http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.auRSS feeds for Malcolm Turnbull MP60http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/493/Malcolm-speaks-with-Barrie-Cassidy-on-Insiders.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=493http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=493&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/493/Malcolm-speaks-with-Barrie-Cassidy-on-Insiders.aspxE & O E BARRIE CASSIDY: Malcolm Turnbull, good morning. Welcome. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Good morning Barrie. BARRIE CASSIDY: So you went into that party room and came out of it with a con? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, Penny Wong is just running the lines as you would expect her to. Our position is a very sensible one. I think most Australians recognise that. The fact of the matter is that we are all committed to reducing Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. The most important thing for Kevin Rudd to take to Copenhagen is a commitment to targets and we have given him bipartisan support for that. In fact when the Danish environment minister, who of course will be hosting the conference, was out in Australia recently, she met with my colleagues Andrew Robb and Greg Hunt and she said that she wasn't concerned about what scheme or structure we had to reduce our emissions. That was a matter for us. What she was concerned about was a commitment to targets. And so we've given Mr Rudd support for that. So he goes to Copenhagen with support for targets. And what we must do with the scheme, of course, is get it right. We've got to have a scheme that is environmentally effective and economically responsible. And what the Government has at the moment is a moving feast. They’re sitting down today apparently planning yet more changes. There's no certainty offered to business. And the reality is, as we all know, is even if we were to pass something this year, once the Americans have legislated and once Copenhagen is concluded we’d have to amend it anyway. So why not get it right early next year. BARRIE CASSIDY: Are you still in favour of an emissions trading scheme? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yes Barrie, I am. I am in favour of putting a price on carbon. There are really only two ways, well there are only two principal ways you can do that. You can have a carbon tax or you can have an emissions trading scheme. The world is moving – there are arguments for both – the world is moving very solidly in the direction of an emissions trading scheme, most notably the Americans. So yes, I've got no doubt we will have an emissions trading scheme in Australia. That's my view. The question is, what is its design. That is going to be very heavily influenced by the decision in the United States. That will be the global benchmark. So, given that the American legislation is likely to be passed by the end of the year, why wouldn't we wait until we saw what that legislation said, saw what was agreed at Copenhagen and then we could act in a way that was fully informed. I might add Barrie, the Canadians are taking exactly the course of action that we are recommending so this is not just a, this is not an idiosyncratic Coalition view from Australia. The developed economy with the economy most similar to ours, that is to say Canada, is doing exactly what we're recommending. So it's common sense. BARRIE CASSIDY: But it does appear though as if the Nationals will never support an emissions trading scheme. Are you in those circumstances prepared to split with the Nationals and go your own way on policy and tactics? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Barrie you've got to remember that we supported an emissions trading scheme when we were in government. It was a Howard Government initiative, an emissions trading scheme. A very different design to that proposed by Mr Rudd and Penny Wong and one which would have protected our trade-exposed emissions-intensive industries and would have protected Australian jobs, but they've set that aside and gone off on a different tack. BARRIE CASSIDY: Yes but the Nationals have hardened their position since then. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Barrie the reality is, look, if you go back a year nobody would have said that it was likely the Americans would pass an emissions trading scheme legislation this year. Now I've got friends on both sides of the aisle in Washington, Democrats and Republicans, and they are all confident that the legislation will be passed this year, and if it's not actually finally passed this year, it will be, the terms of it will be agreed. Now that is a huge change. You add that to a new sense of momentum towards Copenhagen and I think we could easily find ourselves, very likely to find ourselves early next year in a political environment where the biggest developed economy has set up an emissions trading scheme, the world has agreed or the major economies have agreed on an approach to reduce emissions and naturally Australia and all sides of politics will want Australia to play its part, not for Australia to stand outside. BARRIE CASSIDY: So you're convinced in those circumstances then if the Americans do adopt an ETS, you can convince your National Party colleagues? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Barrie, I have no doubt that if the United States establishes an emissions trading scheme, then Australians will expect us to follow suit as part of an effective global agreement. You know, we get back to the fundamental point, and I know this will be hotly debated by your panel a little later, but the fundamental fact of life is this, is that whatever we do by ourselves is ineffective unless it is part of a global agreement. That's always been the big question mark. Now it appears that the enormous political capital that President Obama has has been sufficient to drive this legislation through the Congress. It will carry through the House, and, as I said, my intelligence is it will go through the Senate. Now that may be wrong but if what we all expect to happen happens, surely it makes common sense for us to get the scheme right. I mean we've got our biggest export industry – coal – talking about losing tens of thousands of jobs thanks to Penny Wong and Kevin Rudd's incompetently designed scheme, for no environmental gain. And they're saying to us, ‘you must sign up to this immediately’. Why would we sign up to a scheme that is going to do nothing for the environment and put tens of thousands of Australians out of work? Why would we do that? BARRIE CASSIDY: Okay, so then you block it next month, you block it again in October, presumably then the Government has a double dissolution trigger. Now you're miles behind in the polls. Why would you give them both the opportunity and the excuse for an early election? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Barrie it's only the Prime Minister who can call an election. That's up to him. So you should address all of those questions to him, not me. We will vote in the Senate according to what we believe is the right policy. We've obviously got to take into account the political circumstances. What we are putting up is a sensible approach, which is to defer the vote on the scheme, not for six years, not for a year – literally for about six months until after Copenhagen. We could come back straight after. We could come back you know in early January. But practically speaking, by early Feb, by February when the Parliament comes back, we will know exactly what the Americans have legislated, we'll know exactly what's been agreed at Copenhagen. We will be fully informed. Why wouldn't you want to make as momentous a decision as this when you are fully informed. See this rush to get the legislation passed is an exercise in vanity because Kevin Rudd wants to go to Copenhagen and be a big shot. And I might say, Penny Wong talked about a con, Barrie. Let me tell you what the big con is. The dirty little secret of the Labor Government is that the guts of this scheme, the essential details of the scheme are actually in the regulations, which are rules made by governments administratively, not legislated by Parliament, as you know. Now those regulations have not yet been published. And they are what will determine the scheme. They are what will determine what protection different industries will get. And they are not being presented to the Parliament for voting. BARRIE CASSIDY: Right, you did say then though that when you're considering whether or not you allow the, give the Government a trigger for a double dissolution, you will take political matters into consideration. Surely one of those political matters – there will be a genuine deadlock and there will be a genuine issue. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Barrie, there may well be. The Government has changed its position on the emissions trading scheme frequently. I've got no doubt they are going to abandon the hardline, job destroying position they've taken on coal, to some extent. Whether they abandon it completely, time will tell. They've already put back the commencement date of the scheme. And you see, here again is a practical question: if the scheme is not going to start in truth until 2012, and if there is a vital input – i.e. the legislation in America and Copenhagen that will be known by the end of this year, 2010 – why would you rush to finalise the legislation in advance of that? There's just no justification for it. This is an ego trip by Kevin Rudd. BARRIE CASSIDY: Well to give the business community some certainty so that they know what they're dealing with. MALCOLM TURNBULL: But Barrie that is absolute tripe. Absolute tripe. Look, the fact of the matter is, the thing that matters to the business community is the regulations. The Parliament is not going to be voting on the regulations. The Government hasn't even drawn them up or published them. The deal for industry allocations is still up in the air. The Government has acknowledged to business leaders, just in the course of the last week, that whatever they promulgate this year will be amended after Copenhagen and the US legislation anyway. Look, let me put this to you. You're a political pundit. Do you think it would be politically viable for the Australian Government to offer its Australian workers less protection under an emissions trading scheme than an American emissions trading scheme offers American workers? The answer to that is obviously no. So the fact is, whatever the Americans legislate will be the global benchmark and will require, if the scheme is passed this year, amendment next year. So there is no certainty. That is a humbug. BARRIE CASSIDY: Okay, according to a report in The Australian you've told many of your colleagues that you will move on if you lose the next election. Do you mean by that that you will move on from the leadership or move on from politics altogether? MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, the only meaning of that is that is an invention by the imaginative journalist in The Australian. I've said no such thing. BARRIE CASSIDY: You haven't contemplated... MALCOLM TURNBULL: I am committed to politics for the long term, I can assure you. BARRIE CASSIDY: Okay, no matter what happens? MALCOLM TURNBULL: I'm committed to politics for the long term, Barrie, believe me. BARRIE CASSIDY: Okay. You took a bit of a hammering this week in the Parliament for voting against various infrastructure projects, particularly those in the schools. In retrospect, how do you reconcile that vote? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Barrie, we put up, Kevin Rudd came along with a $42 billion spending package which included some spending on schools, it included a $14 billion cash handout. We said it was too big because it was incurring far too much debt. We said that a lot of its components particularly the cash splash were going to be economically ineffective. I mean the idea that a government would go and borrow $14 billion and then give it away is just, it is not just unprecedented, until a few months ago it would've been unimaginable, but that's the level of the recklessness... BARRIE CASSIDY: Yeah you were opposed to that part of it but surely they've trapped you now. They've trapped you because you've voted against all of these projects and then a lot of your members are out there welcoming them. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Barrie we haven't voted against any projects. What we voted against was the overall package. We put up an alternative... BARRIE CASSIDY: It's the same thing. MALCOLM TURNBULL: …which would have involved spending money on schools but not so much; spending $3 billion instead of $14 billion and spending it in a more targeted and effective way, for example. We put up an alternative package which would have cost less than half as much, which the Government refused to accept. So the reality is the reason we voted against the Government's package was because they were not prepared to negotiate on something different. But you know this whole farce of Kevin Rudd standing up in Parliament showing pictures of school gates and bulldozers, I mean, it really is reducing, it's demeaning Parliament. Remember it's only a few years ago he said he was going to raise parliamentary standards. I don't think any of us have ever seen a Prime Minister demean himself and demean the Parliament more than he did this week. And really what he's doing, as I said in Parliament, he's borrowing billions of dollars, putting this massive debt on the shoulders of Australians, borrowing billions to blackmail members of Parliament. So what he's doing is borrowing billions of dollars and then spraying it around the country and then saying to each member of Parliament, ‘oh so because you have concerns about that debt you don't agree with this amount of money being spent in such and such a school’. And you know he'll no doubt be calling up people to stand up and say, I got my $900 and it's outrageous that the Coalition thinks that shouldn't have been spent. He will stop at nothing. BARRIE CASSIDY: Given the nature of the financial crisis at the moment, how did you manage to grow your wealth and make it onto the BRW rich list? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well look Barrie, Lucy and I have been in business, well, all of our lives. We've worked hard. We've started a lot of small businesses. We've been persistent. We've been enterprising. We've had a go. We've been successful. We've had a degree of good fortune in that. A lot of people work very hard and are not successful in financial terms; so we've been financially successful. And it gives both of us, and obviously me as a politician, a very good insight into small business, into the challenges that business faces and into the need for responsible economic management. And people know when I talk about business, when I talk about economic management, I'm talking about something I've lived my whole life. BARRIE CASSIDY: And you've said that the listing is inaccurate. Was it too high or too low? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Barrie, look I don't go around calculating my net worth. Can I tell you, the only financial figures I am acutely focused on at the moment is the massive amount of debt Kevin Rudd is piling onto Australians. This is the biggest challenge we face, getting that debt under control, because everything depends on it. How much money will we have to spend on the environment, on hospitals and schools, on roads, on anything, if we are saddled with over $300 billion of debt and rising? I mean those debt figures... BARRIE CASSIDY: Yeah but your best estimate or Joe Hockey's best estimate is that your debt would be $275 billion. You're not really that far apart. MALCOLM TURNBULL: No that's not true Barrie. Barrie you are, I'm sure inadvertently, just repeating Kevin Rudd's line. That’s not what Joe said. BARRIE CASSIDY: But Joe Hockey said it would be $25 billion less. MALCOLM TURNBULL: No he didn't. Well I can tell you exactly what he said. He was asked how much lower our debt would be and he said, well for a start it would be at least $25 billion lower, and then went on to describe a number of other factors. I mean the point is that had we... BARRIE CASSIDY: Well then, let's get it accurately on the record then. How much less would it be? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Barrie, it would be a lot less... BARRIE CASSIDY: A lot less. MALCOLM TURNBULL: …and I will explain why. BARRIE CASSIDY: No, no, if you could give us a very precise idea about how much less. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Barrie, it isn't possible to provide, for us in Opposition any more than any other Opposition has done, to provide an alternate Budget down to every last dollar and cent. We don't have the resources to do that. You've got to remember that the Government has been in office for 18 months and it has made a whole series of decisions which have weakened the Australian economy. What about talking up inflation last year? What about those interest rate rises which we didn't need last year? What about the unlimited bank deposit guarantee that shattered the non-bank financial sector... BARRIE CASSIDY: Although we are running out of time. But we'll just have to settle with a lot less, right? MALCOLM TURNBULL: A great deal less and Australians know that. And they know that only the Coalition has the discipline and the character to get this Labor debt under control. BARRIE CASSIDY: Okay. Thanks for your time this morning. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Thank you, Barrie. [ends]  malcolmSun, 31 May 2009 03:51:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:493http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/491/Retirement-of-the-Hon-David-Hawker-MP.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=491http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=491&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/491/Retirement-of-the-Hon-David-Hawker-MP.aspxDavid Hawker has announced today that he will retire from politics at the next election. David has made an enormous contribution to public life in Australia over more than 26 years. Elected to parliament following the retirement of Malcolm Fraser, David has been a dedicated and effective representative of the people of western Victoria. David's commitment to and passion for our parliamentary democracy was recognised when he was elected in 2004 as Speaker of the House of Representatives. In over three years as Speaker, David was always measured and impartial, upholding the important traditions of that office and earning the respect of both sides of politics. David has also served on many parliamentary committees, including as Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committees on Economics, Finance and Public Administration. David will continue as Deputy Chairman of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade until the next election. One of the true gentlemen of political life, David will be missed by his colleagues. I thank David for his decades of distinguished service to the electorate of Wannon and the people of Australia. Lucy and I wish David and Penny a very happy future together.  malcolmSat, 30 May 2009 21:46:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:491http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/490/Joint-Press-Conference-with-Warren-Truss-Parliament-House-Canberra.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=490http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=490&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/490/Joint-Press-Conference-with-Warren-Truss-Parliament-House-Canberra.aspxSubjects: Climate change: getting in step with the world; Sol Trujillo E&OE Now the Coalition will offer bipartisan support to the Government for the carbon abatement targets Australia takes to the Copenhagen climate change conference in December. Those targets are, as you know, an unconditional five per cent reduction from 2000 levels by 2020 and a reduction of up to 25 per cent from 2000 levels by 2020 subject to a global agreement being reached to achieve a substantial reduction in global emissions. Now this enables Mr Rudd to go to Copenhagen in the knowledge that the entire Parliament or at least the Government and the Opposition support the targets he is taking there. It’s a rare degree of bipartisan support and I imagine few national leaders will go to Copenhagen with that degree of support. Now as far as the emissions trading scheme legislation is concerned, we are being asked to consider that and vote on it now when Copenhagen is only six months away and when we have in the United States the Obama Administration well advanced in bringing its legislation to establish an American emissions trading scheme through the Congress. This is the Waxman-Markey Bill. Now, already it is plain that that legislation gives much greater protection to the importing and exporting competing industries upon which so many millions of American jobs depend, gives much greater protection to those businesses than Mr Rudd is proposing to give to similar Australian businesses under his scheme. Now it must be obvious, even to the most committed climate change zealot in the Government, that it would be absurd for Australia’s emissions trading scheme to give our trade-exposed businesses less protection than that which is offered in the United States. This American legislation is likely to be passed by the end of the year and certainly its final form will be well known before Copenhagen. For that reason the Canadian Government has decided to stand back in terms of progressing its own legislation and wait and see what the final shape of the American legislation is and of course what emerges from Copenhagen. We should do the same. Common sense and prudence, the importance of getting this right, of pursuing a practical outcome that is effective for the environment and does not destroy jobs, demands that the decision on the scheme and on the final design of the scheme should be postponed until after Copenhagen, by which stage we will not only know what the world has agreed to do at Copenhagen but, most importantly, we will know exactly what the United States has resolved to do with their emissions trading scheme. Now I know that Mr Rudd, in his vanity, wants to go to Copenhagen with his own legislation and he no doubt believes that the rest of the world will be so taken with his cleverness that they will all line up and copy what he has done in Australia. Now that may be a dream of his, but it is a fantasy. The reality is that the debate in America is proceeding. The scheme that they adopt and the rules they adopt will be by far the most influential benchmark around the world and it is a vital element in Australia’s interest for us to take into consideration when we finalise our own carbon emission reduction arrangements. So that is our position on the legislation. We will vote to defer it until after Copenhagen, which will also be after the US scheme, the US legislation is concluded. Now the other point that I want to make is that we are committed to early and effective action on climate change. Just as we criticise the Government for its haste in rushing the finalisation of this scheme through in a way that runs the risk of getting it drastically wrong and out of step with the rest of the world, so there are important measures to reduce emissions, be it in terms of energy efficiency or green carbon, as we’ve called it, biosequestration, soil carbon and other areas of individual action that are being overlooked. And so we propose that from the 1st of January there be a government authorised voluntary carbon market working in a similar way to the Chicago Climate Exchange so that individuals, firms, businesses, farms can undertake their own actions to reduce emissions, to create offsets, which would then be able to be banked against a future emissions trading scheme when that is enacted in the future. In other words, you add on to a voluntary carbon market the ability to carry forward those credits and bank them and credit them against your obligations in the future. This would certainly provide a real stimulus to that important area of voluntary action. Now finally, given that we are proposing that there be a period of deferment before the legislation is voted on, we are also recommending to the Government, and will seek to amend the legislation to provide for this, that there be a reference to the Productivity Commission so that there can be a thorough examination of the scheme, its impacts, likely variance to the scheme, its relationship with the United States’ arrangements and in particular the impact on jobs, both on an industry and on a regional basis. The Government has absolutely ducked the question of the impact of this scheme on jobs. This will be, the way they have set it up at the moment, this will be a job destroying scheme for very little environmental gain and the Productivity Commission is well placed to examine that with great exactitude and great skill over the next six months. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull aren’t you, in effect, by moving to defer this bill, defeating it – the real message is, start again? