ABC 891

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
Interview – ABC 891 Adelaide with Matthew Abraham, David Bevan and Jay Weatherill
Wednesday 20 May 2015

SUBJECTS: Relations between the Weatherill Government and the Federal Government; Infrastructure projects in SA; Submarine project; Budget 2015.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Premier Jay Weatherill’s at the airport. He’s flying to Whyalla in a few minutes. Welcome to the program Premier.

JAY WEATHERILL: Thank you.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: And Christopher Pyne, Liberal MP for Sturt. He’s Education Minister, Federal MP of course for Sturt as we said, and welcome to the program Christopher Pyne.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning Matthew, good morning David and good morning Jay.

DAVID BEVAN: Premier if we begin with you.

JAY WEATHERILL: Yes.

DAVID BEVAN: Joe Hockey yesterday said that by far and away South Australia has the most difficult State Government to deal with, how can that be good for South Australia?

JAY WEATHERILL: Well, it’s a question of whether it’s true. I mean I think it’s a bit of an invention. Look Joe Hockey and the whole of the Federal Liberal Government have obviously looked at the Federal Budget, realised that there’s not much in it for South Australia and so they’ve decided to just try and spread the blame around a bit for that. So they’re obviously a bit touchy about that and that’s why you see those sort of reactions.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Is there truth in it though, that we are looking like a bunch of whingers? And you’ve run an expensive taxpayer funded advertising campaign and lo and behold ended up with a Federal Budget that’s kicked in on your estimates, $600 million over the Forward Estimates and on Joe Hockey’s $1.8 billion.

JAY WEATHERILL: Well let’s look at what the Federal Government has done for South Australia over the last couple of years. They’ve driven the car industry out of town. Joe Hockey was the cheerleader for driving Holden’s out of town. They’ve pocketed most of the $900 million that went into automotive assistance and now spent it in the north of Australia. They’ve essentially walked away from their promise to build 12 new submarines in South Australia. They’ve brought the wind farm industry to its knees and we’re hoping that it will recover now with the recent agreement. And we saw a budget that put all of the burden on those that could least afford it - we make no apology for standing up for South Australia against all those things. Now if that creates some hurt feelings then so be it but that’s what I promised to do at the last State Election, stand up for South Australia, and that’s what I’m doing.

DAVID BEVAN: Well Christopher Pyne if there is a war between South Australia and the Federal Government, do you risk your kids saying ‘whose side were you on, daddy’?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: As a proud South Australian it makes me sad that our Premier and our Treasurer in particular would rather operate like a political bikie gang than a mature State Government. The simple truth is, just take yesterday’s example of the $9 billion North/South Corridor Plan - the Federal Government paid for it, the Federal Government suggested it. Two weeks ago - there was a draft plan last year which was shown to Jamie Briggs and we made suggestions to the State Government around that plan. Two weeks ago the State Minister, Stephen Mullighan, spoke to Jamie Briggs and said that they would be releasing it together because it was paid for by the Commonwealth. We never heard from them again. Yesterday Tom Koutsantonis goes out, drops the report and starts attacking the Federal Government. The report doesn’t have any economic analysis in it. It’s a good report but we need to actually examine it and yet the first reaction the State Government…

