5AA Adelaide

Christopher Pyne: Good morning Will and good morning Anthony.

Question: You must be relieved Christopher, because now you can be openly hostile about Cory Bernardi.

Christopher Pyne: [laughs] Look, I’ve never been hostile about Cory Bernardi, he never really crossed my radar. I think the only point that really needs to be made about Cory Bernardi is that this is a guy who eight months ago got elected as a Liberal. He would never have been elected if he wasn’t on the party ticket and if he really wanted to restore faith in politics, as he says he does, he would do the honourable thing and resign from the Senate and recontest his position as an independent. As one of his political heroes, Phil Gramm did in Texas, when he decided to leave the democrats. He (Gramm) created his own vacancy in his own seat and won it back as a Republican. Now, apparently if Cory is so popular, as he seems to think that he is, he would apparently easily get re-elected as an independent, which one wonders why he didn’t do so at the last election only eight months ago.

Question: The Liberals would fill that vacancy if he quit? There wouldn’t be a by-election though, would there? He would have to recontest it at the next federal election, wouldn’t he, for a Senate spot?

Christopher Pyne: Absolutely and that is exactly what he should do if he wants to restore people’s trust. He’s just breached the trust and faith of 345,000 people in South Australia, who voted Liberal in the Senate, which is totally contradictory to what he said yesterday. But he could restore that faith by resigning from the Senate and recontesting honestly and openly as an independent, which he didn’t do at the last election in July. And that is why Sean Edwards is not in the Senate, and Sean Edwards should quite rightfully feel that he has been cheated out of his Senate spot by a person who is now no longer sitting as a Liberal. So I feel very sorry for the Liberal people who handed out how-to-vote cards, the people who helped fundraise, who supported our party, who turn up to State Council and branch meetings every month to support the Liberal Party, who get the vote out and who put Cory Bernardi two on the Liberal Senate ticket. And now he is audaciously refusing to keep the contract that he made with the Liberal Party, to support the party in this term.

Question: John Howard managed to juggle the competing interests and agendas of the more progressive moderate stream of the Liberals and the more conservative stream. What does it say about Malcolm Turnbull’s people management skills, that he has been unable to do so?

Christopher Pyne: Look, I think Steven Ciobo hit the nail on the head yesterday, he’s the Minister for Trade and Investment, when he said that Cory has been in the Parliament for 10 years and he’s never laid a glove on the Labor Party. Never laid a glove on the Labor Party. He has taken pot-shots at his own party for 10 years; it’s the easiest thing to do in politics, attacking your own side always gets you a headline. I can’t think of one example where he has actually taken on our opponents as I do every Wednesday on your show with Anthony Albanese, and I’ve been doing it for 24 years…

Anthony Albanese: Not very effectively

Christopher Pyne: [laughs] but Cory has never attacked the Labor Party, he’s not interested in attacking them, he’s just interested in getting himself a headline and attacking our own side.

Question: Albo, to you. There’s a big “stuff the lot of you” factor in this, isn’t there? And Labor has played its part in creating a climate too where we saw in the Newspoll on Monday, it is now getting towards one third of Australians now think that there is a piece of cigarette paper dividing the Labor Party and the Liberal Party, and that you’re all motivated by self-interest.

Anthony Albanese: Well, I think what they are wondering is what the purpose is of the Turnbull Government and that it’s not surprising that they’re racked by this internal turmoil. This is a rabble without a cause. Malcolm Turnbull got elected, people thought that he would transform politics and I think he got his rhetoric quite right when he first became Prime Minister. The people wanted to move away from divisive politics, people wanted someone to stand up for their values and he just hasn’t done that. He hasn’t done that on climate change or marriage equality or anything else. He’s shrunk in the job of Prime Minister and that is because in part, he is trying to hold together this coalition of people who basically hate each other and Cory Bernardi has had a long running feud with Christopher Pyne and others in the party. I feel some sympathy, I’ve got to say, with what Christopher says about him changing party allegiance just months after he was elected, and I regard that as an absolute breach of trust and it says a lot about his character, in my view.

Question: Well Albo, is not the Bernardi move preferable than when Labor was in power, disgruntled backbenchers and senators and others, said about white anting, leaking and undermining Government? Is it not a more honourable course of action for Cory Bernardi to walk away?