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well no. It’s up to the Government what they want to do. Look, if I was the Prime Minister today – and I say this to you as someone that is very committed to reducing Australia’s CO2 emissions and very committed to a global agreement – if I was the Prime Minister today I would not be finalising our scheme until after we had seen what had happened at Copenhagen and what the outcome of the United States legislative process was. Now, I’ve been saying this for quite a long time, for some time, I think ever since we went into Opposition and we started considering this issue of timing. You’ve got to remember Mr Rudd created an artificial timetable. He was the one who said in the election campaign the scheme will start in 2010 therefore, naturally, the legislation had to be completed in 2009. Now, that was a political decision by him. That’s why it was always more appropriate for the scheme to start later, not simply to delay the economic impact of it, because of the current economic downturn, but so that we could get the details of it right. You see, this is not a question of are you in favour of an emissions trading scheme, yes or no. The question is: will the scheme work, what is it going to do to jobs? Jobs, jobs, jobs. That’s the key priority. And what Mr Rudd is proposing now already is a scheme that provides Australian businesses and Australian jobs with dramatically less protection than that which is being offered by President Obama to American industries and American workers in his own country. QUESTION: What does Australian business think of your proposals and in particular the voluntary carbon market? Does that give them some sort of certainty that they have been asking for? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well the whole idea of a voluntary carbon market will be very welcomed. Andrew and Greg can talk about that in a moment if you would like to go in to more detail on that. But there is a lot of support for that and of course it has a great precedent in the Chicago Climate Exchange which has been going for a long time. QUESTION: If you can’t delay this legislation, will you vote it down? And also if the Government were to emulate the trade-exposed compensation proposed by the United States, would you vote for it? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, Lenore, it’s up to the Government. If the Government does not take the opportunity to get the scheme right then we will not vote for it, plainly. Let me be quite clear about that. But, you see, the difficultly with Kevin Rudd trying to play catch-up with developments in the United States is that there is a 964-page bill that is going through the Congress. That is the single most important piece of climate change legislation in the world. It will be the benchmark, and common sense and prudence dictates that what we should do is defer the final consideration of our scheme until we have seen what finally emerges from the Congress and the Administration and what emerges from Copenhagen and that means we should be dealing with this … QUESTION: [Inaudible]… and then emulated the US compensation, would you vote for it? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Lenore, we will look at what happens after Copenhagen but, plainly, if there is a global agreement then Australia should be part of it, and we have always been committed to that. QUESTION: Is your vote contingent on more than just the US legislation? I mean, for instance, many of our trade-exposed industries compete not with the US but with developing countries. So do you have conditions in you position about how we should compare with what developing countries do? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, Lenore, the point of the matter is that in the United States legislation already there is – and this is a bill, right, so it’s got a way to go, quite a way to go – in this legislation already there is substantial protection for American, what we call, trade-exposed industries, export and export competing industries. Now those protections are much more substantial, much more considerable, than offered by Kevin Rudd and they go for a lot longer. In fact, they continue indefinitely until the bulk of the world has got a similar cost on carbon. Now this is basically what we were saying when we were in government with Shergold’s plan, you may recall. So it has taken a long time for Kevin Rudd to wake up to the fact that he has gone off on a very dangerous tangent with his scheme. But for the sake of six months, let’s get this right. Let’s not sacrifice Australian jobs on the altar of Kevin Rudd’s vanity. QUESTION: Do you believe in your position strongly enough to risk a double D, because a deferral is under the Constitution a failure to pass, so it’s the same as rejecting a bill? Do you believe, is what you are saying, sorry, the strength of your conviction, are you ready to go to an election on this if the Government… MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I can’t call a double dissolution. That’s up to Kevin Rudd. If he wants to, well, it’s entirely up to him. If he wants to rush through a scheme before we know what the Americans’ legislation will say, recognising that will be the benchmark – and let’s be real, America is the biggest economy in the world. It’s the biggest emitter of CO2 in the world second only, or it’s just ahead of China. So what the Americans do is the critical element – that’s the critical factor. The arrangement they reach with China at Copenhagen – that is the deal. That’s what it’s all about. Now common sense says if you are genuine about protecting the climate, if you are genuine about protecting jobs you seek to get this right and you get it right by deferring the final consideration until after you know what has happened. QUESTION: Do you think you can get the necessary support in the Senate for a deferral – and that seems to depend on Nick Xenophon? Have you had talks with him about this? Are you confident you can persuade him with this American argument? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, Michelle, I talk to the senators and members all the time. I certainly talk to Senator Xenophon. You will have to talk to him. I am not going to speak for him. But certainly he is very alert to the flaws, the very serious flaws in this legislation. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull, just on an aligned issue, would a Turnbull Government move for, promote the use of nuclear energy in Australia as a means to reduce emissions? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, our position on nuclear energy is the same as it was when we were in government. It should be one of the energy options for Australia but it is not a viable, it’s not a practical option, Matthew, until it has strong bipartisan political support and it has obviously got to pass environmental safeguards and have the support from the community. But the reality is, the practical reality is that nuclear energy is such a long term investment that nobody is going to undertake the investment to build a nuclear power station in Australia unless and until there is bipartisan support for it. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull, Senator Xenophon only wants to delay up until September. That means you do not have his support to delay it until after Copenhagen. Does that mean that you will have to defeat it in the Senate? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well you can talk to Senator Xenophon and report on what he says. I am telling you, Warren and I are here as the Leader of the Liberal Party and Leader of the National Party, we are telling you what the Coalition will vote do and that is to defer it. QUESTION: Mr Truss, you called this scheme a rabid dog that needs to be put down. Would you vote for something like that’s going through Congress at the moment? In respect to Lenore’s question, if the Rudd Government came up with a US-type system which gives 100 per cent protection to big emitters, is that something the National Party would look at or would you not vote for anything? WARREN TRUSS: Well the National Party is strongly opposed to the Rudd Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. We believe that it will be very damaging to Australian industry and the Australian economy at a time when it can ill-afford additional shocks. The evidence before the Senate Committee made it clear that industry after industry would be forced offshore as a result of the measures proposed in this legislation – mining, gas, electricity generation would be adversely affected, food processing, manufacturing – a whole range of industries. It exports jobs and, once more, it also would do nothing for the environment because essentially industries would relocate in other places. Now on the other hand, we want to take a constructive approach towards the issues. If there is an international agreement on the context of an emissions trading scheme, well then our concerns about the disadvantage to Australian industry disappear. If the whole world is moving constructively together with a common set of goals and objectives and rules across the world, then in reality our concerns about the disadvantage to Australian industry are dissipated. QUESTION: Is there an emissions trading scheme in any form that the National Party would consider supporting given your concerns that you’ve constantly expressed about the effects that it would have on agriculture and the mining sector etc? WARREN TRUSS: Well the Australian scheme is probably the harshest that is under consideration anywhere in the world. It would place Australian industry at a disadvantage in every sector. If I may just turn briefly even to the farm sector. The United States has proposals and has a system which would potentially enable farmers to benefit from being able to play a positive role in carbon sequestration activities but would not include them in measuring for emissions. Now that I think is a very constructive way and a way in which, even under our proposed voluntary carbon trading scheme, agriculture would be able to make a significant contribution towards achieving this five per cent target that we’ve set, or agreed to support, without pain being inflicted on Australian industry. So if there is an emissions trading scheme that’s adopted globally, that in fact represents an effort by the planet to address climate change issues, then it doesn’t favour one country over another, and that is our chief objection to the Australian scheme. QUESTION: How much chance do you give of getting that agreement, zero? WARREN TRUSS: Well there is a meeting in Copenhagen. That’s a critical meeting. It’s the globe’s first chance to actually put together a constructive international scheme and I think, frankly, the world deserves a right to be given that opportunity, and we’ll look at what the outcome is on the basis of the willingness of countries around the world to take on the appropriate measures. If you look again, if I may just take up briefly Malcolm Turnbull’s point about the US legislation, it caters for arrangements where the rest of the world may move at a slower pace, where some countries may move at a slower pace than others by ensuring that trade-exposed industries have their involvement in the scheme time to essentially coordinate international activity. The problem with the Rudd scheme is he’s determined to be out in places where no one else wants to be and the cost to Australian jobs and Australian industry will be catastrophic and the Nationals will never support that kind of scheme. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Can I just add something to what Warren’s just said. Look, I’ve represented Australia at climate change negotiations and I well understand people being sceptical about the likelihood of reaching global agreements, but I have to say to you there has been a remarkable lift in momentum. The legislation that is now before the US Congress has very broad support. Talking to our friends in Washington, they are very confident it will be passed this year and if it’s not actually finally signed into law by President Obama before Copenhagen we will know exactly what it says. Now, if you go back even a year, a lot of people would have been very sceptical that the Congress would get that far. So President Obama has enormous political capital. He’s very committed to this. I think we’re going to see legislation in the United States which will be the benchmark and which obviously would be huge input into the finalisation of any arrangements we have here, and that momentum I think will carry through to Copenhagen. So having, you know, been somewhat sceptical about the likelihood of a great result in Copenhagen in the past I think there is a degree of momentum now which may result in an effective agreement there. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull you and Mr Truss seem to be talking across purposes, you’re talking about the Obama Administration and Mr Truss is talking about an international agreement which may be well-off into the never never. The fact is there’s still a great scepticism from the Nationals about any agreement unless it’s international, as if the rest of the world has to do it before Australia is dragged into this process. Going back to Phil’s question Mr Truss, if the Rudd Government did a carbon copy of the US Administration’s proposal, would you support it? WARREN TRUSS: Well we need to see the legislation in detail. The US legislation is being used as an example of a scheme that is less industry damaging than what’s being proposed in Australia. I don’t believe we’re at cross purposes at all. We’re both talking about both the US legislation and an international agreement – and the US legislation does accommodate the fact that some countries will come on board at a later stage than others by the various industry by industry triggers that are associated with the draft. Now, as others have commented, the US legislation is only at a draft stage at this point. It’s got to go through the processes on the Hill and we all know that they can be convoluted – and so I wouldn’t want to pass a judgement on the US legislation as it stands at the present time. But I would say to you that it is one model that is worthy of consideration, as is the Canadian model, that attracts quite a lot of interest, and indeed some of the other ideas that countries are examining around the world and Copenhagen has a key role to look at, not just delivering a level of commitment from around the world, but the form in which some kind of acceptable international trading mechanism might work. QUESTION: Business and industry groups have been running this line about a needing investment certainly and I assume they’ll probably run it today in response to what you’ve announced, are those claims overblown, can they wait til next year? MALCOLM TURNBULL: They certainly can. Passing the legislation next month is not going to give industry certainty, in fact asking someone whether they are in favour of Rudd’s ETS today is a difficult question for anybody to answer because the ETS is changing every day. Greg Combet is in intense negations with the coal industry, which is most dramatically affected by this very badly designed emissions trading scheme, and I’ve got no doubt they’ll come up with some changes there too. So the Labor Government keeps on moving the furniture. You’ve got to remember that they’re moving these parts around all the time. They haven’t decided what their scheme is finally going to look like. Industry is still very anxious about it. This is the absurdity we would get into if we were to pass this scheme this year; pass this scheme this year, the Americans finalise their law, we have an agreement of some kind at Copenhagen, we would have to come back in February next year and amend our legislation in light of what the Americans have done, because I don’t think there is anybody in business or anywhere that would accept for one instant the idea that Australian jobs would have less protection under an Australian emissions trading scheme than American jobs have under an American emissions trading scheme. And yet that is exactly where we are at the moment. And, you know, I just have to say that America is the largest economy, the largest emitter, its arrangements are going to be the benchmark – and you know Kevin Rudd is very vain, he’s very concerned about taking his own design to Copenhagen. We don’t want to get into a sort of Betamax/VHS debate here, you know where Kevin Rudd says I’ve got the best scheme and the rest of the world say, ‘yeah that’s very interesting Kevin, it’s very interesting but we’re not interested in adopting it because it’s from our point of view not practical’. I mean the reality is the American model, we know, because there is a global arrangement and many of these big industries that are affected are multinationals anyway, the American model will be by far the most influential. That will be the most influential benchmark. So, as I say to you, as somebody that is genuinely committed to reducing Australia’s CO2 emissions and playing an effective role in a global agreement to cut global emissions, I say to you if I was the Prime Minister today I would not be finalising this legislation this year, I would do it early next year after we know what the American laws look like, they’ll be concluded by then, and what has been agreed at Copenhagen. But turning to Copenhagen, and again I can draw on my own experience in representing our country at meetings of this kind, the real issue at Copenhagen is going to be, what targets nations are prepared to commit to, because how you get there is a secondary issue. You know the Danish Environment Minister was out here recently and she met with my colleagues, Andrew Robb and Greg Hunt, and she made that point to them – the design of our scheme was a secondary issue, her concern was what are the targets going to be? Now we are offering Kevin Rudd bipartisan support for the targets he wishes to take to Copenhagen, an unconditional five per cent and conditionally up to 25 per cent. That is a very significant commitment. It’s a measure of our sincerity, a measure of our bipartisan commitment to an effective response to climate change. But what we will not sign up to this year is a poorly designed, job destroying scheme that is literally going to put thousands and thousands of Australian jobs, sacrifice them on the altar of the Prime Minister’s vanity. It’s more important to get the scheme right. This is a Government that hasn’t got a lot of things right lately. You know, in a different area look at this bungle with the employee share scheme. Nobody has any idea what the Government’s policy is going to be, a colossal shambles. Now there’s an opportunity to get this emissions trading scheme right and that requires a deferral into early next year. QUESTION: What do you make of Sol Trujillo’s characterisation effectively of Australians and, in particular, Kevin Rudd, as racists, do you agree with it? MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, I don’t. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull, a year ago you and Greg Hunt were very strong that Australian’s shouldn’t wait for the world before starting an emissions trading scheme. Do you still take that [inaudible]? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, Michelle, I have always taken the view, as has Greg, that we should not finalise the design of our scheme until after Copenhagen. I’ve always said that. I’ve never said anything other than that and that is fundamental. And that was why we objected to Mr Rudd bringing forward the commencement date and bringing forward, of necessity, the legislation. QUESTION: Do you still think we should wait for the world before we start operating the scheme? MALCOLM TURNBULL: We should certainly move to reduce emissions, but it’s the design of the scheme that is critical. I mean, not every country in the world is going to sign up to the same emissions trading scheme. What we are going to see, I believe, is the largest economy in the world, the United States, with an emissions trading scheme. We have a scheme operating in Europe. We will see, I believe, schemes of one kind or another in all of the major developed countries and then commitments from developing countries such as China and India and others that move towards reducing their emissions. QUESTION: So you won’t find another excuse later when the Nationals continue to put on pressure for the deferral of killing of the scheme. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, Michelle, there is nothing that I have said today, there is nothing in the recommendation we took to the Party Room today, which has been overwhelmingly endorsed by the Party Room, that is different to what we have been saying for the best part of 18 months. You know, the critical thing here is getting it right. You see, part of the problem we face here is that a number of you, with great respect, pose the question, ‘are you favour of an ETS or not?’ That is like saying, ‘are you in favour of tax?’ Well, because the real question is: what tax, what design, what level of tax, who pays it, where does the money go? The same is true of an emissions trading scheme. An emissions trading scheme is simply a market-based mechanism to impose a price on carbon. That’s all it is. But how it’s designed, the difference between one design and another, makes all the difference. And the critical issue is the treatment of what they call emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries because obviously if you put a heavy carbon price on the steel industry in Australia and the countries with which it competes doesn’t have it, you run the risk that you end up exporting both the jobs and the emissions and that’s the key problem. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull, if your problem is the design of the trade-exposed compensation, why not negotiate with the Government over that right now to see if you can get 100 per cent compensation for most trade exposed industries and pass the scheme? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Lenore they have no interest in negotiating with us. I mean I’ve invited, I’ve offered to sit down with Mr Rudd to discuss it. This issue is apparently not important enough to warrant the great man taking any time to discuss it with me so, you know, they’re not interested in negotiating and you know that as well as I do. But, Lenore, the fact of the matter is we are six months away from knowing exactly what the US legislation will be and knowing what will be decided at Copenhagen, and common sense says you should wait `til then. QUESTION: [inaudible] having a scheme up and running. How far, what’s your best estimate for when Australia would have an emissions trading scheme? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I think in terms of the legislation… QUESTION: [inaudible] MALCOLM TURNBULL: In terms of the legislation, the legislation could be finalised in whatever form is agreed on, and that will depend a lot on what happens at Copenhagen, in the first part of next year, and that of course gives you plenty of time. You’ve got to remember, Mr Rudd’s scheme is really only going to start, he’s only proposing to start it in 2012. In 2011, it’s just a tax. QUESTION: Are you serious in your claim that this whole thing for Kevin Rudd is about his vanity? Isn’t it just the fact that you don’t agree with him? MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, no, Matt, I’m quite serious about this. Look, common sense, prudence, practicality, a concern for jobs and getting it right would mean that you would not finalise the design of an Australian scheme until you knew what the American legislation was and what had happened at Copenhagen because they are vital input, vital factors to bear in mind. Right. Everyone agrees with that. So why are we rushing to finalise a scheme in advance of Copenhagen? The only reason is because of Mr Rudd’s vanity. He wants to go to Copenhagen and say, ‘aha, I have this scheme passed through the Parliament’, and they will say, ‘so what’ or ‘big deal’ or something perhaps even less polite. QUESTION: Mr Truss, can you guarantee that under any emissions trading scheme that you will get Ron Boswell or Barnaby Joyce to vote for it? WARREN TRUSS: Ron Boswell and Barnaby Joyce and most other Nationals, including myself, have said that we will not support Kevin Rudd’s proposed scheme. Now, well you’ve got to tell us what’s in the scheme before you can really ask us to say whether or not we’ll vote for it or whether we’ll vote against it. We will not vote for anything that looks like, smells like, barks like Kevin Rudd’s CPRS scheme, but we are anxious to play our part in ensuring that Australia even plays a leadership role in developing an appropriate response to climate issues around the country. And some of the proposals we’ve put on the agenda today, such as the voluntary carbon market, I think demonstrate a very constructive approach which will actually deliver results without incurring unnecessary pain on Australian industries. QUESTION: [inaudible] MALCOLM TURNBULL: One at a time. Dennis. You’ve got a very nice green shirt on too. QUESTION: Just to get one thing clear, as of today all Nationals MPs and senators support not just an unconditional five per cent target but also conditional targets of up to 25 per cent. Is that the position? WARREN TRUSS: The five per cent target is one that we believe can be achieved through individual initiatives in Australia and that that can be achieved without impact adversely on the Australian industry. There are conditions attached to the Government’s 25 per cent target which includes the engagement of the rest of the world. Now those sorts of conditions fulfil the concerns that I expressed earlier about Australia moving in a direction that the rest of the world wasn’t moving. You know, it is ridiculous for instance for a tourist who travels from Canberra to holiday in Cairns would pay an emissions tax under Kevin Rudd’s trading scheme, but if they go to Bali or Vanuatu they don’t. This is the kind of international distortions that are rife right across the CPRS scheme and so that’s the kind of thing we want to see eliminated. If there is a genuine global response with common rules around the world, well then we’ll want to be a part of that. QUESTION: Without putting up a framework, I mean, you say you don’t accept the Rudd CPRS scheme at all, but you do accept the aspirational idea of a 25 per cent cut if the conditions are met, but we don’t know what those conditions are. MALCOLM TURNBULL: They’re the ones that Kevin Rudd set out actually and they’re attached to a press release of his dated the 4th of May. And I won’t read them out here but it does involve a comprehensive, a comprehensive global action capable of stabilizing etc… QUESTION: [inaudible] you do support that [inaudible] MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, we do and that’s… QUESTION: But don’t support the whole scheme. