again with their hand in the cookie jar: $800,000 to one community, which turned out to be run by Labor apparatchiks, effectively, to campaign against the federal Coalition. This is the same kind of thing they did when they handed out dodgy Family First How To Vote cards in Mawson, or Leon Bignell's electorate the last couple of state elections ago. Labor will stop at nothing to win elections, that's what we have to understand, and they will even use taxpayers' money to prop up so-called community organisations to campaign on their behalf. There should be an investigation into this. I don't know how the South Australian ICAC works because it is a very secretive organisation, but I would have thought this is a classic case of borderline corruption, and I assume that there will be thorough investigation into it.

DAVID PENBERTHY: Christopher Pyne and Anthony Albanese, thanks very much for joining us for Two Tribes.