Anthony Albanese: Like Tony Abbott and Co are doing right now, everyday? I mean, we’ve had an enormous amount of undermining of the Turnbull position, it’s very clear that the Abbott forces are on the march and that he wants to return to the Prime Ministership. And you’ve got others positioning themselves to sort of run through the middle of Julie Bishop and others, perhaps even Christopher Pyne, who knows.

Christopher Pyne: [laughs] Well they could try.

Question: Well you can rule that in or out if you want, Chris.

Christopher Pyne: Nice try, Anthony. I mean, I love being lectured by the Labor party about disunity, when we’ve had the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Government in that six year unhappy period, when Labor was last in power.

Question: Hey Christopher, we’ve got a question from a caller, Scott from Athelstone. G’day Scott.

Scott (caller): How are you going? I voted for the Senate for Liberal and I don’t think Cory Bernardi betrayed me. But I did vote for Christopher Pyne at the election, and he supported Tony Abbott and then he betrayed me and voted for Malcolm Turnbull. So I’m wondering whether he’ll resign.

Christopher Pyne: Well I’m still in the Liberal Party, so I haven’t changed parties. I joined the Liberal Party when I was 17 and I’ve never crossed the floor, I’ve always stuck with the team. And often it’s quite hard to stick with the team and you sometimes have to subsume your own strong views about something, because the team makes a different decision and I’ve done that now for almost a quarter of a century. What Cory Bernardi has done is, well, he hasn’t been able to get his own way; he’s spat the dummy and left the team. Now he’s been bagging the team for 10 years, so a lot of people will say, well this was not unexpected, but what is unexpected is to take the Senate ticket number two position for the party, to get elected as a Liberal, and then eight months later decide to change and become an independent in the Senate, and that’s where the contradiction in Cory Bernardi’s position is so obviously transparent. If he really wants to restore honesty and integrity in politics as he claims, he would resign his spot and recontest it, and if he got elected, good luck to him, but if he didn’t get re-elected then he’d get the answer that people actually don’t want splitters and dividers in the team like the Coalition.

Anthony Albanese: I think it is worth making another point that he has been in the Parliament for eight months, but for three months of that since the election, he spent it as the Liberal Party Government’s representative in New York. So he didn’t change allegiance before he got this overseas trip for 3 months in New York at the UN…

Question: It’s quite the lap of honour

Anthony Albanese: It is. It is just breathtaking.

Question: Honing his neo-con craft in Washington D.C.

Hey, just finally to wrap things up guys, I want to get a response from both of you to the speech Malcolm Turnbull made last week, where he said coal, what he calls clean coal, should be part of Australia’s energy mix. Now we had a perfectly serviceable coal powered station here at the Alinta station in Port Augusta, until recently, that has now been mothballed. To you Christopher and to you Albo, do you think that coal should again be part of the energy mix here in South Australia?

Christopher Pyne: Well I definitely do. Alan Finkel, the Chief Scientist, says that clean coal technology’s carbon capture and storage should very much be part of our energy mix. In South Australia, we need to have base-load energy, we need to have stable energy and we don’t have it, courtesy of the South Australian Labor Government’s ideological obsession with renewables. Now I’m in favour of renewables, as is everybody, but you have to be able to guarantee base-load power. There are 700 clean coal power stations in Asia, 90 in Japan alone. 700. We don’t have one in Australia, and yet we are the largest exporter of coal in the world. So there’s absolutely no reason at all, that we can’t guarantee our base-load power, reduce our electricity prices and make sure we don’t have the blackouts that we’ve had to put up with in South Australia, through clean coal technology.

Question: What about you, Albo?

Anthony Albanese: Well, Malcolm Turnbull was just looking to try and change the conversation. I don’t think he believed what he said last Wednesday. All the financiers and the people in the energy sector say that gas in terms of base-load, which is lower emissions and cheaper than coal, is the way forward and is where there will be an expansion in terms of base-load as well as an expansion of renewables. And that is what the key people in the sector say, just as they all say; including the Government’s main energy advisor, spoke about the emissions intensity scheme that was brought up by Josh Frydenberg last year that will lead to lower electricity prices for households. And the Government ruled it out, in part, to appease Cory Bernardi, quite ironically.

Question: That didn’t really work in the end, I guess. But we’ll have to leave it there. Christopher Pyne and Anthony Albanese, thank you very much for joining us for Two Tribes.

Anthony Albanese: Good to be with you a bit earlier.

Christopher Pyne: Thank you.