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look, let me – this is going to be the longest press conference in the history of the Parliament at this rate, but let me just get back to tors. The critical thing is what is your target to reduce your emissions, okay. Then having set that, how do you get there. An emissions trading scheme is one tool in the climate change policy toolbox, as I’ve said many times. And it can be well designed, it can be a very effective tool too, but it’s just one tool. So the question is what are your targets – that’s what they want to hear at Copenhagen – then how do we get there. Now, for all practical purposes you have to put a price on carbon, one way or another, and there are different ways of doing that. The most influential scheme in the world will undoubtedly be that in the world’s biggest economy, the United States, and how that is set up is going to be a critical influence for us. The Canadians, as I’ve said, are doing exactly what we are recommending Mr Rudd should do. They are deferring the finalisation of their legislation until they see what emerges out of Washington because naturally they deal with the United States a great deal, more than we do of course because they’re neighbours. But America is a big trading partner of ours. And of course the way in which American industries are protected in terms of the competitive issues, the carbon leakage issues, is going to be very influential every where in the developed world. So, again, Mr Rudd likes to dumb everything down. Every issue he tries to dumb it down, you know, you either agree with me or you agree with nothing. This is his sort of line. It’s not a question of ETS, yes or no. We have a particular proposal on the table from Mr Rudd which we have never supported. I have never supported his proposal. I’ve been critical of it from the time he tabled it and I’ve always been critical of the timing and of the way it treats these trade-exposed industries. We’ve got the opportunity now to get it right and we’ve got the opportunity to have a scheme agreed next year which will be in step with what other developed countries are doing and in step with a global agreement. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull, climate change sceptic and nuclear energy enthusiast, Dennis Jensen, is the only one of the 11 WA MPs to be challenged for his seat. If he loses preselection this time around, as he did in 2006, will you do what John Howard did and protect him? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well preselections in the Liberal Party are dealt with by the appropriate preselection body which I imagine in Western Australia is largely composed of the local branch members. I’m not an expert on West Australian preselections and the decision is for them. Okay. Thanks very much. [ends]  malcolmWed, 27 May 2009 06:04:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:490http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/488/Climate-Change-Getting-in-step-with-the-world.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=488http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=488&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/488/Climate-Change-Getting-in-step-with-the-world.aspxThe Coalition will offer bipartisan support to the Government for the carbon abatement targets Australia takes to the Copenhagen climate change conference in December. This means the Government can go to the conference with a united Australian position in seeking a global commitment to addressing climate change. That united position is for an unconditional reduction in emissions of five per cent from 2000 levels by 2020, and a reduction of up to 25 per cent in the event of a comprehensive global agreement. In light of the fact that the Copenhagen conference is only six months away, and the Obama Administration and US Congress are well advanced in finalising US legislation for an ETS, the Coalition believes that it would be premature to lock Australia into an Emissions Trading Scheme that is out of step with the rest of the world. The Coalition therefore will move in the Parliament to defer a final vote on the Government's proposed ETS until after the Copenhagen meeting. In order to enable immediate action on climate change, the Coalition proposes the establishment of a Government-authorised voluntary carbon market from 1 January, 2010 based on the Chicago Climate Exchange. This would enable the immediate involvement of individuals and communities, agriculture and bio-sequestration, the commercial building sector, energy efficiencies by business, and other complementary measures in creating bankable offsets. These voluntary measures will enable immediate action on achieving Australia's 2020 targets and will create an opportunity for individuals, communities and firms to help Australia deliver larger abatement than the Government targets once a full scheme is in place. The Government has already chosen to delay the effective start date of its own ETS to 2012. This is an appropriate acknowledgement of the current economic climate, and offers Australia a window to get our scheme right and ensure it does not export jobs, investment or emissions. In particular, it is clear that the emerging Obama plan will offer 100 per cent protection for US export and import-competing industries until 2025. The Government's current plan would therefore leave many of Australia's most successful industries (and largest employers and taxpayers) at a crippling competitive disadvantage. It is critical for Australia's treatment of these industries to align with the treatment received by their competitors. The deferral in start date also offers an opportunity for the Government to allow the Productivity Commission to assess the efficacy of its proposed scheme, and its impact on jobs, regions and agriculture if competing economies adopt comparable measures many years later than expected. The Coalition will augment its support for emissions reduction targets with a significant renewable energy support package in the near future. The Coalition's overall approach will allow Australia to take a unified commitment to emissions reduction to Copenhagen. It also enables an earlier start to emissions abatement and the potential to build on 2020 targets, via voluntary action. In the meantime it allows Australia to get its ETS right – saving tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investment by ensuring our scheme is in step with the rest of the world.malcolmTue, 26 May 2009 02:35:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:488http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/486/Red-Shield-Appeal.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=486http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=486&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/486/Red-Shield-Appeal.aspxMalcolm and Lucy joined hundreds of locals in the Randwick area for the Salvation Army’s Red Shield Appeal which aims to raise $73 million across Australia this year. Malcolm would like to thank all those who donated their time to help collect money, and all those who donated generously. Money raised during the Red Shield Appeal goes towards vital social and community services. “The Salvation Army needs our support to continue to open doors of opportunity to some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in our community” said Malcolm. Malcolm thanked Salvation Army Captains Donna Evans and Karen Flemming for their help in organising a very successful collection over the weekend. Malcolm also thanked Randwick Mayor Cr. Bruce Notley-Smith and Randwick Councillor, Cr. Kiel Smith for allowing collectors to use Randwick Council Chambers as a staging point for this year’s collection. For more information about the Red Shield Appeal or to donate please visit www.salvos.org.au/red-shield-appeal  malcolmMon, 25 May 2009 04:20:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:486http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/485/Address-to-the-Liberal-Party-Victorian-Division.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=485http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=485&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/485/Address-to-the-Liberal-Party-Victorian-Division.aspxE & O E Well, thank you very much Greg, thank you very much. Lucy and I are thrilled to be here in Melbourne in the heartland of the Liberal Party here with the Victorian Division. And there is nowhere in Australia that knows better the ravages of imprudent reckless Labor government. After all it was your Party, your Division of the Liberal Party that with Jeff Kennett and Alan Stockdale had to rebuild this state and how magnificently it was rebuilt after the reckless spending, the borrowing and the waste of the Cain and Kirner years in government here. Now we are facing a similar challenge. We are facing a similar challenge in Canberra and of course it is a challenge we’ve faced in Canberra before because just as Kennett and Stockdale rebuilt Victoria after the waste and recklessness of Labor governments here, so John Howard and Peter Costello put our public finances at the national level back into order after the reckless spending and debt of the Keating era in Canberra. And all right through that, there has been a single thread that links Liberals at the state level and the federal level, it is a commitment to prudence, a commitment to thrift, a recognition as Greg says that we must not spend more than what we have and a reminder of the great wisdom of my opponent I suppose in the Spycatcher trial Margaret Thatcher who said very wisely, she said the problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other peoples money. Now it’s a double pleasure to be here today and to see so many of you here assembled. I want to say how much I and Lucy and the whole Liberal Party around Australia admires what David Kemp, you have done with your colleagues in putting together these magnificent reforms here in Victoria to [applause]. You have truly revitalised, all of you working together, have revitalised a great political movement and demonstrated that among the many fundamental differences between us and Labor, in the forefront is the fact that we are a democratic, grassroots political party and so that’s why although we have such a wide range of people here, we have my distinguished colleagues from the Federal Parliament and Ted and his distinguished colleagues from the State Parliament, the fact is we are a grassroots political party. All of us have a say. All of us have a vote and seeing that recognised here today with more than a thousand Liberals in the room makes me so proud to be the Leader of your Federal Party. Now, for the last week, together with my colleagues, I’ve been travelling around Australia talking about the Budget and talking about the shocking state of affairs in which Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan have left us. It seems incredible that a country could go in 18 months from having no debt at all, all paid off thanks to the hard work, the discipline of John Howard and Peter Costello and all their colleagues many of whom are here today of course, all of that hard work had left us with cash in the bank, no debt, no debt at all, cash in the bank, $45 billion cash in the bank. And now that is all gone and within a few years we will have well over $200 billion of net debt and in terms of the gross debt figure, well, 350, 380, 400 who knows where it will be. It could be a gigantic figure. It undoubtedly is already a gigantic figure and it will get bigger. And of course, it’s been a matter of great embarrassment to the Government. Who among us would have imagined that we would have ever seen a Treasurer give a Budget speech and not actually mention the result. A detail one would not normally overlook. The largest deficit in Australia’s history. He failed to mention it. He wouldn’t even mention the amount of the debt either. So ashamed were they that on that night when millions of Australians were looking to this Government for leadership, looking to this Government for financial, economic, political leadership through difficult times, they saw a Treasurer who was so ashamed and so afraid he was not prepared to say what the bottom line was. But of course it got worse. Throughout this week, we’ve been amused, bemused perhaps, to see Kevin Rudd popping up every night with his hard hat on. Like many of you, I’ve been uncertain whether he is trying to impersonate Bob the Builder or audition for a part in the Village People. He’s certainly not staying at the YMCA. And if he was serious about being a macho man, I think he would have the courage to actually say how much debt he’s running this country into. The interview that he gave on Monday night was one of the most excruciating performances I’ve ever seen from a public figure in Australia. How could a Prime Minister refuse to say not just then but every day thereafter, all week, till finally he relented towards the end of this week, how could he seriously expect us to take him seriously as a leader if he is not prepared to say frankly and bluntly in plain English the amount of debt he’s running Australia into. What a performance it was. Finally the relentless cross-examiner would get him to say a number. He’d say, well the number is 300. What, an anxious Australia wondered …. was it 300 cutlets? Parsnips? Hairdryers? What could it be? $300 billion and that’s just the beginning. Because I’d say this to you my friends. Consider this, it took us ten years to pay off $96 billion of Labor debt and we had assets to sell, we had Telstra to sell. We had a strong mining boom. We had the longest sustained period of growth in our nation’s history. We paid that debt off. How long will it take us to pay off $300 billion of Labor debt? It won’t be paid off in ten years. It won’t be paid off in 20 years in all probability. This is the work of generations. In 18 months, Kevin Rudd has set our nation on a course of such stupendous debt that our children and our children after us will be paying higher taxes and higher interest rates for years to come. He talks about a peak debt, or he did before he decided he couldn’t utter the words, talked about a peak debt of $188 billion. Well, of course, that’s only the number at the end of the forward estimates. It’ll get a lot higher than that because they’re going to run deficits well past the end of the forward estimates. And their assumption that they will return to surplus is based on having after 2013 six years of growth at 4 ½ per cent per annum. Now, we all hope that’s right. We all, we really do hope that that is right. But I just say to you, what can you say about the prudence of a Government that forecasts such an unprecedented period of economic growth at those levels that is at such a high rate of growth. Over the last 30 years, we’ve had only five years of growth at 4 ½ per cent or higher. So what we have is a Government that has recklessly spent in a way that has no precedent in our history, imposed a stupendous level of debt on a nation that 18 months ago was completely free of debt and now is so ashamed that it is not prepared to say exactly what it has done. They’re not prepared to own up to the facts of what they’ve done. And how can we have confidence in their being able to set this country to rights, to repay that debt when they’re not prepared to say what it is. And they’ve said much in the way of a shopaholic resolving on New Years Eve to stop hitting the credit card in the New Year. It’s like Paris Hilton saying she’s not going to go shopping for a year. Kevin Rudd has said, don’t worry, I know I’ve been a reckless spender but going forward I’m going to limit spending growth to two per cent in real terms. Now you judge people not by their New Year’s resolutions but by what they’ve actually done and his track record is one of unrelenting recklessness. Who would have imagined, who would have imagined just think of this I hold a marginal seat, the seat of Wentworth in Sydney and there are many marginal seat holders here and we know what it’s like and it’s very anxious as you lead up to election day and you’re going out knocking on doors, talking to people on the street and you’re saying to them, you’ve got to vote for me. You’ve got to vote for us. You can’t let the Labor Party get in; they’re a big risk. Imagine if I had come to you in the lead up to the last election and said to you, you must vote for me. We have to be returned because if Labor gets in they will borrow $23 billion and give it away. You would have said: “Malcolm, it’s stressful, it’s hot, relax, yes, I’m going to vote for you”. You’d say that, just to make me feel better and you’d think, gosh, he’s really, he’s really taking this hard. And yet that is exactly what they’ve done. Consider this, Mr Rudd talks about infrastructure a lot, this is part of the hard hat routine, talks about infrastructure a lot. By far the biggest infrastructure commitment, and it is two thirds of all of the infrastructure projects mentioned in the Budget papers, is his $43 billion broadband network. Now, he announced that after his tender failed completely and he was left with no broadband policy at all. He’d of course discarded our very effective approach, put up his own tender, he’d failed and so he had to come up with a headline quickly. So he said he would build a $43 billion broadband network. He said it would be commercially viable and he went on to television and he said to the mums and dads of Australia, his words not mine, he said the mums and dads of Australia should invest in this, it will be a great investment. He had no business plan, certainly no prospectus. He had no financial analysis. The next day his Treasurer was asked, how many people will take this service up do you think. “Oh, we have no idea”, said Mr Swan. Fair enough, that’s just one assumption I suppose. So the journalist said, “well what about the price, what do you think people will pay for it?” “Oh, we don’t know that either”. Now, any business person who did that, what he did with respect to a project, a private sector project would be facing the most awkward, expensive questioning and possibly worse from ASIC. This is the level of the recklessness with which we are confronted and it underlines why we must be disciplined, committed and relentless in our efforts to ensure that this is a one term Government. We cannot afford a second term of Kevin Rudd. Now, we recognise as Liberals that the prosperity of this country is not created by governments. Government, the role of government in our conception, in our Liberal conception of politics, is to enable each and every one of us to do our best, to enable us to do our best. Kevin Rudd has said that he wants the Government to be at the centre of the economy. He believes government should tell us what is best. That is the big philosophical difference between us. We believe government enables us, should enable us to do our best. And above all, it should enable small business to do its best. The most flexible, the most dynamic, the most enterprising, the most resilient part of our economy are the thousands, the millions of small businesses around Australia. They are the ones that are most prepared to take risks, that are most prepared to step up and have a go. Now we are a party who in its very core and its very DNA understands that spirit of enterprise. We understand what motivates the small businessmen and women around Australia. Lucy and I, as you would have seen from the video, that has been our life together. We’ve started many businesses. Some of them have been successful, some of them have not been successful but we’ve always been prepared to get up and have another go. Now that spirit of enterprise is something the Labor Party hates. They hate it bitterly. Think of this, over the next four years the Commonwealth Government will receive around $1200 billion in revenues, a staggering amount of money. Kevin Rudd has said that he feels obliged to break his solemn, much-given, frequently given election pledge not to change the private health insurance rebate. He says he’s got to do that in order to meet the budgetary challenges of declining revenues. That broken promise will generate $1.9 billion over four years, less than two one thousandths of Commonwealth revenues over that period. So you can see that is a decision that has got nothing to do with economics. It’s got everything to do with politics. It is an assault on choice. It’s an assault on the private health system because it’s private, because it offers people choice. And of course it will have the consequence of putting more pressure on the public health system. So we said last week, we will hold you to your promise. We will hold you to your promise but we will offer you a choice. As I said, a tough choice for a weak Prime Minister. If you want to raise a couple of billion dollars over the next four years, why don’t you just put up the tax, the excise on cigarettes instead. He won’t make that choice. Its not about the money, it’s not about health. He won’t choose health. He won’t choose health over an attack on health because what he’s really attacking is private, the private enterprise and choice and freedom. And as another example of the very bitter ideological approach of this Government consider what they’re doing with employee share schemes. Every employee share scheme in Australia is being shut down today. Right around the country, thousands of schemes are being shut down. Employees that should have the opportunity and that we believe as Liberals should be encouraged to own a piece of the company for which they’re working so that their interests are aligned with that of their employer and that of the other shareholders. Those schemes are being shut down because of this extraordinary attack on employee share schemes, an attack that has become so confused that now nobody really knows what the Government’s objective is or what they are going to do but what else can company managers do other than shut down those schemes. Again, how much money will it raise? A very small amount of money in the scheme of the Budget. But what it is designed to do is to attack that spirit of enterprise for which we stand. So last week, we presented a number of policies, a number of alternatives which demonstrated the difference between us and Labor. We talked about, on Thursday night, I talked about our small business forums, how we’d gone around Australia to nearly 50 forums in every state and territory talking to small business, getting ideas back from them. I talked about how so many small businesses had said we just want government to get off our back, let us get on and do our job and so we will bring all of the benefits of technology to enable us to reduce red tape and regulation, to enable us to have a one-stop online shop for small businesses so that they can go through all of the regulatory requirements and approvals easily and quickly and inexpensively. We’ll do all of that and a lot more. And we offered one suggestion which came out of our consultation, which I believe is a good example of the practical way we Liberals approach small business and recognise it because what is a small business challenge at the moment? It’s cash flow. Things are a bit tough, revenues are down, costs still where they are, cash flows tight. So we said why not allow small business, why not allow businesses but this would be particularly applicable to small ones, to carry back their losses, carry them back. At the moment if you have a business that loses $50,000, you can take that loss forward and offset against your profit in a future year and so reduce your tax liability. Why shouldn’t you be able to carry that back, set it off against the $50,000 profit you made last year and recover the $15,000 in tax your business paid. Many other countries have that practice. It’s very feasible, has a very modest cost to the Budget because of course the tax loss carried back cannot be carried forward so it’s really only a timing issue. That is an example of the way we are approaching the Plan for Recovery because we recognise that our Plan for Recovery, our recovery must be founded on supporting small business, must be founded on growing the total pie of the economy so that all Australians benefit and as they do, of course, government revenues will improve. We’re also committed, and this is again a great Liberal tradition, we’re committed to integrity in Government and integrity in particular in Government finances. Now when Peter Costello became Treasurer he set up a Charter for Budget Honesty, he gave the Reserve Bank independence and undertook a number of other reforms that improved the integrity of the financial management of Australia. We will take that a further step when we are elected to Government at the next election. We will set up a Commission to audit the sustainable finances of Australia and our spending so that we can in a rigorous way put our spending back onto a sustainable basis, from the recklessness we’ve had from Labor and we will establish for the first time in Australia an independent Parliamentary Budget Office, modelled on the Congressional Budget Office in the United States, that will provide an independent assessment of the merits, the economic consequences of government policies and legislation. I’ve got no doubt that when we are returned to government, when I’m the Prime Minister and Joe Hockey is the Treasurer, we will say to each other, that Parliamentary Budget Office, their criticism’s a bit tough today, they’re being a bit harsh on us but it’ll be good for us because what governments need is to be held to account. They need to know that their assumptions, their forecasts can be challenged and challenged in an independent and rigorous way. And that’s what we’ll do, and it’ll be part of a great tradition because just as socialists always run out of other people’s money, so people, conservatives, Liberals like ourselves, we recognise that governments are always dealing with other people’s money and we have to protect it and preserve it, incur no more debt than necessary and above all recognise that the prosperity of Australia comes from men and women like yourselves and that our job as a party of freedom, as a party of enterprise is to enable you to do your best. That is what we will do when we return to government and we will come back to government I know with the commitment, the unrelenting support and passion of every division of the Liberal Party in Australia but no less than the division I’m addressing today, the Victorian Division. I applaud you, I commend you for your work and I look forward to working with you to a return to government as soon as possible. Thank you very much. [ends]  malcolmSun, 24 May 2009 22:18:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:485http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/481/Doorstop-Interview-in-Adelaide.