Sky News AM Agenda

SUBJECTS: Nuclear submarines; Government debt; GST; Greens school policies

E&OE…………

David Lipson: Manager of Opposition Business, Christopher Pyne, Thanks for your time this morning.

Christopher Pyne MP: Good morning, David

Lipson: Let’s start where we finished with Penny Wong and nuclear submarines. Is it time for a conversation on nuclear submarines? Should we consider it?

Pyne: We can’t really consider nuclear submarines, David. We just don’t have the infrastructure or the logistical setup for nuclear powered submarines. Nobody, of course, is talking about nuclear weapons on submarines. They’re all talking about the possibility of nuclear propulsion with conventional weapons but to be honest it’s something of a pipe dream. There’s no possibility that Australia could afford to establish, on a green field site, nuclear powered submarines, and so the Coalition doesn’t, and is not considering any such policy. The Coalition’s policy on the submarines is to build them and assemble them in Adelaide, as they have been over the last twenty or so years and we think the Government should have acted much sooner on the submarines project. For four years, they’ve essentially been sitting on their hands doing nothing, and the Coalition thinks this is an absolute number one priority for any new incoming Coalition Government.

Lipson: Well on the Coalition’s costings, a different topic of course, Penny Wong there is saying that the Coalition are serial offenders when it comes to getting policies costed. Why not submit all of the Coalition’s costings to the Parliamentary Budget Office? Joe Hockey said “the bulk of them”...

Pyne: Look I think it’s sad that Penny Wong as the Finance Minister talks relentlessly about the Opposition – sorry I’ve got a bit of a cold at the moment - She talks relentlessly about Joe Hockey, relentlessly about the Opposition’s policies. She doesn’t actually talk about her own Government’s shocking record of economic management. I mean, this is the Labor party’s tactic – distract, defend, never actually put out their own policies for proper scrutiny.

Lipson: Now I’m asking you about your policy…

Pyne: We’ve been very straightforward. Oppositions in the lead up to elections - and the Government keeps saying the election will be next year - submit their policies for proper appraisal and then release them during an election campaign. They’ve done that since time immemorial. Labor did it, the Coalition has done it, because quite simply if we release our policies earlier than that, the Government will take them and claim them as their own. They’ve already done that in my area, in terms of principal autonomy.

Lipson: Joe Hockey’s saying you’ll submit the bulk of your policies to the Parliamentary Budget Office, and he’s talking about another independent auditor. Why not just send them all to the PBO?

Pyne: Well we’ve said we will have our policies costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office, or by others by whomever, on election day the Australian public will know exactly the choice they have: between a Government which came to power with $70 billion in the bank, and now has $150 billion of debt. A Government that came with surpluses and has now delivered the four record biggest deficits in Australia’s history. We now have Macroeconomics on the weekend saying, here in Canberra, that far from having $138 billion of debt in 2015/26, it is far more likely to be $214 billion, and the Government simply doesn’t come clean. Penny Wong likes to talk about what the Coalition’s doing. Why doesn’t she come clean about the fact that the real situation of debt is $214 billion, and every day that we are in deficit and debt, future generations are going to have to pay back this Government’s economic mismanagement.

Lipson: Well one way of paying back debt would be to increase the GST. Tony Abbott’s ruled it out but Joe Hockey said yesterday it would potentially still be on the table if the states agreed to push the case forward, so who do we believe?

Pyne: We are absolutely… there is no possibility at all of a Coalition government, an incoming Coalition government will increase the GST. We created the GST, we set it at ten per cent, we made it so it was virtually impossible to ever change it. The only party that has been increasing taxes in the last five years has been the Labor party, the mining tax, the carbon tax and 22 other taxes and charges – alcopops and so on. The list is endless. We will not be increasing the GST. What Joe Hockey is saying, of course, is that if the states want to campaign for that, good luck to the states. Let them do it, but a Coalition government will not, under any circumstances, increase the GST. Labor can’t make the same claim, of course because they need to find more and more and more revenue, higher taxes, to pay for their debt and deficit.

Lipson: Joe Hockey does say that it would be potentially on the table if the states succeeded in getting the public on board…

Pyne: Well it’s not on the table. A Coalition Government will not increase the GST under any circumstances. What the state governments choose to do is a matter for them.

Lipson: The Greens have reportedly softened their stance when it comes to the funding of private schools. They’ve reportedly dumped the policy to freeze funding at 2003/04 levels. You’d have to welcome that.

Pyne: Well of course they have, because it’s almost ten years ago, and so you couldn’t exactly reduce non-government school funding to the funding of ten years ago, so it’s hardly an important concession. The Greens have got two things in their education policy which of course will strike fear into the hearts of non-government school parents, and that is that they want to decouple non-government school funding from public school funding, the AGSRC model, which is the current model. That would mean that they could reduce funding to non-government schools into the future. And secondly they want to say that non-government schools couldn’t choose, in terms of their staff, the decisions that their staff might make. So if a Catholic school, for example, wanted to have a Catholic teaching religion, and an atheist teacher said that they want to do it and they were more senior, the Greens are saying that the atheist would be required to be given the job rather than the practicing Catholic. Clearly that is a tremendous intrusion in non-government schooling the Coalition won’t support it

Lipson: Now you say just briefly, any indication that this shift in Greens could affect Labor’s policy on schools?

Pyne: Well everything the Greens does affect’s Labor’s policy, so Labor has to come out today and indicate that they will not decouple non-government school funding from the AGSRC model, but they will keep the link between public school funding and non-government school funding.

Lipson: Christopher Pyne, Thanks for your time.

Pyne: Thank you.