DAVID BEVAN: But why wouldn’t Tom Koutsantonis drop it? I don’t know if he did, but you wouldn’t have to be Hercule Poirot to suggest that he is the source, but why wouldn’t he drop it if he did because you’ve got Jamie Briggs calling him a lunatic.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well simply because if the State Government wants to genuinely work with the Federal Government, why on earth would they behave in such an immature fashion? They’re the only State Government in Australia that is so lacking in confidence in their own political ability that they’ve used $5 million of taxpayers’ funds to attack the Federal Government. Now other State Premiers and Treasurers - they might argue with Canberra. Sure, that’s part of the process, but at least they have the confidence to argue without using $5 million of taxpayers’ money to do it and what really disappoints me is this is a far cry from the Rann/Foley approach who sure they played a tough political game but they worked with the Federal Government to achieve things for South Australia rather than Jay and Tom Koutsantonis who just want to score political points every day.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Chris Pyne are we seeing though, you know, belatedly the penny dropping for the Abbott Government, both in this budget but also the South Australian Federal Liberal MPs who have an image problem and that is that they would appear to be happy to take a hard line against South Australia when your predecessors, who were in the Federal Howard Cabinet, went into bat. I mean we even got Alexander Downer getting his pandas.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well there’s absolutely no evidence to what you just said at all Matthew. That’s a complete assertion. As the number one Cabinet Minister in South Australia in Cabinet I work tirelessly for South Australia and South Australia is very much on the radar screen in Canberra, One of the examples Jay Weatherill gave was the closure of Holden - General Motors in Detroit said that no amount of money from any taxpayer in Australia would cause them to keep that factory open and yet he continues this lie that somehow the Federal Government chased Holden out of Adelaide when General Motors themselves said they have no intention of keeping the factory open no matter how much money they were given. Last week Tom Koutsantonis’ first statement about the Federal Budget was that we had delayed a $120 million Torrens project when in fact it turned out he had written or the Government had written to Mathias Cormann asking us to delay it because they weren’t ready.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Premier Jay Weatherill.

JAY WEATHERILL: Look here’s how it works. We’re going to target Christopher Pyne in the next Federal Election and we’re going to take his seat off him, right, and we’re going to target every other one of those Liberal marginal seat MPs because they have been pathetic in standing up and fighting for South Australia. That will concentrate their minds and they might find their voice and all of a sudden you’ll start to see a few things happening here in South Australia. That’s what these people understand – they understand political pressure and that’s what we’re applying and I make no apologies for applying political pressure. Now as much as I’d love to see Christopher Pyne on election night you know thanking all his supporters and, you know, having his bottom lip sort of flutter a little bit I’d much rather have 12 new submarines built here in South Australia. So Christopher can do the business inside his government and get some decent results for South Australia then he might have a chance of keeping his seat, but if he doesn’t he will be gone.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Chris Pyne how do you feel about that?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well now we’re seeing the real Jay Weatherill peeping out, aren’t we? Because that’s the vindictive personal Jay Weatherill that all his colleagues talk about and that Mike Rann and Kevin Foley talk about, that nasty Bobber Boy political vindictiveness has just been seen by your audience across South Australia and I hope they are listening.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Well I’ve never heard Kevin Foley or Mike Rann talk about Jay Weatherill like that.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Because rather than actually debating…

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Do you have a direct line to them?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Rather than actually debating the issues…

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: No really…

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Hang on.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Well no, you’ve just made an assertion about Jay Weatherill being a Bobber Boy and that’s how Mike Rann and Kevin Foley talk about him. I’ve never heard them talk about him like that.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well he sawed them both off politically – he got rid of Mike Rann as Premier and he got rid of Kevin Foley, challenged him for the deputy leadership of the Labor Party. So I’m talking in political terms. But rather than debating the issues Jay Weatherill is attacking the person – in this case it’s me – but I’ve been in Parliament for 22 years and I’m big enough to stand up for myself. I’d rather he talked about the fact that South Australia’s getting a $1.8 billion GST increase over the next 4 years and yet he’s still planning in the paper this morning to put up the Emergency Services Levy up again. He held pensioners to ransom – frightened them and made them feel insecure when he knew that he was always going to fund the pensioner concessions, just like every other State and Territory had done.

DAVID BEVAN: Jay Weatherill, are you going to put up the Emergency Services Levy?

JAY WEATHERILL: Well we’ll see what the results of the various increases that have come through. That’s a process that occurs around budget time, so there’ll be some announcements about that in the ordinary course.

DAVID BEVAN: So that is part of the consideration? If you have got a big bill from the Sampson Flat fire you have to consider putting up the Emergency Services Levy. Now that’s not to say you will but you have to consider it.