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=481http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=481&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/481/Doorstop-Interview-in-Adelaide.aspxSubjects: Visit to Adelaide; Coalition’s Plan for Recovery; reimbursement of MPs and Senators; Labor’s mountain of debt and deficit; Budget. E & O E MALCOLM TURNBULL: It’s great to be here with Christopher this morning, talking to small business people. As you know, our focus, our National Plan for Recovery is focused on small business and we’ve proposed a number of measures, a number of new policy initiatives which will really support small business, provide them with much needed cash flow in these tough times because this is, small business is the engine room of the economy. It’s the most dynamic and flexible part of the economy and that’s why it is right at the centre of our National Plan for Recovery. Now while we’ve been doing that here in South Australia for the last few days, talking to small business, Mr Rudd is still struggling to get his numbers straight. Yesterday he wasn’t able to say what the level of debt was. He couldn’t bring himself to say that the maximum level of borrowings was $300 billion. All he could say is ‘the number is 300’. 300 what? Nobody knew. He was hoping nobody would know anyway. The gentleman we were talking to earlier today, Christopher and I were talking to here, knew exactly what was happening to the country and he was begging us to get back into office as quickly as possible to stop the reckless spending. Now this morning we hear that on radio he’s managed to say 300 billion, but he still can’t get the word ‘dollars’ out of his mouth. Now when you’ve got a problem, when you’ve created a problem, the most important thing to do is to recognise it first. You’ve got to admit you’ve got a problem. Mr Rudd seems to have a difficulty actually coming to terms with the mountain of debt that he has created and that he has put onto the shoulders of Australians today and our children and grandchildren in the years ahead. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull, you’ve been identified as one of the 43 politicians with the, for want of a better term, Canberra residence. Do you think it’s fair that the Australian taxpayer should be funding these investments? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well we have a very transparent system of reimbursing MPs and Senators for the cost of travelling to Canberra and it’s set by an independent tribunal. It’s the same amount paid to every MP and Senator. It’s very transparent and it’s independently established. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull, is it really credible to say that the Coalition wouldn’t also have a massive debt if it was in power now given the global financial situation? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well we have a proven track record of paying off debt. We have a proven track record of fiscal and economic prudence in government. Now in opposition, we stood up and voted against Mr Rudd’s $42 billion stimulus. We voted against the $14 billion cash splash, so it’s quite plain that if we were in government, there would be a lot less debt and there would be a smaller deficit and when we return to government, our commitment is to restore integrity to the way in which Canberra’s finances, the nation’s finances are managed. And that’s why we’ll establish on the day we’re elected a commission, an independent commission, to look at the financial sustainability of all of the Government’s spending so that we can get our public finances back on track. Mr Rudd has been out of control. He’s been like Paris Hilton on a shopping spree – reckless spending piling up an enormous mountain of debt. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull, were you aware of that loophole that effectively means that taxpayers I guess pay your mortgage in Canberra? MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, the fact of the matter is every MP and Senator gets the same amount per day or per night they spend in Canberra and they are paid that allowance regardless of where they stay, whether they own a place or whether they stay in a hotel or wherever they stay, they get exactly the same allowance. So it’s very equitable, it’s very transparent and it’s set by an independent tribunal. QUESTION: Would you say it was a good business move for you? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look, the system for travel allowances in Canberra has been established for a very long time and, as I said, it is transparent and it’s set by an independent tribunal. The reality is that you have to reimburse MPs and Senators for the cost of travelling and staying in Canberra otherwise many MPs and Senators wouldn’t be able to afford to attend Parliament. It would defeat the whole purpose of electing somebody to Parliament. QUESTION: Mr Turnbull what are your thoughts on the decision to freeze politicians’ pay for at least three months? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well again, that is set by an independent tribunal. You will have seen there are some big political scandals in the United Kingdom about MPs’ allowances and expenses. Here in Australia we have a much better system. Our pay and our allowances are set by an independent remuneration tribunal and we all abide by and accept the judgments of that tribunal. And that’s how it should be. You shouldn’t have MPs setting their own pay. QUESTION: Would you be expecting to be lobbied by some of your backbenchers, trying to somehow overturn this decision? MALCOLM TURNBULL: That’s the whole point. It’s set by an independent tribunal. The Remuneration Tribunal makes its decisions and it’s completely transparent, it’s public and it’s thoroughly independent and that’s exactly how it should be. I think we’ve got a good system in Australia. QUESTION: In this current economic climate, do you think it’s a fair decision by the Tribunal? MALCOLM TURNBULL: It’s a decision by the Tribunal. If the Tribunal makes that decision, then we abide by it. It’s a fair decision. They’re entitled to make that decision. I’m not going to criticise or comment on the Remuneration Tribunal’s decisions other than to say that they’ve made their decision, they’ve made it independently, it’s transparent and that’s the way it should be. QUESTION: Do you think what Australian politicians are paid is fair for the work they do? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Again, it is not for me to comment on that. We have a system of remuneration for MPs and Senators that is set by an independent tribunal. You don’t want to have politicians setting their own pay. It’s set by an independent tribunal and it’s done so in a transparent fashion and that’s exactly how it should be. I don’t think you could design a better system for setting the remuneration. QUESTION: Does Ken Henry have your confidence given the attacks on the Budget growth estimates that Treasury has put out? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well no, the Treasury has our confidence but that doesn’t mean we agree with everything that the Treasury says. Just in terms of the growth forecast, we’ve got to bear this in mind – the Budget is not the Treasury’s Budget. It is the Government’s Budget, it’s the Treasurer’s Budget so – and Dr Henry made this point yesterday – the Treasury provides figures and estimates and forecasts to the Government and then the Government, the politicians that is, decide which ones they are going to put into the Budget. So the Treasury is expert, it’s very well respected, we have great confidence in their professional abilities but they are not independent of Government. They are part of the Government and everybody is entitled to form a view. You can take any economic issue you like, any economic forecast you like and you will find there is a range of opinion and everybody respects everybody else’s opinion but that doesn’t mean they have to agree with it. QUESTION: Do you agree with Tony Abbott’s comment that he’s not an economic god? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I didn’t hear that, I didn’t hear that comment but the reality is Dr Henry is a very distinguished economist, he’s head of the Treasury, he’s entitled to his own opinions as is everybody else. The fact is, the simple fact is that the growth forecasts that the Rudd Government is relying on to pull Australia out of deficit are way above those of really any other independent forecasting body and they are well over twice the growth figures proposed or set out for Australia by the International Monetary Fund. So there’s a big difference between the figures that Mr Swan has put into the Budget and presumably have been contributed to by Treasury and, for example, the IMF. The Government cites the IMF all the time but on this occasion their figures are very, you know, very different, much higher levels of growth and so it’s not unreasonable that there is disagreement about it. My own view – and people can take different views on this – but my own view is that if you’re setting out growth figures in the Budget, you should be cautious and conservative about the growth figures. Now for the Government to say that from 2012 there will be six years of growth at 4 ½ per cent, a period of growth I think Dr Henry said for which there is no precedent since the 1960s, that is a… that is, as I’ve said, that’s a heroic assumption. It really is a heroic assumption. And I just can’t imagine anybody else in the economic business today looking forward, recognising that the IMF and many others say the recovery from the recession will be slow and measured, agreeing with it. Now I hope it’s right. I really do. I hope we do snap out of this downturn and that Dr Henry’s very optimistic forecast or Mr Swan’s very optimistic forecasts are proved to be correct. But you’d have to say, looking at it as a fairly hard-headed, conservative businessman, they are very, very optimistic and I’m not surprised that the IMF, for example, doesn’t agree with them at all. Okay. Thanks a lot. [ends]  malcolmWed, 20 May 2009 06:32:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:481http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/480/Cuts-to-the-Private-Health-Insurance-Rebate.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=480http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=480&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/480/Cuts-to-the-Private-Health-Insurance-Rebate.aspxKevin Rudd has not been honest with the Australian people. He promised again and again that he would not touch the private health insurance (PHI) rebate. That emphatic promise has been shattered in this year’s Budget. All Australians will now pay the price for the Rudd Government’s sustained attack on private health insurance. - Insured Australians who earn over $75,000 will pay more because of the cut to the PHI rebate, and if they drop out altogether they will still pay more due to an increased Medicare Levy Surcharge. - Insured Australians who earn under $75,000 will pay more because of increased premiums due to “younger and healthier” people dropping out. It is estimated that premiums could increase by 10% or even more a year compared to around 6 per cent per annum now. - Uninsured Australians will be waiting longer in the public hospital queue for essential treatment because of the influx of people into a public health system already under extreme pressure. Every Australian knows that the cost of health care is growing as are the waiting lists for public hospitals. This savage cut will drive up premiums and place unsustainable pressure on the public health system. The changes to the private health insurance rebate are just the latest phase in Labor’s unrelenting war against private health insurance - Labor hates private health insurance. The Coalition believes in the right of all Australians to take charge of their own health care needs and plan for the future - We have always worked hard to deliver incentives to promote the uptake of private health insurance and take the pressure off Medicare. We remain firmly committed to Medicare as the cornerstone of our health system. In fact, the Coalition is the best friend Medicare ever had. Over the term of the previous Coalition Government, Medicare funding increased by 48 per cent in real terms. We also lifted private health insurance levels from 34 per cent to 44 per cent. Australians deserve a strong and well balanced health system that supports Medicare but also encourages self-reliance. We have provided Mr Rudd with a credible alternative to cutting the PHI rebate that will not to drain essential resources from our health system – an increase to the excise on tobacco. Mr Rudd is now faced with a tough decision - take billions out of private health insurance or increase the excise on tobacco. Australians are now paying the price for the Rudd Government’s reckless spending.  malcolmTue, 19 May 2009 23:19:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:480http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/483/Doorstop-Interview-in-Adelaide.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=483http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=483&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/483/Doorstop-Interview-in-Adelaide.aspxSubjects: Labor’s mountain of debt and deficit; Kevin Rudd’s reckless spending; Labor’s bungling of employee share ownership schemes. E&OE………………………………………………………………………………… QUESTION: Mr Turnbull, has the new poll taken the gloss off our Prime Minister somewhat? MALCOLM TURNBULL: I’m focused on jobs. I’m focused on the massive deficit and debt Mr Rudd is running up and as far as polls are concerned, the only one counts is the one on election day. QUESTION: Are there any implications for you in the current poll, Malcolm? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well the only implication for Australia at the moment that I’m concerned about is the shocking level of unemployment that is forecast in the Budget, the shocking levels of debt and deficit. And I see today Ken Henry, the Secretary of the Treasury, has said that there have been some communication problems with the Budget. Well, there have been two very big communication problems, well at least two and they are that firstly the Treasurer couldn’t bring himself to say what the deficit was – he was so ashamed of it – and last night it took what seemed like hours for Kevin Rudd to finally `fess up to what the level of debt was. QUESTION: The International Monetary Fund is questioning this whole, the whole question of growth that’s been forecast by the Government. What do you say to their opinion? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well there’s no doubt the IMF’s forecasts are much more prudent. I don’t know anybody that believes the Government’s forecast that the economy will spring back into 4½ per cent per annum growth in 2012 and then continue for six years as being even vaguely realistic. It’s well over twice the forecast from the IMF. Look, it’s just difficult to see how that can be responsible. Now, I saw that the best the Governor of the Reserve Bank, being as tactful as he could, when asked about it, could say today was that the Government’s forecasts were ‘not crazily optimistic’. Well that is very, very faint praise indeed. In fact it really is… it indicates that he’s trying to distance himself from the Government’s forecasts. QUESTION: I understand you’ve called these growth figures heroic. Would you stand by that term sir? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, heroic is another way of saying ‘not crazily optimistic’. You know, look, the fact of the matter is this – Australians expect the Budget to be realistic. They expect it to be hard-headed and objective and to give a realistic assessment of the future. The idea that within a few years we are going to go back into a long boom, six years of boom that will make the previous mining boom look half-hearted, is completely unbelievable and it just underlines the desperate measures that the Government is undertaking to try to cover up for the, and make up, I suppose, for the extraordinary levels of debt they’ve run us into. QUESTION: Given your abhorrence of the levels of debt that we’re going into, will you be reviewing all capital commitments under the recent federal Budget? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well when we are returned to Government after the next election, we’ve said that we will establish a commission to look at the financial sustainability of the Budget and of all the spending measures. There has to be a very thorough review. There’s been far too much reckless spending by the Rudd Government and we are paying a very heavy price for it, Australians are paying a very heavy price for Kevin Rudd’s reckless spending so everything will have to be reviewed. There’s no question about that. QUESTION: Including all infrastructure projects, public transport, [inaudible] that we’re already embarking on as well? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, projects that are underway, of course, will have to be continued and completed. That goes without saying. QUESTION: What do you think Glenn Stevens actually means by using that turn of phrase ‘not crazily optimistic’? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well it is not much of an endorsement, is it. In fact, it’s not an endorsement at all. To say that something is, an opinion is ‘not crazily optimistic’ is really no endorsement at all. I think it’s pretty clear what he’s saying. QUESTION: Just in terms of the debt level, you said there was a $188 billion debt in the Treasury papers and the Prime Minister last night said $300 billion but that was incorrect. What level do you think it is at? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I can only tell you what’s in the Budget papers. The Budget papers show that in 2012 the net debt of the Commonwealth will be $188 billion which is just under 14 per cent of GDP. Mr Rudd said last night it would be $300 billion. Now he was either revealing that there was going to be a lot more debt than the Budget papers had said or he’d got his sums wrong. It’s hard to know. So you’ve got to ask Mr Rudd whether he made a mistake or whether he was telling us something new. What I can tell you is that – and this is just a fact – that there are a number of very big expenditure items referred to in the Budget which are not calculated, not included in the calculation of debt. Now the $43 billion broadband network is one of them, so you can add that on to the $188 billion. The $28 billion of borrowings for Rudd Bank are not included either, so you can add that on to the $188 billion. So the $188 billion that Mr Rudd has on other occasions referred to as peak debt, as I said, will only be a foothill at the base of the mighty summit of debt that Mr Rudd is building up. QUESTION: Do you think more people are taking you seriously? Now a lot of letters to the newspapers around the country are saying, I voted ALP and now I wish I hadn’t because of whatever reason, whatever leanings they might have. Do you think your message is now being taken more seriously by more people? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I think Australians are growing increasingly concerned about the level of debt. I mean all of us know that if you run up too much debt, you run into problems. You’ve got to pay it back with interest, and we know that if, as a nation, we run up vast levels of debt with reckless spending as Mr Rudd has done, that is going to mean higher taxes and higher interest rates for our children in the future. And Australians are very concerned about debt and deficit and the level of that concern can be seen by the fact that Mr Rudd had to be pushed and pushed and pushed last night to actually say what the level of debt was. He was determined not to say it, and on Budget night of course you had the first ever occasion of a Treasurer bringing down a Budget and not saying what the result was. It was the biggest deficit in our history. Kevin Rudd’s Treasurer, Wayne Swan, could not bring himself to say the figure. Now, if you’re not prepared to say it then you can’t be trusted to pay it back. And if you can’t count up the debt, then it’s no wonder that the Budget doesn’t add up. QUESTION: Will you block any changes to employee share ownership schemes as proposed by the Government? MALCOLM TURNBULL: The share ownership scheme proposal that the Government has put up is a complete shambles, an absolute shambles. It is shutting down every employee share ownership scheme in the country. Now this is a shocking assault on the opportunity for employees to have a stake in the companies for which they work. It is inconceivable that the Government actually intended to do this and if they did intend to do this, this is an incredible attack on the aspirations of millions of Australians who want to have a stake in the businesses which they’re working for and which they’re helping to drive and deliver wealth for. So I can only assume this is a massive bungle by Chris Bowen. Of course this is the same minister that brought us FuelWatch and GroceryWatch – so he’s got a track record of bungling things. And the Government must address it. It will certainly go through a very thorough inquiry in the Senate but I’m hopeful that the Government will sort this out. It says a lot about the lack of competence that they could come up with a change like this that is so misconceived and, if I may say so, the idea that you could save money for the Budget by shutting down all the employee share ownership schemes, if you do that of course there won’t be any share ownership schemes so there’ll be no savings at all over time because nobody will be making any money out of them. So it is just a mess, and Kevin Rudd and Chris Bowen and Wayne Swan have got a lot to answer for, but they’d better tidy it up because what’s happening at the moment is that companies are acting on the basis of what they’ve seen in the Budget papers and they’re shutting these schemes down. QUESTION: Just one question in relation to local level politics. Are you at all concerned about the prospect of defamation action hanging over the head of Martin Hamilton-Smith? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look, I can’t comment on that. Thanks a lot. [ends]  malcolmTue, 19 May 2009 06:36:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:483http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/482/Address-to-the-South-Australian-Liberal-Party-Budget-Response.