5AA Adelaide Breakfast Radio

JOURNALIST: It’s time for two tribes, Christopher Pyne and Anthony Albanese on the program, good morning to you both.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning Will.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Good morning from Canberra.

JOURNALIST: Now chaps not to surprise you but yet again we’re going to talk about the energy situation here in South Australia. There’s a story on the front page of today’s ‘Tiser that for just $25 million the state government could have apparently helped keep the Northern Power Station going for three years, avoiding some of the instability that’s beset the state over the past twelve months. Chris Pyne do you think that would’ve been money well spent?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Of course it would’ve and the truth is nothing proves more the ideological obsession of the South Australian Labor Party than this story because when Arrium and Nyrstar in Port Perry and Whyalla were facing difficulties the Labor state government jumped up and down as though it was the end of the world when Northern Power, the Northern Power Station run by Alinta was facing closure they did absolutely nothing, lifted not one finger to do anything for them, to support base load power in South Australia. For $25 million they could’ve avoided the blackouts we’ve had in the last twelve months and instead they’re now spending $550 million of South Australian taxpayer’s money that we can’t afford to make up for their mistakes.

JOURNALIST: What’s your assessment Albo, do you think that Labor should have stepped in to save a coal fired power station or do you think that coal is a thing of the past and that it should’ve been allowed to die a natural death?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Well a private company looking for a public subsidy, state Labor didn’t privatise the network, the former Liberal government did that. And a private company looking for a public handout is something that once it happen there’s another handout, and then they come back for more, and then they say if you just give us a bit more money to add to our bottom line we’ll do…

JOURNALIST: You mean like the car industry?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: What you want. Well for Christopher, who oversaw - basically when Joe Hockey when he was the Treasurer said – Joe Hockey was pretty keen on telling them to bugger off was their attitude as a federal government, for them to play politics with this. I think your listeners are sick of people playing politics about South Australian energy and are sick of a federal government that pretends it has no responsibility for the national electricity market at all and what they want is solutions. Jay Weatherill came up with a positive plan last week, all again we hear from the Coalition is just negativity and trying, basically, to run down South Australia, is what we hear, in question time day after day.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well in democracies, Anthony, government shave to bare responsibility for their failures, and the South Australian Labor government’s been in power for many years…

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Do you bare responsibility to people for the car plan?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Hang on, hang on I gave you a good run, I didn’t interrupt you. Labor’s been in power in South Australia for 16 years and they are solely responsible for the obsession with closing down base load power in South Australia…

ANTHONY ALBANESE: No, the market’s responsible Christopher, the market’s responsible.

JOURNALIST: Gentleman can we perhaps change tack and turn our attention to the…

ANTHONY ALBANESE: It’s not a government owned power station, the government didn’t make a decision to shut it down…

JOURNALIST: Thank you Anthony.

JOURNALIST: Right, Christopher if I can just turn your attention to the Chinese extradition treaty for just a moment and ask how it came to pass that this was debated like this, put forward and then rescinded in the midst of a visit from the Chinese Premier, it seems entirely embarrassing, how did it get to this point?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well Julie Bishop has withdrawn the motion to pass the extradition treaty and we are going to talk again to people within the party and also of course the Labor Party about what they may be prepared to support. And as far as our relationship with China goes it’s obviously a very strong and robust relationship but we don’t always agree with the Chinese government about everything and one of the things we don’t always agree with them about is the treatment of human rights issues so these are important debates, we obviously want to make sure…

JOURNALIST: Is it regrettable that they didn’t happen before it was first put up and now rescinded?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well we want to make sure of two things, we want to make sure that Australians don’t escape to China who have broken the law and we want to try them for crimes here, we want to be able to extradite them back here, and similarly, we don’t want to become a safe haven for cleptocrats in the Chinese bureaucracy who are hiding in Australia and avoiding legal issues back in China. But to do those two things we need to be very clear about the protections in terms of human rights, one of the key protections in his treaty, of course, was the discretion of the Minister to refuse to allow someone to be extradited if there were doubts about any of those protections, but that wasn’t enough to convince the Senate or the Labor Party. So we will keep talking these issues through which are really, quite frankly, beyond politics, they are important issues of national security and national confidence.

JOURNALIST: Albo, you guys for your part have said that there isn’t issues necessarily specific to China, this is a broad stance with regard to extradition treaties across the spectrum. Are there any specific remedies with regard to China that would get you to the point that the government seems to be at when it comes to this particular, this specific extradition treaty?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Look we’re not ruling out in the future as China’s legal system evolves an engagement on this issue. What’s extraordinary though is that the relationship with China’s too important to have what’s been a debacle frankly over the last 24 hours where the government doesn’t seem to have even known what its own members were doing, let alone the Senate, let alone what we were doing when we made our decision. One would’ve though that this should’ve been handled in a much more sensitive way and the government needs to learn the lesson from that and negotiate with all of the Parliament in order to make sure that there’s not just simply a repeat of what’s been a pretty poor 24 hours yet again for the government.

JOURNALIST: Hey guys before we let you both go, I know you’re both big music fans, you Chris, I know that you’re into a lot of ‘80s tracks.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: That’s our era David.

JOURNALIST: That’s right, it certainly is, but Albo you’re a former programmer of Rage and today’s a big day for you because you’ve become and ambassador for World Record Store Day.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: I haven, it’s a big deal, it’s a global day, April 22, and people can go into their local independent record store and there’ll be people performing and DJs playing and a focus on I guess getting the message out there that, yes people can sit in their lounge room and download a track these days, but nothing replaces actually going into a record store, engaging with the community, thumbing through racks of CDs, or these that’s vinyl’s back and admiring the artwork and the liner notes and touching and feeling it rather than just listening to a track and many albums of course, you need to hear the whole track, all the tracks in the right order because they fit together just like a great novel.

JOURNALIST: Certainly do

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: You’re such a relic.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: That’s why we love him.

JOURNALIST: Kicking it old school, good stuff guys, Christopher Pyne, Anthony Albanese…

ANTHONY ALBANESE: It should be called old school record day.

JOURNALIST: That’s right, old school record day.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Unashamed.

JOURNALIST: Good on you, thanks guys.