ABC 891

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
Interview – ABC 891 Adelaide with Matthew Abraham, David Bevan and Mark Butler
Wednesday 27 May 2015

SUBJECTS: Submarines; GST on sanitary products; Same sex Marriage Bill

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Christopher Pyne is Liberal MP for Sturt, he’s the Education Minister, he is Tony Abbott’s Leader of the House in the Federal Parliament. Welcome Christopher Pyne.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning boys.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: And Mark Butler, welcome to you. Labor MP for Port Adelaide, you speak for the opposition on environment and climate change matters, and you are running for Federal President of the ALP. Mark Butler, welcome.

MARK BUTLER: Good morning gentlemen.

DAVID BEVAN: Christopher Pyne if we can start with you, as the most senior Liberal Minister from South Australia in the Federal Government, were you surprised by Ian Macfarlane’s comments yesterday, your colleague’s comments, that the first few subs might not be built in South Australia?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well most of the foreign bidders for the submarine contract working with ASC have indicated that they might be able to build all the subs in Adelaide, they might start by building one or two in their home bases and then building the rest in Adelaide, so I think Ian Macfarlane was simply stating what’s been stated many times before and the ASC in fact have told me before as they’ve said publicly that they can’t build the subs on their own in Adelaide, they do need a foreign partner - the French, the Germans and the Japanese are all bidding as part of the competitive evaluation process.

DAVID BEVAN: We know they need a foreign partner and there’s nothing unusual about that but there was a promise that they would all be built in Adelaide and now to hear the words, ‘first few not built here’, that must send a shiver through the workforce?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No, that’s not a new statement, people have been saying that for many, many months. Now, this is a $50 billion project, there will be tremendous amount of investment and jobs in Adelaide through the submarine contract. We do need ASC to partner with a foreign bidder and that’s obviously going through that process. And whether they are all built in Adelaide or whether there is a process of bringing ever more submarines to Adelaide to be built is a matter that will be decided as part of the bidding process. But when Kockums built the Collins Class submarine there was a tremendous amount of work being done both in Adelaide and overseas to make that happen, so that will happen too.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: And that first submarine … they were all built in Adelaide, weren’t they?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: There were lots of parts built in Europe and then transported to Adelaide but I think you’re splitting hairs. There’s a $50 billion project of which there will tremendous amount of investment in Adelaide and jobs.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Chris Pyne, we are not splitting hairs. If the first few subs, and that could be one or six or three or four, are not built in Adelaide it will have a devastating impact on employment in Adelaide.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No it won’t actually, you’re quite wrong about that. There is a large number of —

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Well I put it to you I’m not quite wrong about that.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Okay, well I disagree with you. There will be a tremendous number of jobs in Adelaide and the Government is working and Kevin Andrews particularly is working and I’m talking to him very regularly about making sure that there isn’t this appalling cliff that was left to us by the Labor Party, this valley of death where there’s no shipbuilding work. Let me just explain just one other thing to you; in the six years that Labor was in Government they didn’t award one shipbuilding contract in Australia. They awarded two to Asian companies in Asia. They didn’t award one Australian shipbuilding contract and they did nothing about advancing the submarine contract. This Government has taken the bull by the horns and is dealing with it.

DAVID BEVAN: Would you be happy if the first few were not built here?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I’m not going to pre-empt the winning contract, the winning bid…

DAVID BEVAN: You’re a South Australian MP, it’s a pretty straightforward question; would you as a South Australian be happy if the first few were not built here?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I will be happy when the announcement is made about the winning submarine bid and that that means tens of billions of dollars of investment and jobs in South Australia. Now how that is exactly made up by the winning bid I’m prepared to wait and see but I’m absolutely confident with the work that I’m doing and Matt Williams in Hindmarsh is doing and others are doing, that we will have a successful outcome for South Australia.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Okay, now, Mark Butler, Labor MP for Port Adelaide, do you accept what Chris Pyne has said?

MARK BUTLER: Not at all.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Hang on, he’s said a lot so let me just put it specifically to you and that is that there was not one contract signed under the previous Labor Government, for ships or the subs?

MARK BUTLER: Well of course - over the period of our time in Government the Air Warfare Destroyer program was cranking up and we just had the launch of the first ship last week, which was a fantastic event. And we did do a significant amount of work to prepare the ground for a decision on the next generation of submarines.