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=482http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=482&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/482/Address-to-the-South-Australian-Liberal-Party-Budget-Response.aspxE & O E [Audio begins]…for the first time in history, possibly in world history, that a Treasurer has ever given a Budget speech and not mentioned the result, not mentioned the deficit or the surplus as the case may be. Those of you that are in business, imagine if you turned up to your shareholders meeting and reported to the shareholders and did not mention what the bottom line was – an extraordinary example of cowardice and shame. But it was outdone last night. Many of us, Nick Minchin and Christopher Pyne and Andrew and others here have had the dubious privilege of being cross-examined by Tony Jones on Lateline. And he is a tenacious interviewer, there’s no doubt about that. But his tenacity was sorely tested last night as he tried to get the Prime Minister to actually say what the amount of debt was that he was going to run up. And finally, after question after question, he finally came out with a figure and actually got it wrong. And you have to say, why are we surprised, why are we surprised that we have a Budget that doesn’t add up when we have a Prime Minister who can’t count, and why would we expect a Government to be able to repay debt when the Treasurer won’t say it. As they say, if you can’t say it, you’re very unlikely to pay it. It is a very disappointing picture and I notice today that the Treasury Secretary, the permanent head of the Treasury, Dr Ken Henry, has given a speech and he’s addressed some of the criticism of the Budget and he said that he attributes a lot of the criticism to a communication problem. Well there is a communication problem. He’s right about that. His Treasurer cannot communicate what the deficit is and his Prime Minister is too ashamed to actually tell us, other than under intense pressure, what the level of the debt is. Now when we think about this debt it’s important to put it into context. We have a Government that in 18 months has got us to a situation where we are looking at a level of debt twice as great – in fact it’s quite a bit more than twice as great because they started off with cash in the bank of course, inherited from John Howard and Peter Costello – but we have a Government that has run up more than twice as much debt as Paul Keating in a fraction of the time. Now it took us in government, during a period of unprecedented, continuous economic growth and expansion, 10 years to pay off Paul Keating’s $96 billion of debt and we have to ask ourselves how long will it take us to pay off the $300 billion of debt that Kevin Rudd owned up to last night? How many decades will that be? And it will be tens of years, literally decades. All of here today are looking at a future where our children and perhaps their children will be paying higher taxes and higher interest rates to pay off Labor’s debt. Now there is nothing that is more innate, more human, more naturally human than all of our desires to ensure that our children have better opportunities than we did. And whether that’s for our own children or whether it’s for the next generation, as a nation we have been able to pass on to the generations that come after us – at least for more than 60 years, since the Second World War at the very least – we’ve been able to pass on a better future, better opportunities, wider horizons for the next generation. Now when we were in government we Liberals fulfilled that ambition by taking Labor’s debt off the shoulders of future generations. We didn’t just pay back Labor’s existing debt – the $96 billion. We put money aside in the Future Fund to ensure that there was enough provision made for the previously unfunded obligations to pay pensions to people in the public service and defence personnel. So we reached out across the years, across the generations and took those burdens off generations to come, our children’s and our grandchildren’s generations. That’s what we did. Because we were committed to that vision, to that very deep and natural human instinct to make sure our children had better opportunities than us. And Kevin Rudd has reversed that in 18 months. And he’s said, of course, it’s all the fault of the global financial crisis. When he’s not blaming it on the global financial crisis, he’s blaming it on John Howard, he’s blaming it on anyone. The only consistency with this Prime Minister is that he takes the blame for absolutely nothing – nothing at all. And yet we now are in a situation where the taxes and the interest rates our children and their children will pay will, on any view, be significantly higher than they ought to be thanks to Labor’s reckless spending. Now he points to the level of debt being a consequence of a decline in revenues. Well there’s no doubt there has been a decline in revenues – there’s no question about that. But that debt level which in the Parliament, although not on Lateline last night, in the Parliament they’ve said will peak at $188 billion – last night on Lateline he said it would peak at $300 billion. Take your pick – I think 300 is probably closer to the truth, don’t you? But, in any event, he said 188 in the Budget Papers. Compare that $188 billion of so-called peak debt in 2012 with the $124 billion of additional spending, spending decisions taken by Labor since the election. So you can say two-thirds of that 188 is represented by Labor’s additional spending. Now if we wanted to pay off that $188 billion, which they say we will get to in 2012, if we were to pay that off in a decade it would take – we would have to pay $25 billion a year. The largest surplus we have ever had in our history, at the peak of a boom, the last Coalition budget was just under $20 billion. So when we say this is something that will take decades to pay off, we’re not exaggerating. It will take several, perhaps many decades to pay off. So it really is a challenge for our children and grandchildren, which of course reminds us that you can never underestimate the Labor Party when it comes to deficit and debt. You know, we go through periods of great anxiety about Labor governments on our side of politics. But I reckon that if any of us here with marginal seats, if Southcott or Pyne or myself had come knocking on your door – as we all did, knocking on the doors of our constituents at the last election – and said you’ve got to vote for us because if the Labor Party get in they will go mad, they will borrow $23 billion and give it away, you would have called us in and said, ‘look, it’s hot, you’re getting stressed, sit down and have a cup of tea; look, we’re going to vote for you but, you know, they’re not that bad’. But that’s what they’ve done. Just think about that. Just think about a government that when it knew revenues were declining, when it knew they were declining, went out and borrowed $23 billion and gave it away and, most recently, $14 billion given away just recently. And you know that distribution of $900 payments to most people, most taxpayers in Australia, was no doubt well received in the sense that people made use of it – the vast majority of course with that payment, as indeed with the one in December, used it to pay off debt or saved it and that’s why it was such an ineffective use of public money. That’s why it didn’t create a single job, didn’t create any opportunities, didn’t leave anything behind other than increasing government debt and somewhat decreasing household debt. There was no road, there was no bridge, there was no port, there was no railway. I mean, $23 billion – it’s a lot of money. For the $23 billion of cash splashes Kevin Rudd has handed out, we could have duplicated or completed the duplication of the highway from Adelaide to Melbourne to Sydney to Brisbane. Imagine if the Government had said, right, that’s what we’re going to spend $23 billion on; it will take a few years to spend it, we’re going to get to work on it, that’s our project, our $23 billion project. I think many of Australians would have said, ‘well, that’s a lot of money and, yes, that’s going to be a big commitment but we’ll have something to show for it’. We have nothing to show for Kevin Rudd’s reckless spending. And if you consider his claims to be spending a lot of money on infrastructure, this is the greatest hypocrisy that we’ve ever witnessed. And I just remind you of what he said about infrastructure. In last year’s Budget he said, and I’m quoting – “efficient public infrastructure investment requires decision-making based on thorough and rigorous cost benefit analysis, a commitment to transparency at all stages, a public sector financial management regime with clear accountabilities and responsibilities”. Now, that is tough, that’s strict, that’s prudent – it sounds like it was written by Nick Minchin. But the problem is, the problem is it has been completely ignored, completely ignored. Kevin Rudd announced the other day a $43 billion broadband network which represents two-thirds of the infrastructure spending boasted about in the Budget. He went on to television and he told people that it was a great investment, a commercially viable investment. He reached out through the television screen, addressing the mums and dads of Australia as he addressed them – ‘mums and dads of Australia’, he said, ‘come and invest, this is going to be great’. There is no business plan, there is no financial analysis, there is no basis of knowing that it will cost $43 billion or 53 or 63. There is certainly not one analyst in the whole industry that believes it could possibly be commercially viable. It, in fact, could only be built on that basis with a gigantic government subsidy. And do you know, despite the fact that the largest commentary and discussion about infrastructure in the Budget Papers relates to this unanalysed broadband investment, one which flies in the face of all of these principles espoused last by Mr Rudd, notwithstanding that, that $43 billion is not taken into account in calculating the debt. No, it’s not. So $188 billion is not the peak debt. It’s 188 plus the $40 odd billion for the broadband network. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the $28 billion for Rudd Bank isn’t mentioned either. That’s another detail that Mr Rudd couldn’t bring himself to put into the debt calculations. So when he talks about 188 billion, as I said last week, that $188 billion of peak debt is not a peak, it is just a foothill at the base of the massive summit of debt that Kevin Rudd is building. And they haven’t taken into account the massive capital expansion on Defence expenditure either, on the $300 billion plus expansion there. So this is an extraordinarily reckless Government. So what should our approach be? What should our approach be as the Opposition, as the Coalition? We are a party and an Opposition that is committed to fiscal discipline. We stand ready at the next election to once again take the helm in Australia and restore our public finances to prudence, to probity, to discipline. That’s what Australia needs and that’s what Australia will get when we are returned to government. And so in our response to this Budget we have been strictly responsible. Now, one of the most disgraceful elements in the Budget, one of the most brazenly broken promises out of many broken promises, is the assault on the private health insurance rebate. Because this has had a lot of publicity lately, let me just take the time just to explain the policy behind this. The private health insurance rebate is a tax break. It is a tax concession. And it was put in place by us in order to promote a public policy objective, as are many, many other tax breaks whether it’s for research and development in the business world, whether it’s for land care and planting trees and undertaking measures to stop erosion and so forth in the agricultural world. And those tax breaks are put in place in order to encourage people to do something that governments believe are a good thing, a good public policy objective. Now we believe, as Liberals, that private health insurance is a good thing. We believe it’s good because it encourages self-reliance and we believe in self-reliance. That is one of our cores values. We also believe it is good because, from a practical point of view, the more people that take out private health insurance, the less pressure there is on an already strained public hospital system. So both the private health system and the public hospital system work hand in hand; one supports the other. And it is a mix of both private and public, private and public funding and it works well when it is supported and has governments that recognise that while there is a solid foundation of public health services, be it Medicare, be it public hospitals, the private health system has a very important role to play. Now before the last election the Labor Party gave an absolutely unequivocal pledge to keep that rebate in place. They gave it again and again. They gave it orally, they gave it in writing. And now they have broken it. And they say that they’re doing it in order to make up $1.9 billion over four years. $1.9 billion is a lot of money, believe me. But during those four years the Federal Government will receive in revenues $1,200 billion. So this broken election promise, this assault on the private health system will generate an amount of saving that is less than two-one-thousandths of total Federal Government revenues. So this is not a financial or an economic necessity. This is a bitter, ideological attack on free enterprise, it is a bitter ideological attack on aspirational Australia. It is designed to make private health insurance more expensive and to make it further out of reach for those who seek to have it. It is an effort in ideology, not in economics. And we have now Mr Swan saying that having the private health insurance rebate being available to people who earn more than $74,000 is an obscenity – an obscenity. Well, it was an obscenity that his leader and his shadow health minister were uttering and pledging to commit to less than two years ago. The position we are taking on private health insurance today, as a matter of principle, was Labor Party policy at the last election. Let’s be quite clear. So we have to recognise that there is not just a question of economics here, not just a question of protecting our health services here, there is a fundamental question of integrity because the attacks the Labor Government are making on the private health system now are ones that are so bitter that they make us recognise that they knew they were lying when they made those promises in 2007. They never had any intention of keeping them. So, we’re opposed to it, but I don’t want to make the deficit any bigger. If Labor had taken our advice – not much chance of that – but if they had taken our advice it would be a lot smaller because, of course, we’ve opposed, in the teeth of a lot of criticism I might add, a number of their reckless spending measures. We opposed the $14 billion cash splash back in February. We opposed the $42 billion stimulus and offered a smaller and much better targeted alternative. But, nonetheless, the $58 billion deficit is there. It’s a fact of life. It’s a financial fact of life. It has to be addressed. So we have offered as an alternative a better way of raising that money. We’ve said alright, put up the excise on tobacco by 12.5 per cent. I said on Thursday night it would raise $1.9 billion over the four years; it would fill that gap. The Labor Party has since come out and said – issued some papers from the Treasury which they handed out to journalists a couple of nights ago on the basis that they couldn’t ring us and get a commentary from us about it, which say that over 10 years the savings from the private health insurance broken promise would be greater than the revenue from the tobacco tax because people will stop smoking. I actually thought that was part of the objective of taxing tobacco, to get people to stop smoking, but apparently not if you are in the Labor Party nowadays. And Mr Rudd has been outrageous enough and dishonest enough to say that this means there is a hole, some financial hole in what we have represented. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Budget covers the four years of the forward estimates – that’s it. This isn’t a ten year Budget. The Budget goes out four years. And over those four years – the next financial year and the three after it – even on the Treasury’s own figures, on the Treasury’s own figures or the Treasurer’s own figures, the tobacco tax that I have proposed would generate over $2.2 billion. So exactly what I said on Thursday night is the case. He wants to preserve a $1.9 billion saving in his Budget. If he takes our advice, he’ll cover that and have at least $300 million to the good. Now, the position that we’re presented with today is a function of that tired, old Labor cocktail of higher debt, higher deficits, leading of course to the greatest tragedy of all, higher unemployment. The other figure that they cannot bring themselves to mention is that their own Budget is forecasting nearly a million Australians out of work – nearly a million Australians out of work. That is the price we pay, the human price that we pay for Labor misgovernment. Now our alternative is one, as I said earlier, of financial discipline, of incurring no more debt than is absolutely necessary, of ensuring that prudence and probity will be restored to public finances. There will be no unfunded broadband network proposals from my government, I can assure you. We will establish a Commission of Financial Sustainability from the moment we are elected to review the sustainability of all of the Federal Government’s spending to ensure that we get the spending, the finances of the Federal Government back onto an even keel, back where it was before Labor took it astray. And we will do that as part of our commitment to financial integrity. But we’ve also been, as I know many of you are, bitterly disappointed with the way in which the Government has played with the figures, the way in which they have made forecasts and representations that have no – literally – no credibility. They are forecasting a return by 2012 to a recovery from the downturn which will see economic growth for six years at 4.5 per cent per annum from 2012. Now, this a hockey stick sort of confusing itself with a rocket. Every other economic forecaster around the world says the recovery from the recession will be slow and measured, but not Kevin Rudd who says we will snap out of it and we will go back into a new boom that will make the last mining boom look anaemic. Let me just give you a comparison, just to give you an idea of how out of touch and reckless this Government is. He says from 2011-2012, we’ll have 4.5 per cent for six years. The IMF says, their figures are, in terms of Australia’s growth, 2010 – 1.1 per cent, 2011 – 1.9, 2012 – 2.8, 2013 – 2.9, 2014 – 3. That’s the International Monetary Fund. So don’t you think it’s perfectly clear that the Treasury presented the Government with a range of growth estimates, with 4.5 probably at the bleeding nose, highest end. And instead of doing what prudent people would do and taking something in the middle or to the lower end of the middle, they went for the most optimistic forecast possible. And Glenn Stevens, who you would all know as that very taciturn Governor of the Reserve Bank was asked about this today, and the best he could say of Kevin Rudd’s forecast – and this is worth savouring – the best that he could say was that they were not, quote, “crazily optimistic.” So there’s a headline for you – Governor of Reserve Bank says Prime Minister’s growth estimates not crazy. He’s not saying they’re right, he’s saying they’re not crazily optimistic. But that, my friends, is what our recovery is apparently predicated upon in this Budget. So part of our project of restoring the Budget to integrity and to discipline and credibility is to establish a Parliamentary Budget Office and that will be modelled on the United States Congressional Budget Office. It will be an independent organisation answerable to Parliament, not a big one but a small, highly qualified group that will provide rigorous, independent financial and economic analysis of government policies, government programs so that there will be an objective yardstick against which the claims of government can be assessed. And I’ve got no doubt that there will be times when we are in government that we will find their criticisms and strictures uncomfortable, but so we should. Governments need to be held to account and held to account in a disciplined way. This is consistent with our Liberal traditions. It was the Coalition under John Howard that put in place the Charter of Budget Honesty. It was the Coalition that made the Reserve Bank independent. We have consistently undertaken reforms to provide for more integrity in the management of Australia’s finances and we will continue that tradition when we return to government. Now finally, in closing let me touch on what is the key, in my view, to growth and to recovery. It is small business. We have been holding small business forums around the country, nearly 50 including many in South Australia. And we’ve been engaging with small business and hearing what they have to say, what they want. And I set out in the speech on Thursday night a number of measures that will assist small business. Andrew Southcott and I have worked closely together on training and so we’ve proposed, in light of the concerns we’ve had from employers of apprentices, a reshaping of the timing of the incentive payments to the employers of apprentices so that they get more support in the earlier and, for the employer, more expensive years of an apprenticeship. We’ve proposed measures that will dramatically reduce red tape, compliance and unnecessary regulation, and that has been the most common criticism we’ve heard from small business. But the one that I believe has considerable merit and will cost very, very little, very, very little in budgetary terms and one which the Government should and could adopt now, is to allow for tax losses to be carried back. At the moment if you have a business and you lose money, if your business loses $50,000 that’s bad news, you can carry it forward and offset it against profits in the future and reduce your tax liability. In many countries, but not in Australia, you can carry that tax loss backwards, so if you’d made $50,000 in the year before or the year before that, you could take it back and then reclaim the $15,000 in tax you had paid. So this enables a business to get cash flow in the here and now when it actually needs it. It is a constructive practical measure. It has a very, very modest cost to the Budget, because of course a tax loss carried back cannot thereafter be carried forward, so it’s at best a timing impact. Now that is a practical measure that has come out of our grassroots consultation with small business, as have a number of other measures. We’ve set all of these proposals, and others, as we develop them in our partnership with small business around Australia, we’ve set them all out on our website. And I encourage you to engage with us, as I’m sure all of you are doing, because what we need is to work closely with small business, genuinely, the engine room of the economy. Really at the front line, the part of the economy that is most flexible, most resilient, best able to take up the challenge of a recovery and put people on and also the one that gets hardest hit when things slow down. So working closely with small business we know we will build the framework for that recovery, because this is really where we differ from Mr Rudd. Obviously, if we were in Government we would tell people what the Budget deficit was and we wouldn’t be so shamefaced about the level of debt or any feature of our financial management. But the biggest difference is that Kevin Rudd wants the Government to be at the centre of the economy. He believes that government is there to tell us what is best. We believe that government’s role is to enable each and every one of you, and thousands and millions of Australians like you, to do your best, because we know that the prosperity, the future, the opportunity for our children to enjoy even better times than we have lies in the energy and the enterprise of thousands of Australians, thousands of Australian businesses, millions of Australians each seeking to realise their own dream. And the Liberal way is to empower and to enable them. That is our commitment. It’s a commitment to freedom and it’s a commitment to values that have not only made the Liberal Party the standard bearer for prosperity and free enterprise that it has been for all of its life, but also they are the values that have made Australia great and, after the next election, will make it greater still. Thank you very much. [ends]  malcolmTue, 19 May 2009 06:34:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:482http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/484/Address-to-the-Queensland-Media-Club.aspx#Comments1http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=484http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=484&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/484/Address-to-the-Queensland-Media-Club.aspxE & O E Well thank you very much for that warm welcome. It is wonderful to be here with members of my former profession, journalism, and so many colleagues from the state and federal parliaments in my current profession of politics. It is great to be here. Now Australians today are paying a very heavy price for Kevin Rudd’s reckless spending. The Budget speech that we heard on Tuesday night was a first, not simply because the levels of debt