ABC RN Breakfast

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
ABC RN Breakfast with Fran Kelly
04 December 2017
SUBJECTS: Banking Royal Commission; SSM;

FRAN KELLY: You’re ending the Parliamentary year in a weaker state than you started it, is that a definition of failure?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Not at all because, of course, it’s entirely out of our hands. John Alexander has resigned and created a bi-election in Bennelong because of doubts around his citizenship. So obviously he won’t be there, Barnaby Joyce’s seat has not been declared despite, as you described it, a thumping bi-election win on Saturday which should put many of the nay-sayers to bed.
FRAN KELLY: The nay-sayers in your own side?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: In the media basically, in the commentariat. So we’re down two votes, so of course by definition we therefor rely on the crossbenchers for support but that’s really not because of a failure on our part, it’s because of the citizenship of two of our members.
FRAN KELLY: Okay, the Prime Minister says he’s already satisfied there are no more citizenship issues for government MPs. Now we’ve heard that before from the Prime Minister just before you lost both Stephen Parry and John Alexander. How can he be certain when we haven’t got the member’s declarations yet?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: We’ve done our own investigations obviously of our Members of Parliament in terms of their citizenship and we are very confident that we’ve done the right thing that Barnaby Joyce and John Alexander have created bi-elections in their seats and been re-elected and in terms of Barnaby Joyce and hopefully the case of John Alexander whereas Labor is still harbouring members who clearly have issues around their citizenship. Susan Lamb has admitted that the UK wrote back to her indicating that she hadn’t provided them with the information required for her to renounce her citizenship. She was a UK citizen when she nominated, and the same thing with Justine Keay, she was a UK citizen when she nominated, therefor both have serious clouds over their citizenship and Bill Shorten has harboured them and protected them rather than doing the right thing which was to get them to resign and create bi-elections which we could’ve all had on December the 16th.
FRAN KELLY: Malcolm Turnbull said yesterday the government was not going to hesitate to refer those Labor MPs you talked about, but if you don’t do the same, Labor says that some of your MPs are under constitutional cloud too. If don’t do the same with those then are you running a protection racket? This is the line that Tony Burke, and I’m sure he’ll say it again when we speak to him in a moment.
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Fran, if there are members on our side where there’s evidence that indicates that there is doubt around their citizenship then of course we’ll refer them, I’ve never said that we wouldn’t. The question I’ve been asked is would I refer Labor members with doubts around their citizenship, the answer has always been yes we will. But if there’s Liberals or Nationals with doubts of course we’ll refer them, we’ll do the right thing.
FRAN KELLY: Okay, now Tony Burke is coming up in a moment, he’s going to move a resolution empowering the opposition to refer government MPs just in case you don’t. Will you agree to that in the interest of clearing up this mess once and for all and looking even handed?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Tony Burke knows that’s not necessary because if I move a resolution at the end of the week to refer members to the High Court, if I don’t include the people that he thinks should be referred from our side he’s open to amend that motion. So he knows that that’s quite capable of being done right now, and the amendment only requires a simple majority of the House of Representatives, it doesn’t require 76 votes so that’s just him posturing.
FRAN KELLY: Okay, alright well I’m sure we’ll come and ask him that in just a moment. Let’s move on to your side of politics, the government on the face of it is a Coalition divided at the moment. On show, the schisms between conservatives and progressives, we’ll come to those in a moment, but also between the Libs and the Nats, we now know that it was George Christensen who was threatening to quit if Malcolm Turnbull was still Prime Minister this week, he’s recanted that, but he says with Barnaby Joyce set to return to Canberra, this is the Nats, ‘we will have a more assertive and independently minded National Party, we should point the government in a new direction.’ Now that the Nats have had a taste of their power inside the Coalition why would they stop at a royal commission into the banks, haven’t they got you over a barrel here?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Fran it all sounds very breathless and exciting, but the truth is the Nats have always been an independent voice in the Coalition, that’s the whole purpose of it being a separate party, there’s a Liberal Party and the National Party…
FRAN KELLY: But this is the quote, ‘we will have a more assertive an independently minded national party.’
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: We’ve been in the Coalition with the Nationals since the 1920s and it is axiomatic that they are a separate party; if they’d wanted to be part of the Liberal Party they would’ve joined the Liberal Party. Now we won’t always agree with the Nationals and one of the good things about the Coalition is that we allow our members to take a conscience view on any subject. Now, they rarely do so, they rarely change and vote with the opposition and they sometimes do, and we don’t take a Stalinist approach to that, we suck it up and we move on and that’s been our history since the creation of the Liberal Party.
FRAN KELLY: But you’ve run out of patience though, George Christensen was toying last week with quitting the government as we now know, since the royal commission was announced he reconsidered that position and now says despite earlier misgivings ‘I remain completely with the Nationals and the government.’ How many more times can George Christensen threaten to quit the Coalition before he has to either put up or shut up?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well Fran I have deep wellsprings of good will toward my colleagues, and as Leader of the House you would expect that, and I’m glad George has made that decision. I’m disappointed that he had a different view a week or so ago but he’s changed his mind and that’s a great thing and we welcome him as a valued member of the team.