DAVID BEVAN: But you could have locked these contracts in and we wouldn’t have a valley facing those workers right now?

MARK BUTLER: The time wasn’t right to lock contracts in at that stage …

DAVID BEVAN: Well it was right. That was exactly when you had to lock it in…

MARK BUTLER: Let me finish … we were doing preparatory work …

DAVID BEVAN: Mark Butler, that was exactly when the contracts had to be locked in to avoid the valley.

MARK BUTLER: We did a range of preparatory works to ensure that we made the right decision and came to the view that submarines should be built here in Australia … we thought we had a bipartisan decision on that leading into the last election in 2013, but what we saw from Ian Macfarlane over the last couple of days is just the latest attempt to try to warm up the Australian community, particularly the South Australian community, to the idea of the Government walking away from that promise. Now Christopher says that either way there will be huge numbers of jobs and investment in South Australia. Well that’s simply not right. As Nick Xenophon made clear again last week the Government, or particularly the Prime Minister, has only guaranteed a few hundred jobs, a few hundred jobs, which is vastly different to the sort of investment and employment opportunities that would come from a build option here in Australia. Now I’ve met with the French company and the German company who have come here and talked openly with MPs from both sides of politics about their ability to do this project and it’s quite clear that if the Government took the view that they should stick with their election promise that they could build the submarines here in Australia, partner with the ASC and do what I think everyone a couple of years ago thought was going to happen.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Okay, now, Chris Pyne, will you disown the further remarks by Ian Macfarlane that in terms of our current record, and he’s talking about the ASC and the Government owns the ASC, ‘it’s a shocker’ can you, would you disown his reflections on the ASC and the Adelaide workforce?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well he was talking about the ASC as it existed under the previous Government…

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: He says, ‘in terms of our current record it’s a shocker’, not the previous record.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: The record of the ASC until recent times has been appalling. Now the forensic audit found that during the Labor years the Air Warfare Destroyer did blowout massively in cost and was horrendously delayed. The same thing happened with the Collins Class submarines. Now I’m a very proud South Australian but there’s no point in pretending that that hasn’t been the case.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Chris Pyne, can you think of any other CEO, effectively, of a company making a product in South Australia that bags their own company, bags their own product, bags their workforce and then expects to be able to do business overseas competitively?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well number one, Ian Macfarlane is not the CEO of the ASC, Mathias Cormann is the Minister for Finance and he is —

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Well he’s bagged it, he’s bagged it as well …

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Tou’re talking about two different periods of time. Since Mathias Cormann has been the Minister for Finance we have shaken up the ASC, we have brought in new management principles and practices. In the last 12 to 14 months there’s been a massive turnaround at the ASC and in the next Air Warfare Destroyer will be much better built in terms of cheaper price and in terms of time because of the work that this Government has done to fix the ASC. What Ian Macfarlane’s been talking about, what Mathias Cormann was talking about was the period before we came into Government when the ASC was facing constant massive cost blowouts and delays but we’re fixing that because that’s important for the future.

DAVID BEVAN: Some people think the releasing of that report on Friday, the day before the Hobart was lowered into the water, was an act of utter bastardry.

MARK BUTLER: And it was.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I’m very proud of the Air Warfare Destroyer. I’ve been down there and visited at the ASC. I’m very proud of the work … that’s been done there by the workers at the ASC … the next Air Warfare Destroyer will definitely be built faster, with less errors and much less cost blowouts because of what they’ve learnt from the first one.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: It may not be reflected in the latest ACTU poll and I don’t know how rigorous that was, it was a Robo poll of Hindmarsh - ReachTEL poll I should say - showing that you’re much loved in Hindmarsh apparently as is Matt Williams. Do you think there’s a possibility that as Lynton Crosby said mid-term people are happy to be unhappy, that they’re waiting for you in Adelaide with baseball bats come polling day?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No I don’t think that at all, I think the people are very common sense. I think they realise that let’s take the Submarine Corporation for example, they realise that there were cost blowouts, there were delays, that’s just a fact of life, the Government is trying to fix it. They realise that Labor did nothing for six years but sit on their hands and make empty promises which they didn’t keep. They realise that we are trying to fill the valley of death with shipbuilding and submarine building down the track, which will deliver lots of jobs and I don’t think they buy the constant 24 hour news cycle which is trying to create this sense of chaos. I think they actually recognise the Government’s getting on with the job, which they saw in the budget two weeks ago.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Does it ever occur to you, would you ever hear an executive from Apple like the late Steve Jobs bagging the first iPhone for instance, which had an appalling battery life, was plagued with problems, ever will they turn around and say, ‘you know, in the past we made crap products’, because that’d be dumb wouldn’t it?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I bet Steve Jobs would laugh about their first product and say, ‘gosh we’ve learnt a lot since then’.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: He wouldn’t say it publicly … he wouldn’t say it’s a dud.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I bet he would …