that were without precedent, not simply because the deficit – nearly $58 billion – was without precedent, but because we had a Treasurer who was too ashamed of that deficit to actually say what it was and this bears some reflection. What would you think of the Chief Executive or the Chairman of a company who had had a tough year and stood up and was not prepared, couldn’t bring himself to actually tell the shareholders how much red ink there was at the bottom of the accounts. It is an extraordinary act of political cowardice or perhaps a very eloquent statement of his shame. The scale of the indebtedness that the Government is running up is really stupendous. The figure, the headline figure that Kevin Rudd has put out, which he refers to as a peak debt figure, is $188 billion in 2012. Now, he does not give any indication of how and when that will be reduced. You probably notice that when Mr Rudd or Mr Swan are asked for an answer about the Budget – when will the deficit come down, when will the debt be repaid – they always say ask Mr Turnbull, or ask Joe Hockey, ask the Liberals, ask anyone but themselves. Now our job as an Opposition is to criticise the Government constructively, to hold it to account, to provide alternative policies, but our job is not to be some sort of roving good Samaritan that seeks them out in some wilderness of their own creation then carries them back to the path of fiscal probity. The people that do that, the people that will do that, are the Australian people when at the next election they elect a Coalition government that will bring Australian back to the standards of fiscal probity and discipline that is so lacking at the moment. But I want to give you one interesting figure just to contemplate the scale of the problem that Kevin Rudd has presided over. When Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister there was what they call negative net debt, in other words cash at the bank, of $45 billion dollars, and by 2012 he tells us there will be a $188 billion debt. There will be a lot more than that, but I will come to that. That means the turnaround there is $233 billion. So that is essentially what we would have gone through in about four years – $233 billion negative impact to the country’s balance sheet. Paul Keating inherited a small amount of debt, a relatively small amount of debt when he became Treasurer and Bob Hawke was Prime Minister and of course when he left there was $96 billion of debt. All told Labor added about $85 billion of debt in their thirteen years. So 85 versus 233. So Kevin Rudd will add, take on, incur, nearly three times as much debt in a third of the time as Paul Keating did. It is an impressive performance isn’t it? You really have to hand it to him. For years Australians have breathed a sigh of relief that that Labor debt was paid off, that $96 billion was paid off. We know that it was a tough business paying it off. There are a lot of tough decisions that had to be taken and it took a decade. We will have $188 billion to pay off – how many decades, not decade or years, how many decades will it take to pay it off? And it isn’t as though that is on any view the peak of the debt. You know, as I said on Thursday night, there will be times I fear in the years ahead, when far from $188 billion being peak debt, we will recognise that it was just a foothill at the summit of Mr Rudd’s massive mountain of debt that he is creating. Because in addition to that $188 billion of debt, we have to take into account his Broadband network, which he says will cost $43 billion. There’s not a cent of that has gone into the $188 billion calculation. There’s not a cent of the $28 billion he has to borrow to fund his Rudd Bank. There’s not a cent of the borrowings that will be incurred for the massive capital expenditure on the armed forces that is set out in the White Paper. And the whole thing, the whole debt figure of course, assumes that there will be not one cent more of spending, new spending beyond what’s in the Budget papers. And when these melancholy facts that obviously add up to a peak debt figure in well over $200 billion, perhaps more approaching $300 billion, that’s a net debt figure, a gigantic sum. When this is put to the Government, they say, Lindsay Tanner would say “Oh but we are going to, once the recession is over, we will discipline ourselves, and we’ll limit ourselves to only a 2% real increase in spending every year”. Well again, as we know, that’s as convincing as Paris Hilton saying she’ll never go shopping again. It is absurd. This is a guy, who when he knew government revenues were declining, went out and borrowed $23 billion and gave it away. And I was talking to some of my constituents on the weekend and we were reflecting on my door knocking activities, how as a member of a very marginal seat of Parliament, I get around there and knock on doors, and introduce myself to people on street corners, and very busy about making sure that I was getting re-elected, and I said, if I’d come to any of your houses, knocked on the door and said: “You’ve got to vote for me. If these Labor guys get in, they will borrow $23 billion and give it away”, you would have said look it’s hot, you’re getting tired, you’re overwrought, come in, have a cup of tea, sit down. It can’t be that bad. But that is exactly what has happened. There is no precedent for the scale of indebtedness that we’ve seen. The other feature of the Budget, that I just draw your attention to, because I want to focus on our positive plan for the future in these remarks, and we can perhaps get back to Mr Rudd’s failings in the questions and answer, but the other feature to this Budget is it is highly ideological. It is a very bitter Budget in this sense. You may recall Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said famously “You should never let a good crisis go to waste”. And what Labor is doing here, is they are using this crisis as a means of pursuing bitter ideological objectives which are designed to challenge and undermine aspirational Australia. And when I say aspirational Australia, I mean the vast majority of Australians. I think all Australians, who like us, believe in the spirit of enterprise, who believe that they have the opportunity, if they work hard, if they save, if they invest, if they are positive, and enterprising, and resilient, they have the opportunity to deliver to their children, greater opportunities than they enjoyed themselves. It is very much the Liberal ethos. It’s my values, it’s the Liberal party’s values, the LNP’s values. This is what we believe in. We believe in a spirit of enterprise. Getting in and having a go. That’s what makes this country great. That’s why Government’s role should not be as Kevin Rudd says, “To sit at the centre of the economy”, commanding the economy as though we were back in the days of the Soviet Union. The role of Government should be to enable people to do their best. Government’s role should be to ensure there are no more obstacles in the way of people realising their ambitions and dreams than absolutely necessary. So that’s our view of the world. Now consider what he is proposing to do with private health insurance. There are many other measures I could talk about but I’ll just focus on that. The private health insurance rebate is a tax break. Why is it there? It’s there because the policy objective, the public policy objective when we were in government was to encourage people to take out private health insurance, and we had a tax break. Now there are hundreds of other tax breaks, whether it’s for planting trees or doing research and development, or installing energy efficient equipment in power station, or whatever it is. You can go across the whole gamut of activity; governments identify objectives they want to achieve, and will give a tax break to encourage that to occur. Now we would never say, no one would ever in their right mind say, for example, that farmers who are making good money or who have got profitable farms should not be able to get a tax care for land care expenditure, for water infrastructure. No one would say that a company with strong earnings should not be able to claim a tax break for research and development. Because what we’re trying to achieve is more of the activity that we’re giving the tax break for. And that’s exactly where the private health insurance rebate fitted in. It’s not a welfare payment, it’s not social welfare – it’s designed to encourage there to be a higher level of private health insurance, and so it worked. In our years in government, private health insurance went from 34% to 44%. At the same time we increased funding, for example, to Medicare, by 48% in real terms, so we were supporting both parts of that health system, the foundation of which is Medicare, the public hospital system, but an important part of which of course is the private health system. Now people on our side of politics, on the free enterprise side of politics, are very suspicious of Labor when it comes to the private sector, and so that’s why in the lead up to the election, Kevin Rudd was asked again and again, are you going to change the private health insurance rebate, and he said again and again, as I’m sure you all know, that he would not. He said so in writing, he said so orally, his Shadow Health Minister Nicola Roxon even put out a press release denouncing the Liberals for running a scare campaign to suggest that Labor might change the private health insurance rebate. Never was a promise given more repeatedly, emphatically, unequivocally, and of course, never was a promise broken so brazenly. And it will raise, so the Government says – this is what they say; it’s in their Budget papers – 1.9 billion over five years. Well one of the first of those years is this financial year that doesn’t have much left in it, so it’s 1.9 over four years. So what we have offered to them is an alternative which will raise, even on the figures the Treasury circulated last night, even on the figure the Treasury circulated last night, will raise over $1.9 billion over four years. The Treasury’s figures that were given to journalists yesterday on condition that they not contact the Opposition for fear that we might contradict them or qualify them, those figures confirm the accuracy of what I said in Parliament on Thursday night, which is that a 12.5% increase in the tobacco tax would generate 1.9 billion, or something more than that in fact, over four years. So there’s a choice for the Government. It’s a question, a very fundamental one of values. Our value is to support self-reliance, and to support the health system overall. Because the more people that are self-reliant, the more people that are able to afford private health services, private hospitals and so forth, the less pressure on the public system. All of that makes perfect sense as a policy objective. On the other hand you’ve got a Labor Government that wants to undermine that, and of course we know that this will be the thin edge of the wedge. So we’ve given them an alternative, one that will enable them to keep their Budget outcomes; the deficit, already too big, will not be made any bigger. And they can take that up. So it’s a test of values, it’s a test of priorities, and I have to say it’s also a test of integrity, but I’m afraid that test is one that Mr Rudd has already failed. Now let me talk about our way forward. We did not have to embark on such a debt trail as we have. We cannot create an alternative Budget from Opposition, plainly, we can’t rewrite the Budget from Opposition. But we have shown in our response to the Government’s proposals the fact that we have a discipline and a character that they lack. We stood up in February and said no, the $42 billion stimulus package, so-called, was too big. We said this is crazy, giving away $14 billion in another cash splash. The one you did in December wasn’t effective – why would you do it again? And so we urged on the Government a smaller – significantly smaller, less than half the size – stimulus package, with measures that were targeted at jobs, that were going to be more effective. And that is the measure of our character. We, unlike the Prime Minister, were able to resist the temptation to just spend, spend, spend. And that’s the fundamental difference, the most important difference in many ways we will bring to government: a discipline, and a prudence. But above all we recognise that the engine room of our economy is small business. This is where most jobs are created; it is where you see the quickest response both to improved economic conditions and, sadly, to deteriorating economic conditions; it’s where people are able to move nimbly and quickly; and where you will see the greatest opportunities for employment. And so we’ve been having these jobs forums around the country, many of them in Queensland, nearly fifty in total, and of course consulting on the Web. We’ve taken a lot of very valuable feedback from those jobs forums, from… when I say small business, of course, I don’t just mean two and three-person businesses, but businesses that employ several hundred people as well. So it’s been almost the SME sector that we’ve been talking to, the most dynamic part of business. And so we have presented some alternative policies, which I’ll just discuss with you briefly now, which present a genuine low cost in terms of the Budget, a low cost, innovative approach that will provide real support to business. Probably the most appealing of them, or most interesting of them, is the idea of a tax loss carry-back. At the moment, if you have a business, you lose money in this year, you can carry it forward and not set it against profits in subsequent years. Now, why shouldn’t you be able to carry it backwards and offset it against past profits, and recover the tax you’ve already paid? That would mean that a business this year, for example, that had made a $50,000 loss, could carry it back against its $50,000 profit form last year and recover the $15,000 in tax that it had paid. Immediate cash inject. Does it have an impact on the Budget? Yes, but only from a timing point of view, because the tax loss carried backwards cannot then be carried forwards, so it balances out. And the Canadian experience bears that out, as indeed it has in the United States and a number of other countries where it’s applied. That is a practical suggestion that has come out of our meetings with small business. We’ve also developed a set of policies and an approach that will dramatically reduce the burden of excessive regulation and compliance. You know, one of the… let’s say the most common complaint that we’ve had at these meetings has been just how much of a hassle it is for small businesses to get started and to get all of the approvals and consents that they need. You know, so often I feel that government designs its compliance and regulation from the mindset of big corporations. That might be partly because public servants, who are bureaucrats, in a big organisation, the public service, have got a lot in common with bureaucrat in big private sector organisations, banks and big companies. But they’re certainly not on the same wavelength as the woman we met at Coffs Harbour that I spoke about on Thursday, who had told us this long rigmarole of a story about how she had had to go through so much red tape, and so many forms and processes to start one bed and breakfast and employ one part-time housekeeper. Now you know that’s just not good enough. If we want people to start businesses, we got to make it easier and easier for them to do so from a compliance point of view. And of course we have the ability to use the internet creatively to do that, to have state, federal and local, all of the relevant regulations and forms on the same site so that people can do it readily, and that’s certainly our commitment. The other item that we’ve – again, a very low cost proposal – that we’ve identified on Thursday night, which responds to a theme and many suggestions from the meetings we’ve had, relates to training and particularly apprentices in traditional trades. At the moment as you know, the incentive payment is divided behind a portion at the front end when the apprentices signed up and then the bulk of it at the back end of the apprenticeship. We propose to direct a greater proportion of that existing incentive to the first two years, which is when the apprentice is most expensive to the employer because he or she has less skills and of course is spending more time undergoing their own training. So those are just some of the ideas that we’re working with and proposing. We’re setting them out. We’ll be developing them further, explaining them, expanding them as we build the Plan for Recovery that we will take to the next election, and I just want to say to all of you, we see our role as building and developing a Plan for Recovery in partnership with the small business men and women of Australia. We’re reaching out to them for their ideas, their feedback and if you like in a collaboration between the party of small business and enterprise and the enterprising small business men and women of Australia. We believe we will have the plan that will enable Australia to get moving again. Because I’ve talked about financial discipline and I’ve talked about some of the Rudd Government’s extravagant spending, but the most important element in our recovery is going to be business and growth in our economy. And when you look at that Budget on Tuesday night, and I’ll conclude on this point, when you look at that Budget on Tuesday night, I ask you this: where was there a genuine stimulus for business? Where was there something that small business in particular could look at and say, that will give me a leg up? The only element that could possibly qualify for that claim is the accelerated depreciation for purchases of equipment, but as we’ve said time again and as Steve Ciobo, the Shadow Minister for Small Business, has said many times, you’ve got to have a dollar to spend a dollar and so many small businesspeople have said to us at these meetings, yes, yep, that’s not a bad thing. It’s better having it than nothing but I don’t have the cash flow to go off and buy new equipment. What I need is cash flow now, and we’ve sought to address that with our policies and will continue to do so in the future. Because I just say this to you, my friends, we have a country whose potential is unlimited. It’s not just our great resources, the natural resources that we’re all so proud of; it is because we have an enterprising people. We Australians are enterprising, we’re courageous, we’re resilient. We want to work, we want to get ahead, but we need a Government that is prepared to enable us to do our best. That’s what we commit ourselves to do. That’s what we will do, and we will do that when we return to Government at the next election. Thank you very much. [ends]  malcolmMon, 18 May 2009 00:27:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:484http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/479/A-Sustainable-Health-System-for-all-Australians.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=479http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=479&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/479/A-Sustainable-Health-System-for-all-Australians.aspxMr Rudd is desperately trying to divert attention from his spiralling debt and his outrageous broken promise to maintain the private health insurance 30 per cent rebate. An addict to spin, Mr Rudd claims that the Coalition doesn’t support Medicare but the facts condemn his latest falsehood. Over the term of the previous Coalition Government, Medicare funding increased by 48 per cent in real terms. As well as supporting Medicare, the Coalition also lifted private health insurance levels from 34 per cent to 44 per cent. 11 million Australians choose to pay their own hard-earned money for private health insurance in order to have a choice in their health care. It doesn’t have to be one at the expense of the other Mr Rudd. Australians deserve a strong and well balanced health system that supports Medicare as a cornerstone but also encourages self-reliance. With Labor’s debt growing at an alarmingly rate, it now falls to the Coalition to ensure we have a sustainable health system for the future. The Prime Minister simply should tell us what he is going to do - withdraw $1.9 billion from private health or raise the excise on tobacco.  malcolmSat, 16 May 2009 23:43:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:479http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/477/Budget-Address-in-Reply.aspx#Comments123http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=477http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=477&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/477/Budget-Address-in-Reply.aspxE & O E Thank you Mr Speaker. Australians are now paying the price for Labor’s reckless spending. The enterprise and the energy of Australians coupled with the richness of our resources mean that with the right leadership our greatest days, our most prosperous days, should be in front of us. But opportunities can be seized or they can be squandered. On Tuesday night we should have had a Budget that laid out a foundation for recovery and for growth. We should have had a Budget that marked a path out of this downturn, offering confidence and hope for a better future. Instead, what we were offered was a counsel of despair setting out no credible or convincing plan for economic recovery. A Budget that just doesn’t add up. A Budget so unbelievable that the Prime Minister is already running away from it – racing to an early election so that he can get to the polls before the full consequences of his mismanagement are felt by the Australian people. Last year the Treasurer was filled with pride as he proclaimed a surplus built by others. This year, he was so ashamed he could not bring himself, in a speech of 30 minutes, to even mention the $58 billion deficit he had created himself. And he could not utter the words “$188 billion of net debt – the highest in our history – double the record under Paul Keating”. That’s $9,000 for every man, woman and child in Australia. This Prime Minister will run up more than twice as much debt in less than half the time as Paul Keating did. Quite an achievement. He says that this colossal figure of $188 billion is peak debt. Mr Speaker, it is only a foothill at the base of what will be the Prime Minister’s towering summit of debt. His Budget Papers boast for page after page of his national broadband network – $43 billion he says. But the massive borrowings it will demand are not taken into account. And who is to say it will be $43 billion? This Prime Minister went on to television to say it would be commercially viable and called on mums and dads to invest. He did so without any business plan, any financial analysis – any responsible or reasonable basis to support what he was saying. And so what price the Prime Minister’s broadband dream? Nobody knows – least of all the Prime Minister. But we do know this – we will all pay for it and it will build that Labor mountain of debt. And what about Rudd Bank – it will require $28 billion of Government borrowings – that isn’t to be found in the peak debt calculations. And if all that is not enough – consider this: the Prime Minister is asking us to believe that between now and his $188 billion of “peak debt” there will be no new spending initiatives from this spendthrift Government. Mr Speaker, there will come a time when Australians will look wistfully at $188 billion of debt and ask not when our debt will rise to that peak, but when we will descend down from the summit to $188 billion. And every single Australian will pay the price – it took the Coalition together with the Australian people ten years to pay off $96 billion of Keating Labor debt. How many years, how many decades will it take us to pay off hundreds of billions of dollars of Rudd Labor debt? The Prime Minister’s reckless borrowing and spending today is guaranteed to deliver higher interest rates and higher taxes in the future. Because as we all know, debt has to be repaid and with interest – whether it is a family’s credit card, or the credit card of the nation. Already, self-reliant Australians who take out private health insurance are being asked to pay more in order to offset Labor’s reckless spending. And while the Coalition welcomes the Government adopting our proposal for an increase to the single age pension, the news was not good for all seniors, particularly those self-reliant Australians who seek to put money away for their retirement. But that is the Labor way – making prudent and thrifty Australians pay for reckless and spendthrift Labor Governments. Labor blames this ocean of red ink entirely on the global financial crisis. But let us not forget that in November 2007 this Prime Minister was dealt the best hand of economic cards of any leader in our history. All of Labor’s debt had been repaid – there was $45 billion of cash in the bank! The Budget was strongly in surplus. Unemployment was at historic lows and growth was strong. Since November 2007 this Labor Government has chosen to increase spending, its decisions, by $124 billion – that is two thirds of the $188 billion Labor debt we will accumulate in just four years. And what we have got for it? The same old Labor cocktail of higher debt, higher unemployment and higher deficits. As the global downturn worsened late last year. As it became more and more obvious that tax revenues were declining. The Rudd