Sky News AM Agenda

SUBJECTS:  Cut to the Company Tax; Same sex marriage; Newspoll

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Kieran Gilbert: Christopher Pyne, Coalition Campaign Spokesman joins now us from the Coalition Headquarters there in Melbourne – don’t you open yourselves up to that sort of attack without having the costings out there, without being transparent early in this campaign, Mr Pyne?

Christopher Pyne: Well Kieran, we have been perfectly transparent in fact the announcement we made last week of a 1.5% cut to company tax which will cost us $5 billion over the forward estimates has already been paid for in savings that has been announced by the leader in both the budget reply speech and his economic statement earlier in the year in the National Press Club.

Gilbert: But there are no specifics.

Pyne: They are absolutely specific.  They were quite specific. Things like not going ahead with the massive increase to the humanitarian intake from 14,000 to over 20,000 will save us $1.3 billion just on its own.  We have announced a number of savings measures.  Labor has come up with a fantasy figure of $70 billion, which includes the company tax receipts and the mining tax receipts as they were estimated over 3 years ago.  Now we know that in the last three years the receipts expected from company taxes and mining taxes and the carbon tax has been massively reduced so in fact Labor is fighting with a hologram trying to get a line up which they know is not true just like their other scare campaigns in this campaign.  The Coalition has been perfectly straightforward and the public I think accept that.

Gilbert: We are standing by to take our viewers live to a news conference with Tony Abbott this morning. It is his first campaign stop in Melbourne; he will be focusing on infrastructure, in the meantime I have got Christopher Pyne, Brendan O’Connor, Paul Fletcher, and Andrew Leigh with me on the program this morning.

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Gilbert: And we have got Christopher Pyne, the Coalition Campaign Spokesman who joins me again from Coalition headquarters.  Mr Pyne, on another issue that was touched on there in that news conference, we will go through a few of them, but on marriage equality – what’s your sense... Tony Abbott is keeping open the option of the party room changing its position after the election. What’s your sense of the mood within your party at the moment?

Pyne: Well Kieran, my sense of the mood in my party is that they want an election campaign focussed on cost of living, job security, border protection, and economic management.  And Kevin Rudd is trying to flip the switch to any other subject other than Labor’s record and that is why he has raised same sex marriage.  Nobody I have spoken to over the weekend, Kieran, in my electorate of Sturt, has raised with me as the highest priority after the election a bill on same sex marriage in the first 100 days of the new Parliament.  And for Kevin Rudd to think that that is the priority just indicates how out of touch with reality that he is and it indicates that Rudd Redux is not even as good as Rudd in his first iteration as Prime Minister.  Clearly the Labor Party’s strategy is off the rails – they have had a bad first week.

Gilbert: But you recognise that it is very important to many Australians, you know that?

Pyne: It is very important to a very small proportion of many Australians.  To hundreds of thousands if not millions of other Australians, it is an interesting issue and one of which they would like to see it resolved positively in favour of same sex marriage.  But only a very small proportion of Australians think that the most important issue at this election is same sex marriage.  If you poll anybody in Rundle Mall today in Adelaide and ask them what the number one priority was, you’d be struggling to find one person out of a hundred that thought the number one priority for 2013 in Australia was same sex marriage.  They want to be able to pay their bills, they want to be able to secure their jobs, they are shocked that the government can’t protect our borders and they don’t trust the budget numbers, they don’t trust Labor to manage the economy and that is worrying them.

Gilbert: In terms of costings, Tony Abbott says that they would be out quite soon, this does, and we have heard Kevin Rudd use the word many times last night and yesterday describing Tony Abbott as being evasive on this issue. If you hold on for too long, it threatens the credibility that you have got on this front doesn’t it - while announcing big projects like the East-West Link it opens the Coalition up to criticism of having a magic pudding doesn’t it?

Pyne: Well the problem for Kevin Rudd is that he said six weeks ago that he wanted to be ‘Mr Positive’ and all he has done since the election was called is attack Tony Abbott and the Coalition.  So yet again Kevin Rudd’s messages are mixed - on the one hand he wants to be ‘Mr New Way’. On the other hand, he attacks Mr Abbott on a personal basis every day.  He wants to appear to be a leader but last night in the debate he looked like a reader.  Kevin Rudd says that he wants to rise above petty politics, but then he engages in scare campaigns.  Labor’s campaign is off the rails, Kieran.  They have sacked two candidates on Saturday, they lost several others last week.  Bill Shorten flexed his muscles to get rid of Geoff Lake in Hotham in order to get back at his old mate Steve Conroy.  So the wounds are opening up in the Labor Party and in terms of our budget figures, we will announce them in good time.  We have already announced $17 billion worth of savings and $17 billion worth of spending because we will get rid of the carbon tax but still keep peoples’ pensions rises and their income tax cuts and more importantly we will introduce a company tax cut which will help to revive an ailing economy.  Now Kevin Rudd doesn’t want to talk about any of those things, he wants to bring in the clown with Peter Beattie on Thursday and try and shift peoples’ attention to the Vaudeville show that passes as a government in Canberra.  Tony Abbott wants to focus on the economy, focus on job security and border protection where the peoples’ interests lie.

Gilbert: Tony Abbott didn’t want to get ahead of himself clearly in that news conference, but the Newspoll today and others in recent days suggest that you are well and truly the favourites now.  It is Tony Abbott’s election to lose four weeks out, isn’t it?

Pyne: Look the polls will come and go, Kieran, and while that is a cliché which months out from an elections sounds like a cliché, we are less than four weeks away from an election now so the only election that really counts is the one on polling day.  I am very confident having moved around my electorate in the last week particularly but also over the last many months that a lot of people have made up their mind about this very chaotic and dysfunctional government.  All they had seen since the beginning of the election is more chaos and dysfunction from Labor.  Candidates being sacked, candidates being forced to resign, talking about themselves, who is giving them money, which unions are in, which unions are out.  The Australian public is thoroughly sick of the whole show, if we win the election, it will be an opportunity for the Coalition to reset the Australian economy back towards growth and prosperity.  If Labor wins it will just be more of the same chaos that we have had for the last six years.

Gilbert: Mr Pyne, thanks for your time, appreciate it, Coalition spokesman there Christopher Pyne in Melbourne.

ENDS