JAY WEATHERILL: Yeah, but look there’s a process for that. It goes before a committee of Parliament and that will work its way through. But can I just respond to what Christopher Pyne said. It’s pretty elementary this business. You represent the people that vote for you – that’s a pretty basic proposition. In this case it’s the people of South Australia. We’ve got a bunch of Liberal MPs here in South Australia that simply aren’t standing up for South Australia and we just see one industry after another close and we see the meek response by the Federal Liberal representatives here. As you rightly point out it would never have happened in the old days with people like Robert Hill and Alexander Downer, Vanstone – they would have stood up for South Australia – but we are poorly represented here.

DAVID BEVAN: Or maybe Mike Rann and Kevin Foley also knew how to work with Federal Ministers. There were very good relations between Mike Rann and John Howard, between Kevin Foley and Ian Macfarlane.

JAY WEATHERILL: Well I don’t have a John Howard, I’ve got unfortunately a Jamie Briggs who’s calling the shots here in South Australia and you’ve seen his approach to my Treasurer – he called him a lunatic the other day. The reason we released that report ahead of the agreed time is that we were putting up with day after day this suggestion that we had not put concrete plans in front of the Federal Government to make essentially infrastructure improvements to South Australia.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: And you still haven’t.

JAY WEATHERILL: And now we have done that. We have done that.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Now Premier...

JAY WEATHERILL: I personally...

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Well Premier...

JAY WEATHERILL: I personally sat in...

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Premier, if we can just... Premier, are you playing you know a very subtle and smart game here with these projects? In other words, you are trying to delay the projects, put them off into the next financial year because otherwise you lose GST revenue. If you can delay it for a year you pump up your GST revenue, you get to spend that money – you don’t have Jamie Briggs cutting the ribbon on the South Road Superway, you do and you’re also as a double bonus able to bag the Federal Government - saying they’re not looking after South Australia. Is that the game?

JAY WEATHERILL: Well no it’s not and look, it’s as simple as this - when Joe Hockey was put under pressure, you know what’s the future for South Australia he named three things – Kangaroo Island, he named our resources sector and he talked about the Barossa Valley and our food. Three of the projects we’ve put in front of them involve the upgrading of the Kangaroo Island Airport, sealing of the Strzelecki Track up to the Cooper Basin to unlock the mining resources up there and the Northern Connector, which goes into our food bowl in the Barossa Valley. Three projects in black and white that we put in front of the Federal Government. We’re ready to go as soon as they are.

DAVID BEVAN: Terry has called from Mt Barker. Hello Terry.

Caller Terry: G’day guys. You well? I’ve got one word for Christopher Pyne and it’s basically this: Submarines.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Chris Pyne.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I’m very pleased to say that we have a competitive evaluation process for the submarines which is going along extremely well. I was only at the ASC Friday a week ago talking to them about how they’ll be able to be involved in the project. They’re very confident that they’ll be able to demonstrate their capacity. They said themselves of course they can’t build the submarines, they’ve said that publicly and they confirmed that to me a couple of weeks ago, that they know that they can’t build the submarines.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Kevin Andrews, according to Sarah Martin, the Defence Minister, in the Australian today will visit Japan within weeks after the country’s National Security Council signed off on plans to bid for the Navy’s future submarine project.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well sure.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: He’s going to go over there and lock it in.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well we’ve publicly said we want Japan, France and Germany all bidding to build the submarines as part of a build at Adelaide, as part of the ASC and the ASC is working with all three of them – Japan, France and Germany. That’s part of the competitive evaluation process. The ASC itself has said that they can’t build the submarines on their own, they never have and they’re not going to be able to do that. So obviously as a South Australian I’m working very hard to make sure that we build the submarines here in Adelaide; we maximise the jobs and the investment in the state and that’s what a good Cabinet Minister would do and I’m not going to take the jibes from the Premier personally, I assume this is all part of the pressure of politics.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Well you called him a nasty Bobber Boy. I think it’s a bit of tit for tat, isn’t it?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I think his response earlier was extremely personally vindictive.

DAVID BEVAN: Jim has called from Morphett Vale. Hello Jim.

Caller Jim: Yes, good morning gentlemen. Really this is all sounding like a school yard brawl. I really wish that both the Federal and the State would actually get on with governing South Australia and Australia for that matter instead of this bickering back and forth – he did this, he said this to me, he said something else. It’s nonsense.