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: He wouldn’t say we couldn’t build a … Morse code set, or a canoe, would he, because that’d damage his company.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: But I’ve never said anything like that so don’t put words into my mouth that I have never said. I have always supported the ASC. I’ve always supported the submarines projects, whether it was Collins, whether it’s the newest project and I’m working very hard for South Australia to bring that about, but I’m sure Steve Jobs would say, ‘sure, we’ve learned a tremendous amount since the first produce we ever built’ …

MARK BUTLER: Can I have a say here? What Steve Jobs wouldn’t do is he wouldn’t apply the cost of the first Apple iPhone to the cost of subsequent iPhones and that’s the problem with what Cormann did last week …

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: What did you do when you were in Government, Mark, what did you do about the subs …

MARK BUTLER: You had a very long go Christopher, let me have a response. What Cormann did last week was utterly misleading, he said that the cost of the first destroyer, the first ship of a type, would be the same cost that would apply to all the subsequent ships when anyone who has any familiarity with shipbuilding knows that the cost of the second ship is about half the cost of the first ship because the cost of the first ship involves building all of the infrastructure, so his attempt to say that subsequent destroyers will cost three billion dollars but cost a billion dollars overseas was just completely misleading. And you’re right, the fact that he dropped it the day before the launch of the first destroyer was an act of bastardry. It was so deeply insulting to do that in a misleading way before the pride of the work of thousands of South Australians was put into the water. I mean Christopher can clean this up or try to clean this up as much as he likes but Cormann and Ian Macfarlane and others in this Government are just trying to tear down the good work of South Australian workers.

DAVID BEVAN: Christopher Pyne, do you support removing the GST on tampons?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, each State and Territory Government needs to ask the Federal Government to do that and if they do of course I support it. I mean the GST is a State tax, if they want to take out sanitary products then the Government will take sanitary products out.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: How about the principle?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: It seems odd to me that they are treated differently for example to condoms, it does seem odd to me that that’s the case and it’s probably an anomaly that should be dealt with and from listening to the radio this morning it seems that the only state that is yet to commit to that is Western Australia.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: And Mark Butler?

MARK BUTLER: We’ve made our position clear on this. We fought the fight on this when the GST was being introduced that not exempting sanitary products while you were exempting things like condoms was ridiculous. I think the campaign that the young woman in Sydney has been running has been an extraordinary one, and also we’re at a time when the extension of the GST to Netflix and other downloads will give the State Governments significant extra income so the timing seems right, but it looks like the Prime Minister has overruled Joe Hockey yesterday so it’s very unclear what the position of the Commonwealth is.

DAVID BEVAN: Mark Butler, is Bill Shorten, your Leader, jeopardising bipartisan support for the same sex marriage bill by bringing it forward to a vote perhaps as early as, well, within the next few days?

MARK BUTLER: Not at all. The question of bipartisanship really depends on what the party room in the Liberal Party is going to do. Now Tanya Plibersek as the Deputy Leader wrote to Liberal MPs more than a year ago including a number who have been on the radio this morning complaining about our actions, more than a year ago wrote to them asking for a discussion about how we could progress this issue in the Parliament and has not received a single response, including from those MPs.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Okay. Chris Pyne, what’s your view on that?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I think it’s very important that no one plays politics with something that is an important issue to a lot of Australians and I do think it’s a shame that Bill Shorten has so-called jumped the gun by bringing this bill in next week but we will deal with it in the normal processes that the Parliament deals with private members’ business, the Government will deal with this issue in due course and I just want to make sure that politics is not played with something that is really important to a lot of Australians.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Chris Pyne, thank you for talking to us, Liberal MP for Sturt, Education Minister, thank you.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Pleasure.

MATTHEW ABRAHAM: Mark Butler, Labor MP for Port Adelaide, opposition environment and climate change spokesman.

[ends]