FRAN KELLY: It just goes to what you said earlier though, you say the naysayers in the media, the naysayers aren’t in the media, the naysayers are on your own side, George Christensen’s admitted that.
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I think there’s plenty of commentators in the press, in the newspapers and…
FRAN KELLY: Yeah but they’re less of a concern to you, aren’t they, than the ones within your own team.
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I think it’s interesting that George Christensen apparently made those comments to Andrew Bolt and Peta Credlin, who are supposed to be columnists and journalists, and they were engaged in that discussion with him, and I would say, therefore, you could categorise them as naysayers when it comes to the Turnbull government, I think they’d agree with that. But the result on Saturday in the New England by-election has Labor at 11% of the vote. Now, Tony Windsor wasn’t running so they can’t claim the hit that their vote went to Tony Windsor, the truth is that people haven’t embraced Bill Shorten as leader of the opposition as an alternative Prime Minister, they don’t trust him, they think he’s shifty and that result on Saturday very clearly indicates that Labor’s vote is in the toilet in New England and if there was an election I think you’d find that a lot of people would continue to embrace Malcolm Turnbull and the Coalition in government.
FRAN KELLY: You’re listening to RN Breakfast, its quartet to 8. Our guest is Christopher Pyne, the Leader of the House and Minister for Defence Industry. We’ve got a couple of issues to get through if we can move through them. The government will introduce its foreign interference and foreign donation laws this week, we learn today that Bill Shorten visited the home of a Chinese business, Huang Xiangmo, reportedly to seek political donations after the major parties were warned off by ASIO, do you think Bill Shorten’s got some explaining to do?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Of course he does, he does have some explaining to do, he also needs to explain how it was that he thought it was a good idea to bring back Sam Dastyari into the front bench of the Labor Party months after it was exposed that Chinese donors were paying Sam Dastyari’s personal bills and accounts. And he has to explain it us all why he himself visited the same Chinese donor in spite of being warned by security agencies that he might be a person of interest.
FRAN KELLY: And yet your own party accepted money from the same businessman after that ASIO warning as well, almost $123,000, both sides have explaining to do. How does this happen?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I’m not aware of the donations that Mr Huang made to the Liberal Party nationally in Canberra...
FRAN KELLY: They’ve been declared, it’s well documented.
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Or New South Wales. I haven’t seen the details of those particular donations so I can’t comment…
FRAN KELLY: But it’s wrong isn’t it, it’s wrong for your party to have accepted that donation too then, if ASIO warned you off.
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I’m not aware of the circumstances, I’m don’t know who was warned, by the way, so I’m not sure if it was the federal director or the federal leader, it certainly wasn’t me so I can’t comment on those particular donations without being aware of the actual circumstances of them.
FRAN KELLY: Just finally, the same sex marriage legislation comes into the House of Reps this week, it’s another internal pressure point within the government because there is division within your ranks on same sex marriage. The former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson says the sidelining of the conservatives, this is how he put it, and the 5 million people who votes ‘no’ is a ‘national crisis’ for the government, is the government going to push harder in the Reps to get some amendments through or will it go through so easily as it did in the Senate, what is your view?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I’m satisfied with the religious protections in the Smith bill, they don’t require - they allow, if you like, churches and religious Ministers to refuse to marry same sex couples because of religious reason. The amendments that were put by my colleagues in the Senate were not passed, I’m sure they will be revisited in the House of Representatives and it will be up to the members of the House of Representatives to determine whether the particular amendments are ones that they wish to support…
FRAN KELLY: The Prime Minister himself, as I understand, is going to introduce some of these amendments too. In the interests of trying to calm the troops because, as they’re pointing out, ¾ of the Coalition Senators voted against the legislation as it was and tried to get it amended. Do you hope there might be some amendments that get through that you can manage through that don’t change the bill too much in the effort to calm tensions within your own party room?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well you have to look at each amendment on its merits, and I’ll be doing that during the debate this week. Each amendment put up by members of the House of Representatives should be considered by all colleagues with a dispassionate eye as to whether they wish to support it or not, that’s not a division. You say that the Coalition was divided over marriage equality, it’s a private member’s bill, which means that people…
FRAN KELLY: I think there’s plenty of division within your ranks, within it.
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: It’s a private member’s bill, it’s about people exercising their own conscience, and that means that they will have different views, that doesn’t represent division in the Coalition, it represents the private member’s bill process doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. And each amendment will be considered on
its merits by me and by my colleagues in the House of Representatives and if they succeed, if they get the majority of the votes, then the bill will be changed, if they don’t succeed they won’t.
FRAN KELLY: When do you think the bill will go through?
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I suspect it will go through on Wednesday-Thursday, Thursday morning, Wednesday evening, one of the two, after a very thorough and rigorous debate. It will take as long as it takes; we’re not going to cut the debate short, we’re going to allow our colleagues to debate it for as long as they wish to do so.
FRAN KELLY: Christopher Pyne, thank you very much for joining us.
CHRISTOPHER PYNE: It’s a pleasure Fran, thank you.