DAVID BEVAN: Jim thank you. Premier Jay Weatherill, how do you respond to Jim and how do you expect our listeners to seriously think that if you’re making those sorts of threats to Christopher Pyne that you are then when you’re finished this you can pick up the phone and do business?

JAY WEATHERILL: It’s the only thing they understand. The only thing they understand is pressure. I mean when they hand down a budget like they did back in 2014 we led the charge against that budget. It’s now fashionable to say that budget is unfair and was a mistake. When we raised our voice against it we were the only ones on that picket line.

DAVID BEVAN: No you weren’t.

JAY WEATHERILL: We were.

DAVID BEVAN: Everybody said it was unfair.

JAY WEATHERILL: There was one Labor Government that was raising their voice against this.

DAVID BEVAN: The response was nationwide.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I think you’ve got delusions of grandeur Jay.

JAY WEATHERILL: Well, there were very few voices being raised - it was very early on in the life of this government…

DAVID BEVAN: Are you saying that the South Australian Government saved the whole country…

JAY WEATHERILL: No I’m saying...

DAVID BEVAN: …from the excesses of that first budget?

JAY WEATHERILL: I’m saying that we led the charge at that time. We led the charge and we put pressure on this Federal Government and we also campaigned very strongly on it in a series of by-elections that came up. It sent a very clear message to this Federal Government that there were electoral consequences associated with pursuing the unfair budget. Now...

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: And Chris Pyne is that what we’re seeing now and is that why we’re seeing a budget that is a pale shadow of what was described as a reformist budget?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I think if you look back in the…

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: He spooked you.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I think if you look back in the history of this you’ll find that every single Premier, Liberal and Labor, attacked last year’s budget within 24 hours of the budget being handed down.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: None of the others ran a $5 million advertising campaign against you.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: And neither should they.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: And none of the others took a seat off you, Fisher, that you were expected to win.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: ... neither should have run a $5 million advertising campaign. You’re now just bending that Matthew.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: No, no I’m just saying...

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I’m really quite surprised.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: I’m just saying, I’m just wondering whether it spooked you and, you know, Fisher is uncomfortably close demographically to Sturt.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No, I don’t see...

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: If they can win that, they can win Sturt.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Look Matthew ... I’ve won eight elections. Almost every election the Labor Party says they’re going to take the seat off me and they put all sorts of stories in the newspaper about how the polling shows that I’m in trouble this time, I’m on the way out. It happens every single election as you well know because I’ve been coming on this show for probably 20 years and they haven’t won it yet and I’m happy to put myself in the hands of the good burgers of Sturt who’ve re-elected me eight times. Now putting me aside because it’s not about me, it’s disgraceful that the South Australian Government didn’t have the confidence that the other Premiers had and that Mike Rann would have had to actually go out and argue without backing their arguments with $5 million of other people’s money. What that proves is that Tom Koutsantonis and Jay Weatherill don’t have the confidence to be able to actually hold an argument and a debate and they need $5 million of taxpayers’ money to do so.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: ... Jacques is our final caller on this for now. Hello Jacques.

Caller Jacques: I just want to talk to the Premier there because the way you’ve been talking to Christopher Pyne this morning it’s a bit like a gangster – you know I’ll shoot you if you don’t do what I want. This is disgusting.

DAVID BEVAN: Jay Weatherill.

JAY WEATHERILL: Sorry about that, but when you’re standing up and fighting for your state you have to be assertive and I make no apologies for telling this Federal Government that what they’re doing to South Australia is unacceptable; what they’re doing to working people who are asking to bear the burden of all of the adjustment is utterly unacceptable. I said I’d stand up for this State and I’ll use any and all means within my power to do that.

DAVID BEVAN: Premier Jay Weatherill thank you for your time this morning.

JAY WEATHERILL: Thank you gentlemen. Bye bye.

DAVID BEVAN: And Christopher Pyne, Liberal MP for Sturt, Education Minister and Leader of the House, thank you.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Pleasure. Thank you.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: And Chris Pyne will be back we think with his normal sparring partner, Mark Butler, next week here on 891 ABC Adelaide, next Wednesday.

[ends]