Government embarked on the most profligate spending spree in our nation’s history. The idea that a Government faced with a worsening financial climate would borrow $23 billion and give it away defies common sense. They did not spend it on roads, or railways or bridges or ports. They gave it away. Most of it, naturally, was not spent, it was saved. And so its impact on the economy was modest and short-lived. In February when Labor presented its $42 billion stimulus package – so-called – we took the unpopular decision to oppose it and to offer a smaller and better targeted package, that would have more effectively protected Australian jobs. Our advice was dismissed scornfully by a Prime Minister who always knows best. Who claims, repeatedly but untruthfully, that it’s his way or nothing. The truth is that it didn’t have to be this way. Australia didn’t have to embark on this irresponsible, dangerous course of high deficits, high debt, and high unemployment. There was a better way forward, involving less debt, and less risk, more discipline, more responsibility. Mr Speaker, our Plan for Recovery will be based on four key principles. The protection and creation of jobs for all Australians. Government should not incur one dollar more in debt than absolutely necessary. Spending should be targeted at creating jobs and building economic infrastructure. And private enterprise and small business must be supported because they drivers of economic growth. As we develop and expand this Plan we have been meeting with small business people around the nation at nearly 50 Jobs for Australia Forums. These enterprising men and women are the engine room, the drivers of our economy. We have listened to the challenges faced by small business in these difficult times and we have developed and will develop policies that will meet their concerns and respond to their suggestions. At every forum whether it was in Darwin or Terrigal, Coffs Harbour or Burnie we’ve heard concerns about the need for more effective incentives to take on and keep apprentices during these tough times. Right around the country we’ve heard complaints about the incredible burdens of red tape and compliance – at Cleveland a young woman managing a small business told us of the elaborate five hour accounting exercise she was legally obliged to go through to calculate a diesel rebate – worth $27. Or at Coffs Harbour, in the vital tourism industry, another woman told us of the incredible rigmarole she had gone through to establish a bed and breakfast and hire one part-time housekeeper. And at every meeting there were concerns about cash flow – the Government’s 30 per cent depreciation allowance for equipment purchases was noted – but many said it was not much good to you if you were short of cash or didn’t need any new equipment. Tonight, drawing on what we have learned from thousands of small business people around Australia, we propose a number of practical measures to support jobs and businesses, especially small businesses. All of them have a modest cost – proving you don’t need to borrow recklessly to do the right thing by small business. We propose a tax loss carryback for business. If businesses make operating losses this year or next year, they should be able to carry them ‘back’ against previous year’s profits and recover, as a refund, up to $100,000 of taxes paid over the past three years. This tax refund would bolster cash flows in difficult times. Because the tax loss carried back could not be carried forward the budgetary expense should be relatively neutral over the cycle. We need fairer rules to deal with troubled businesses. Australia’s insolvency laws do not encourage the reconstruction and rehabilitation of businesses that hit hard times. Too many jobs and too much value is lost when viable businesses are wound up or their assets sold in fire sales. We support a change to our laws which will emphasise reconstruction of these businesses. Reform in this area, in these times especially, could save thousands of jobs that would otherwise be lost. Now the most consistent complaint we have heard from small businesses is excessive regulation and compliance. The Coalition would reduce this burden to the lowest in the OECD, and join state and local governments to deliver a one-stop online portal for all necessary filings. Many small businesses find the paperwork for Government tendering overly complex and inconsistent between departments and governments. Part of our reform will be to standardise and streamline procurement contracts and similar processes. Now, we are taking up a suggestion that we’ve heard from many employers of apprentices in traditional trades who came to our Jobs For Australia Forums. They told us that two of the biggest barriers to apprenticeships are small business cash flow and wage costs. So we propose to direct a greater proportion of the existing incentives for those who take on an apprentice to the first two years of a traditional trade apprenticeship meaning employers will receive this support when they need it the most. Now, these measures are practical, pragmatic, job-focused measures that would greatly assist the economy in this difficult period. They have been drawn from our first hand and ongoing engagement with small business – whether it is meeting in community halls around the country or on our www.jobsforaustralia.com website. I now turn, Mr Speaker, to Budget honesty. The sheer magnitude of the deterioration in our nation’s finances revealed by the Treasurer on Tuesday night raises a more serious and unsettling set of issues. Labor has no strategy to return the Budget to surplus other than hoping that “something will turn up” – the something in this case being an incredible six successive years of above-trend growth of 4.5 per cent of GDP from 2011-12 – a scarcely believable boom. And we contrast that to the IMF’s more sober growth forecast for Australia in 2010 of 1.1 per cent. Now, nobody believes this “best of all possible worlds” scenario is credible. The recovery from this recession will not come in a rush – the days of cheap and easy credit that helped fuel the last boom are over, if not forever, for many, many years. Australians deserve, and are entitled to expect an honest, objective and upfront appraisal of the nation’s circumstances – not to be buried beneath a daily avalanche of spin and manipulation in the media. So we will appoint an independent Commission for Sustainable Finances to undertake a top-to-toe review of Commonwealth spending after the next election, to determine what levels of expenditure are sustainable and consistent with the need to address intergenerational equity. The alarming expansion of spending under Labor makes this vitally important. Annual spending is projected to rise from $272 billion in 2007-08 to $342 billion in 2010-11 – the largest three-year increase since the 1970s. The Commission’s task will be to help the next Coalition Government to identify and cut the waste in that spending. The Coalition also believes that honesty in fiscal policy would be served by the creation of an Australian version of America’s Congressional Budget Office which has for many years provided the Congress with objective and impartial advice and analysis on fiscal policy and the effects of new policies. We would establish a Parliamentary Budget Office which would be chartered to provide Parliament with independent, objective analysis of fiscal policy, including long-term projections of the impact of various measures on the economy, employment, real interest rates and debt levels. It would be responsible to the Parliament rather than the Executive, much like the Auditor-General or Commonwealth Ombudsman. It would be staffed with economic, accounting and actuarial experts, and overseen by a director with an independent tenure. Now governments never welcome greater scrutiny, and so I’m under no illusion that this proposal will be greeted with any great enthusiasm by the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. But such a body would contribute greatly to a better-informed debate about fiscal policy alternatives and the consequence of different choices and trade-offs. The Parliamentary Budget Office will be an invaluable mechanism in seeking to ensure that the damage done to this economy in just 18 months by this inexperienced and incompetent government never happens again. Now, turning to the Budget measures themselves, Mr Speaker, the Prime Minister, in his desperate rush to find an excuse to go to an early election, has called on the Coalition to indicate how it will respond to the major savings measures in his Budget – the decisions that increase Government revenues or reduce Government expenditures. Given the magnitude of the deficit, these so-called major savings measures are hardly heroic – in 2009-10 they amount to $ 1.5 billion, compared to a $57.6 billion deficit. Now we in the Coalition showed our commitment to fiscal discipline in February by proposing a much smaller stimulus package and when that was rejected out of hand, by voting against the $42 billion package and its $14 billion cash splash. Only this side of the House has had the courage to take a tough decision to restrain this debt and deficit blow out. None of the savings measures in this Budget will make, by themselves, a material difference to the deficit. We will consider them carefully and respond to them reasonably. This deficit is already too big – we do not want to make it bigger. But there is one savings measure in this Budget which we will oppose. The changes to the private health insurance rebate are just the latest phase in Labor’s unrelenting war against private health insurance. Labor hates private health insurance. Labor hates it because it encourages self-reliance and because it offers choice. Australians know that and that is why in the lead up to the last election the Prime Minister was asked time and time again whether he would change the private health insurance rebate. Again and again he and his shadow health minister said they would not. Never, never was an election promise given more emphatically and then broken so brazenly. Every Australian knows that the cost of public health is growing as are the waiting lists for public hospitals. Every Australian knows that as our population ages the need for more self reliance in the provision of health services becomes greater. This broken promise will be a direct hit on the family budget of at least 1.7 million Australians and indirectly will result in higher premiums for all Australians – including those on very low incomes. And it is just the beginning – this is the thin edge of the wedge. And as private health insurance costs go up, more pressure is put on public hospitals. The Prime Minister claims to be concerned about public hospitals and yet I see in his Budget’s Infrastructure document spending on health and hospital infrastructure receives less than ten per cent – less than 10 per cent the amount allocated to his unplanned, unanalysed broadband network. So much for priorities. The private health insurance broken promise contributes $1.9 billion of savings over four years – when total revenues will exceed $1200 billion. That fact alone underlines the point that the Prime Minister’s attack on private health insurance is based in ideology, not economics. There are plainly hundreds of opportunities for the Prime Minister to offset that saving if the measure is defeated – he could do worse than starting with his own foreign affairs spendathon in support of his UN ambitions. But tonight I will make one suggestion of a suitable offset for the Prime Minister’s consideration. One that would make for a healthier Australia and lessen the burden on public hospitals rather than increase it. The Government could comfortably afford to retain the current private health insurance rebate without any cost to the published Budget outcome by increasing the amount of excise collected on tobacco by 12.5 per cent (or about three cents extra per cigarette). Tobacco is the single most preventible cause of ill health and death in Australia. So there’s a tough choice for a weak Prime Minister. Raise $1.9 billion by making health more expensive and putting more pressure on the public hospital system or raise it by adding about three cents more to the price of a cigarette and taking pressure of the public health system. You see, Mr Speaker, budgets are indeed about priorities. Mr Speaker, history tells us that an addiction to debt and excess spending is in the DNA of the Labor Party. Too many times, Labor governments both here in Canberra and in the states have taken us down that dead-end street of debt. This time, we were told, it was all going to be different. Australians took on trust this Prime Minister and this Treasurer. When they swore hand on heart at the last election that they were economic conservatives, Australians took them at their word. They hoped this government would govern wisely and prudently. And they genuinely wanted the Prime Minister to succeed. They were prepared to give him every chance. And yet, today, Australians see our national balance sheet drowning in red ink. They see our nation’s future mortgaged for as far as the eye can see. To repay the principal and interest on Labor’s $188 billion debt over the next 10 years would cost taxpayers $25 billion a year – our largest ever surplus, the Coalition’s last was $20 billion. And if the debt turns out to be higher – say $250 billion – then the repayments would be $33 billion a year. Australians wonder how it could have come to this, in only 18 months? Now, you might have expected a bit of humility, a bit of contrition, from a Prime Minister and a Treasurer who have failed this nation. Instead, all we get are sanctimonious lectures about how the Opposition should either lock in behind the Government’s failed strategies. Or better yet provide Labor with the policy alternatives, with the map and compass, that will get them out of the mess in which they find themselves. Mr Speaker, our job as political leaders is to build hope for the future. For the least 60 years our proudest boast as a nation is that no generation of Australians has been left worse off than their parents. That optimism, that confidence, that certainty in what the future promises, is central to the success of modern Australia as a safe and prosperous place to bring up a family – the anchor of our society. It is our responsibility, the members of this Parliament, to ensure that whatever challenges we may confront, we will do all we can to ensure that our children will have the opportunity to build an even better Australia than the one we know today. Enterprise, opportunity, optimism – these are core Australian values. They are core values of mine and of the Coalition. They are essential building-blocks for Australia if it is to continue to fulfil its destiny as a strong and prosperous nation. But tonight we cannot avoid the hard questions. Will we be the first generation of Australians to bequeath to our children a lower standard of living? To what extent are our actions today consigning the next generation of working Australians to higher taxes, higher interest rates and higher debt – a lesser opportunity to give their families what we ourselves enjoy in life today? And when the time comes to answer to the Australian people for these failings, who will be judged the Guilty Party? That day of reckoning is approaching for the Rudd Labor Government. Its gross policy miscalculations have made much worse the impact of difficult global economic conditions. The Treasurer admits it will be many years before Australians are as well off as they were before this Government came to power. The Prime Minister has no idea how to fix the mess he has made. Just tonight we’ve seen the Labor Party advertising on television, proudly claiming that Australia’s debt is lower than other countries. What they didn’t mention was what our debt was in 2007. They didn’t mention the starting point. The rapid deteriorating of our fiscal position from the very best in the world to being just another one in the line-up to of heavily indebted nations. That has come about after 18 months, 18 months only, a total transformation under the leadership, or should I say, lack of leadership, of this Labor Government. And the Prime Minister takes no responsibility. If he’s not blaming the global financial crisis he’s blaming John Howard or Peter Costello, anyone but himself. He said once, he takes responsibility for the good news and the bad news. Well, he was half right, half right. He does take responsibility for the good news. The bad news he blames on anybody he can identify – the global situation, the previous government, the radical liberals, free markets. And when he can’t do that he pushes the Treasurer out before the cameras. The Prime Minister cannot even summon up the courage to try to fix this mess. His threat of a double dissolution and an early election proves to all of us what this Budget is really about. It isn’t about protecting the jobs of Australians. Least of all the one million Australians it says will soon be out of work. It is about the job security of one man and one man only. A Prime Minister, frightened of the consequences of his mismanagement, now wants to cut and run before he is found out. Mr Speaker, history tells us it has always been the job of the Liberal and National Party Coalition to repair the damage done by Labor governments – to rescue Australia from Labor debt. Right around Australia at our Jobs for Australia Forums people say, as they become more and more concerned about the growing level of debt, as they worry about the future for their children, they say, well at least you blokes will be able to sort it out. And the sad fact of life is this, Mr Speaker, this debt will be unprecedented. We talk about $188 billion but Rudd Bank, broadband and whatever the latest spending spree is going to be, that net debt could be 250, $300 billion within three or four or five years. This Government has shown it has absolutely no control. We heard in the Budget and we heard yesterday in the House, ministers talking about the rules, the regulations, the practises – Infrastructure Australia was talked about, the thorough way it looks at infrastructure projects. We have a Government that has committed us to $43 billion of debt for a broadband project that didn’t even have a business plan, no analysis at all. We have a Rudd Bank proposal that has no business plan, no financial analysis at all. We have a Government that staggers from one media opportunity to another. And as it does so it doesn’t simply spin, it doesn’t simply spin and mislead Australians, it adds mightily to that mountain of debt, that summit of debt which we will have to reduce, chip away at, bring down when we return to government. Now we know it will not be easy to repair the mess that this Prime Minister has created in such a short time. But on this side of the House we are ready to take up that challenge – and to do so with the confidence and the determination that comes from knowing that the Coalition has the experience and the expertise, the character and the commitment to get the job done. Mr Speaker, it is only a Coalition Government, only the Liberal and National Parties, that can and will restore this great nation to prosperity. Because this nation needs leadership of conviction, needs leaders that are prepared to take the tough decisions. We have a Prime Minister who is yet to make a tough decision, who wants always to be Santa Claus, and we and our children and perhaps their children after them, will be paying for the bill for that for years to come. We will set it right, my colleagues and I assembled in this Parliament today will set it right with the support of the Australian people. And when we do, Australia will have a government and a leadership and an economy that it deserves. [ends]  malcolmThu, 14 May 2009 11:19:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:477http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/478/Recovery-for-Australia.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=478http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=478&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/478/Recovery-for-Australia.aspxAustralia needs a plan for recovery. The Coalition has a plan for recovery, focused on targeted spending, lower debt, higher employment and support for small business people. Had the Coalition’s strategy been adopted, Australia would already have lower debt, more jobs and greater optimism. This means Australia would be better placed to recover strongly from the global financial crisis. The Coalition’s Plan for Recovery puts forward measures that are practical, pragmatic and job-focused and that would greatly assist the economy in this difficult period. There are four key principles to the Coalition’s Plan for Recovery: • The protection and creation of jobs for all Australians. • Government should not incur one dollar more in debt than necessary. • Spending should be targeted at creating jobs and building economic infrastructure. • Private enterprise and small business must be supported as the drivers of economic growth. Between now and the next election the Coalition will release policies across a wide range of areas which will add to our Plan for Recovery. I encourage Australians to visit  www.recoveryforaustralia.com.au where they can consider our plans carefully and provide comments or ideas that they wish to share.  malcolmWed, 13 May 2009 20:30:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:478http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/473/Interview-with-Chris-Uhlmann-AM-Programme.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=473http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=473&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/473/Interview-with-Chris-Uhlmann-AM-Programme.aspxSubjects: Labor's nation-wrecking Budget. E & O E UHLMANN: Malcolm Turnbull, you must be delighted for pensioners this morning. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yes, we’re very pleased that the increase in the pension, the single age pension, that we’ve been arguing for from last year – in fact we’d introduced legislation to allow last year – has been delivered in the budget. UHLMANN: And the Government has made some structural changes so that that will be affordable over time. Also good moves? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well yes, they’ve made a number of changes, a change to the age at which the pension is available. They’ve made that decision, it comes into place from 2023, and that’s certainly consistent with an ageing population and a population that is not only living longer but also working and being active longer. UHLMANN: And you’ve been calling for the Government to be more optimistic. Well it could hardly be more optimistic in its growth forecasts, so it’s a trifecta, you’re happy on all fronts. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well look, I heard what Mr Rudd was just saying to you there. There is enormous scepticism about these growth forecasts. The idea that we would suddenly snap out of this downturn into seven years of above trend growth at four-and-a-half percent per annum, really. Mr Rudd talks about the integrity of the Treasury – nobody is challenging the integrity of the Treasury – but you’ve only got to pick up the newspapers to see that, I think, scepticism is the order of the day. I think people are talking about Pollyanna, a Pollyanna approach to budgeting. So the reality is that what he has done is he has run up the biggest deficit in the country’s history. So horrifying is that deficit that the Treasurer last night could not bring himself to utter the words. I mean there has never been a Treasurer’s speech on budget night where the Treasurer has not said what the budget result is. It’s like the chief executive of a company standing up at the AGM and overlooking and not telling the shareholders what the results are. He was ashamed of it. UHLMANN: Well Malcolm Turnbull, the lion’s share of that collapse is down to a loss of revenue, an unprecedented loss of revenue. Not since the 1930s have we seen a loss of revenue like this, so you also would be in deficit now if you were Prime Minister, wouldn’t you? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well even if you assume that’s the case, and I’ll come back to that in a moment, but even if you assume that’s the case, if I was Prime Minister, or if I was the Treasurer, and I was running a deficit, you can bet your bottom dollar I’d actually tell people what the facts were on the night. This guy is so gutless he wasn’t prepared to do it. UHLMANN: Would you be in deficit? There’s been a huge collapse in revenues, it would be unavoidable. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look I don’t think there’s any doubt that… the fact that there’s a deficit is hardly surprising. However, don’t get taken in by Labor’s line on this, because what Labor says is, if you agree or concede that there it is inevitable there be some deficit, then you give us a carte blanche to have any level of deficit; and they say, if you concede that the government should borrow one cent, then you shouldn’t object if we borrow any amount of money. The reality is we’ve got to ask ourselves how have they managed in this downturn, and the fact is peak net debt, as we know, will be $188 billion – that’s at the end of the forward estimates, it will actually grow higher than that outside of those estimates. In the last eighteen months since the election Mr Rudd has spent, has chosen to spend, discretionary spending, an extra $124 billion, so that’s two thirds of the 188 billion. UHLMANN: And Treasury says that without that spending we would be looking at double digit unemployment next year and GDP would be two-and-three-quarter percent lower, so that spending has filled the void of private sector capital as it retreats. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Chris, I do not agree with that. There is no question that much of the Labor Government’s spending has been economically ineffective. The cash splashes simply have not worked, and there is no evidence to suggest that they have. UHLMANN: The retail trade figures would suggest that there has been an effect. But there has been an effect, hasn’t there? MALCOLM TURNBULL: It’s a tiny effect. UHLMANN: But it is not no effect. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Chris just think about this. Just recently the Government handed out fourteen thousand million dollars, okay? Fourteen thousand million dollars, and then they were excited that the retail sales figures for the relevant month, for March, has gone up by $380 million. Now 380 isn’t much of a return on 14,000, and that’s really the point – that the bulk of these cash splashes get saved, not spent. They haven’t been effective. Mr Rudd has run up a massive deficit through reckless spending. The debt, the big debt level, the burden that’s going to be carried by Australians for generations to come, is two-thirds a consequence of his spending. Yes we’ve had a global downturn, there’s no doubt about that. But the question is: how has he reacted to it? And he’s reacted poorly. UHLMANN: Isn’t there a dirty little secret in Australian politics that neither you or Kevin Rudd is prepared to tell the Australian people, which is that one day there must be a very tough budget. We were operating at levels, and we had high income, and we spent that income, and now we’re going to have lower income, and we’ll have to cut our cloth. Won’t you at some stage have to cut the cloth on the structural overspend that we had? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well the only secret that Wayne Swan had last night was actually the amount of the deficit. If you were sitting at home watching this on television, and you hadn’t been following the financial pages day after day, you’d be sitting there wondering well, what’s the result, what’s the bottom line, and Swan was not prepared to utter those words. And this is typical of the way in which the Rudd Government is all about spin. Of course the $58 billion deficit was in the budget papers. The reason he didn’t want to say it was that he didn’t want a picture of himself on television saying we’re running a $58 billion deficit. Everything is about spin. UHLMANN: If you’re going to say that what the Government has done has been incorrect, what would have you done that would have been different that would have left Australia in a different position? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I can explain that very clearly. From the start, if we had been re-elected in 2007, we would not have talked up inflation and talked up interest rates. The Rudd Government for purely political purposes contributed to unnecessary interest rate rises in 2008, in the first half of 2008, which put a lot of stress on the Australian economy, right at the time when we didn’t need it, when in fact we should have had rates coming down, as they did later in the year. Secondly, we would not have had an unlimited bank deposit guarantee, which shattered the finance markets outside of the banking sector, and did enormous damage to the economy, particularly to the property industry, the motor vehicle industry. We would not have engaged in so much reckless and ineffective spending. The $42 billion stimulus that was proposed and legislated for in February, as you know, we opposed. But we didn’t say do nothing. We proposed much cheaper, much more effective measures. So the bottom line is we would have run the economy with an economic strategy rather than a political strategy of spin, we would have spent less, we would have spent more effectively, and where we intervened with credit markets, we would have done so more judiciously, more carefully, ensuring that we got the result without the damage. UHLMANN: Just quickly, you would have engaged in some stimulus spending, and there would have been a deficit. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look, it’s very hard to imagine a circumstance in which the budget this year would not be in deficit, but it may have been in deficit by a very small amount or it may have been in surplus by a small amount with different policies. But the point is, Chris, the issue is not deficit or no deficit, it’s the scale of the deficit. And you see this is the problem with Mr Rudd. Everything is dumbed-down for his spin. It’s all about spin. So he wants us to agree that if there’s going to be any deficit then he is at liberty to have the biggest deficit in Australia’s history, which is exactly what he’s delivered, and of course it was the deficit that could not speak it’s name last night. UHLMANN: Malcolm Turnbull, thank you. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Thank you. [ends]  malcolmWed, 13 May 2009 07:45:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:473http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/470/Labors-NationWrecking-Budget.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=470http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=470&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/470/Labors-NationWrecking-Budget.aspxThis Budget reveals the high price all Australians will pay for Labor’s reckless spending spree over the past 18 months. - One million unemployed by 2010-11, - a record $58 billion deficit, and - record net debt of at least $188 billion by 2012-13 are all key markers of the failure of the Rudd Government’s economic management. Two thirds of the debt owed by taxpayers in 2012-13 will be due to spending decisions taken by the Rudd Government over the past 18 months. Since the November 2007 election, Labor has announced measures which have increased Commonwealth spending by $124 billion. That is an average of $225 million of new spending per day. Labor pretends the destruction of our nation’s balance sheet is an unavoidable consequence of the global recession. But Labor has lost control of the public finances. The 2009-10 Budget delivers a dismal trifecta: record spending (29 per cent of GDP), a record deficit (5 per cent of GDP) and a further severe increase in the jobless rate to 8.5 per cent. Mr Rudd and Mr Swan have failed to deliver a credible plan for recovery. The Budget relies on rubbery figures projecting what would be an unprecedented future economic boom to show a path back to surplus. Having blown all the proceeds of the last mining boom, Labor is betting the house on another upswing that hasn’t even begun yet. Buried in the Budget’s detail are unrealistic and unachievable economic projections that rely on six successive years of above-trend economic growth and a further three years of trend growth to return to surplus and pay down Labor’s record debt. All of the Government’s allegedly tough ‘razor gang’ decisions delivered only $15 billion of savings over the forward estimates: less than 1 per cent of $1.7 trillion in expenditure projected over the five years. Labor’s out-of-control and undisciplined fiscal management doesn’t end at spending. Over the same 18 months since the last election, Labor has introduced tax hikes which increase revenue by $26 billion. Taken together, these decisions represent the biggest tax-and-spend binge in Australia’s peacetime history, driving an expansion in the size and scope of the public sector not seen since the Whitlam years. By 2012-13, net public debt will surge to $188 billion, double its previous record peak under Paul Keating. In reality borrowings are likely to be even higher, since this figure excludes debt associated with the National Broadband Network, RuddBank and other off-Budget liabilities. It took the Coalition and the Australian people more than a decade to pay off the previous debt left behind by Labor; how long will it take to pay off Kevin Rudd’s debt? The annual interest bill paid by the Australian people in 2012-13 will be $8 billion, more than the Commonwealth spends each year on infrastructure and housing combined. In summary, the 2009-10 Budget is a classic tax-and-spend Labor exercise, but on a far more reckless scale than ever seen before. The Australian people will pay a high price, in terms of higher future taxes, higher future real interest rates, higher future foreign debt and higher unemployment. The Budget also relies on rubbery figures and dodgy accounting to an extent unprecedented in the modern era. HEALTH: The Coalition believes in the right of all Australians to take charge of their own health care needs and plan for the future. That is why we don’t support Labor’s one size fits all approach. In government we promoted private health insurance to take pressure off Medicare. Labor has always opposed choice when it comes to health care while the Coalition has always believed that individuals should be supported to make their own decisions. The 11.1 million Australians with private health insurance have been dealt a blow by the Rudd Government’s attack on the private health insurance rebate. Australians will now pay more for their health needs. This is a clear breach of an election promise. Changes to the Medicare Safety Net will also have wide ranging effects on Australians trying to access essential services such as obstetrics, reproductive technology and cataract surgery. This is another clear breach of an election promise. SUPER AND PENSIONS: The Rudd Government has cut by one third the superannuation co-contribution scheme, which bolsters the retirement savings of low and middle income earners. Low and middle income earners will now receive $1 instead of $1.50 for every $1 contributed. Over 1.4 million Australians received a co-contribution in 2007-08. This disincentive to contribute to super is accompanied by a halving of the concessional limit on voluntary contributions. Australians will have to work longer because of Labor’s changes. Again, all of these measures are clear breaches of election commitments. Labor has made superannuation less affordable and attractive for millions of Australians, including many on modest incomes, yet is also raising the pension age from 65 to 67. Raising $4.3 billion by attacking superannuation sends a conflicting signal to Australians planning for their retirement. INFRASTRUCTURE: The $12.6 billion infrastructure fund set up in 2008-09 (all funded from Coalition surpluses) has been raided and only $250 million is left. Yet in spite of all Labor’s rhetoric about nation building, total expenditure over the next six years on roads, rail and ports will be less than that committed by the former Coalition Government. The $13.8 billion spent in total from three infrastructure funds - $3.2 billion from Health and Hospitals, $3 billion from Education Investment, and $7.6 billion from Building Australia - is less than two thirds of the $22 billion spent on Labor’s cash splashes. Labor will spend $53.2 million to conduct an implementation study into the National Broadband Network that will examine detailed engineering, commercial and structural issues, even though Mr. Rudd has already announced he will spend $43 billion on this unproven scheme. EDUCATION AND TRAINING: The Education Revolution is a failure. After the massive cost blow-outs of Computers in Schools, and disappointing mismanagement of the school hall program, the Government is offering nothing new for Australian schools at all. Universities have been let down. After promises of significant reform, and the year-long Bradley Review that urged more than $7 billion in new spending, less than a third has been forthcoming. New funding in universities is largely directed towards increasing student numbers to keep down the unemployment rate and obscure the reality of recession. RURAL AUSTRALIA: The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry is the only department hit with an efficiency dividend (of $12 million) through “identifying lower priority programs that can cease”. In addition, Land and Water Australia has been axed and $12 million has been taken from the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. TAXES: The Rudd Government has attacked the ability of many employees to participate in employee share agreements, by forcing them to pay upfront tax before they can receive equity entitlements. Employees will have to find cash to pay or decline to participate. The modest cost of extending and almost doubling the tax break for small business investment shows that this tax break, despite being increased once before, is not being taken up by cash-constrained businesses - just as the Coalition warned. 12 May 2009  malcolmWed, 13 May 2009 06:46:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:470http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/468/Interview-with-Steve-Price.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=468http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=468&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/468/Interview-with-Steve-Price.aspxSubjects: Labor's nation-wrecking Budget E & O E STEVE PRICE: Malcolm Turnbull the Opposition Leader’s in our studio in Canberra. Morning to you. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Good morning Steve. STEVE PRICE: This is supposed to be, by all previews, the horror budget. You must have a bit of trouble criticising it today because it’s not really a horror budget at all, is it? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well the deficit was so horrible that the Treasurer couldn’t even bring himself to mention it in his speech. This is the first time in history that a treasurer has given a budget night speech and has not mentioned, hasn’t had the guts to say what the result of the budget is. He couldn’t tell us, wasn’t prepared to say that it was $58 billion in deficit and he wasn’t prepared to say that the debt by 2012 would be $188 billion – the two key numbers he wasn’t prepared to utter. STEVE PRICE: Well it’s interesting you raise that deficit figure because I spoke to the Prime Minister 20 minutes ago. He says there’s absolute confusion in the Opposition ranks over what your deficit would be. Here’s what he told me. KEVIN RUDD: Here’s the rub. Today, less than 12 hours after the budget comes down, the Shadow Treasurer Mr Hockey and the Leader of the Opposition Mr Turnbull have fundamentally contradicted each other on what sort of deficit and debt they would support. Mr Hockey has said they would have a total deficit of $25 billion less than the Government. Simultaneously, on a different radio program, Mr Turnbull was asked the same question – he said it was impossible to provide a figure. Absolute chaos and confusion on something as fundamental as temporary borrowing for a temporary deficit and for net debt for the future. It’s time the Liberal Party got its act together because the future of the budget in the Parliament depends on what the Liberals do in the Senate. STEVE PRICE: You’d say they won’t utter the word. They say you don’t know what you’re talking about. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well the Prime Minister as usual is being… look, he’s just being dishonest. He’s misrepresenting what we’re saying. He does this all the time. He does it day in, day out. And he does it so often that we cease to be outraged by it. STEVE PRICE: So the figure Joe Hockey used is the figure you’re saying… MALCOLM TURNBULL: The reality is, Steve, is if we were, if we had been elected in November 2007, the deficit would be dramatically lower and the debt forecast in 2012 would be dramatically lower because there are a whole lot of things we would have done differently. It’s not just a question of spending less on the stimulus. And what Mr Rudd is referring to is the $42 stimulus package that he proposed in February; we countered with a counter proposal which was less than half what he was proposing. So he’s using that as the difference, the only difference. But the fact is, Steve, if we’d been elected we wouldn’t have done what Swan and Rudd did and we wouldn’t have talked up inflation, we wouldn’t have egged the Reserve Bank on to put up interest rates last year, which obviously damaged business, which put people out of work, which reduced government revenues. We wouldn’t have had an unlimited bank deposit guarantee which flattened every part of the finance sector outside of the banks. We wouldn’t have spent so much money, plainly. So there’s a whole lot of things, and you could form an assumption but it would be pretty speculative. STEVE PRICE: Joe’s formed an… I don’t want to get hung up on this but he’s formed an assumption. Do you agree with his assumption or you… MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I haven’t heard… Look, can I tell you, you’re relying on Kevin Rudd as a report for Joe Hockey so I would… STEVE PRICE: Well I heard Joe say it this morning. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well the reality is this: our deficit, if we were in government today, the deficit would be dramatically lower than it is, dramatically lower than it is, and not simply because we would have spent less but because we would have had different policies. STEVE PRICE: What about these growth predictions? Minus 0.5 next year and plus 0.5 the year after that and the year after that a 400 and a bit per cent turn around. How’s that going to happen? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, miracles I guess. Miracles do happen occasionally, but not that often. STEVE PRICE: Again I asked the PM that and he says well it’s the same independent Treasury officials who advised the Howard Government. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yeah, I know, he goes on about that. Look the reality is if he wants people to accept that forecast then what he should do is table the entire Treasury advice. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean people will agree with it. And one of the things that is most contemptible about the way Mr Rudd conducts political debate in this country is that when people say, as just about everyone is, ‘hang on four and a half per cent growth for seven years sounds a bit optimistic’, he then bridles and says ‘oh you’re attacking the integrity of the Treasury’. No one is attacking the integrity of the Treasury. We’re not attacking anyone’s integrity. What we’re saying is, as reasonable people, is that a dramatic and sustained turnaround at that level seems, given the history and experience, highly unlikely. STEVE PRICE: Well The Australian has described it as on a wing and a prayer. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Correct, and so, you know, are they attacking the integrity of the Treasury? Of course not and this is where Mr Rudd really debases the political debate. The fundamental issue that Australians are concerned about today is debt and deficit. You see, he can attack Joe Hockey, he can attack me, but what he can’t get around, even though his Treasurer isn’t prepared to utter the numbers himself, is $58 billion of deficit, deficits for a very long time, and a debt in just a few years of $188 billion and rising – that’s $9,000 for every man, woman and child in Australia. This is a dramatic, perilous turnaround in our public finances in 18 months. That’s what he really should be talking about. Instead of attacking the Opposition, the question he should be answering is: what are you going to do, what is your plan to get us out of debt? STEVE PRICE: They haven’t been terribly tough it wouldn’t appear to me on my reading so far with spending cuts. Would you be tougher? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, we will have to assess the situation we inherit. Yes, there is no question… STEVE PRICE: I mean, buried there in the Budget there apparently the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s own office has added 65 staff at the cost of $13 million. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, I haven’t noticed that detail. We’re still digging through it, Steve. STEVE PRICE: Well, I’ve heard him respond to that and the Prime Minister has accepted that that’s the case. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, there it is. That gives you an example of how lacking in conviction he is in terms of cutting costs. STEVE PRICE: 65 more people in the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s office. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look Steve, the reality is this: we are going into $188 billion of debt – fact. That’s what they’re forecasting. It’s probably going to be a lot higher than that. I mean none of the cost of the $43 billion broadband network is in any of these calculations, so if he proceeds with that you can add another $43 billion onto that 188. So 188 is a low estimate. But let’s say that’s what we’re heading for. Now, that is the simple fact that $124 billion, 124 thousand million dollars of additional spending was undertaken by Mr Rudd since the election. Now, that’s 124 thousand million of additional spending versus 188 thousand million of debt in a few years time. In other words, two-thirds of that debt has been contributed to by his spending. So, yes, there’s a global downturn, yes times are tough economically around the world, but Mr Rudd has made it worse and a lot worse. STEVE PRICE: Pensioners get more money. Are you now embarrassed that you didn’t do it when you were in office, give them the rise they needed? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, pensioners got a lot of increased benefits while we were in office in one-off payments and bonuses and indexation. There’s a whole range of measures. STEVE PRICE: But age pensioners, single age pensioners fell behind. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Steve, we addressed that last year and we actually brought a bill into parliament to increase the single age pension and the Government could have done that last year. Now they’ve chosen to do it in the Budget and we obviously welcome that decision. It’s one that we argued for. We championed the plight or championed the cause of single age pensioners last year. If we hadn’t done that, I very much doubt whether Mr Rudd would have taken it up. STEVE PRICE: Why did everyone on your side laugh when they announced that the retirement age should go from 65 up to 67 in 2023? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well okay, Steve… STEVE PRICE: Or did you, as I did, get the bit of paper out and work out how old I’d be in 2023 and I was horrified to work out I’m going to get caught. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, Steve, I’m really thrilled that you’re so young. You won’t get caught by much I suspect. STEVE PRICE: No, six months. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, there you go. Look, the fact of the matter is they said this was going to be a tough budget, right, and they said they were going to make big structural changes, and changing the age for the pension is a structural change and it’s one that’s been recognised as an issue. As Australians live longer and work longer and so forth it’s been recognised as an issue for some time. But to momentously announce you’re going to increase the age to qualify for the pension and then say it won’t hit until 2023, it isn’t really a, it isn’t a courageous or particularly tough decision. It’s a long way off. STEVE PRICE: That’s three years beyond the 2020 summit. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yes, well exactly, that’s right. So Mr Rudd obviously regards 2020 as being far off into the distance. I think the one thing we can be certain is that if that is the test of their toughness and their commitment to take on structural reform, just like we’ll never see a surplus from this Government, we’ll never see any tough reform from it either. STEVE PRICE: Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Thanks Steve. [ends]  malcolmWed, 13 May 2009 06:00:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:468http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/466/Million-Paws-Walk-this-Sunday.aspx#Comments2http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=466http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=466&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/466/Million-Paws-Walk-this-Sunday.aspx    Only a few more days left to go! Wow, only a few days left until the big walk.  Sunday 17 May.  Make sure you are at Million Paws Walk Central in a capital city or town near you.  There are 70 to choose from.  Visit www.mpw.org.au to find out your nearest location.   I’m Bouncer and I’ve been in training for a couple of months now.  I will be walking in Canberra, around the beautiful Lake Burley Griffin.  I have heard that about 4,000 other Canberra based dogs will also be walking, so I am really looking forward to seeing all of my cousins.   Some of the activities you can find at the Canberra walk include the Walk of Fame, this is where some of the dogs adopted in the last 12 months come back and show us how they are going.  We also have the Walk of Hope, a showcase of the currently available dogs.   There will also be plenty of food and drink, as well as a vet, games and prizes and over 50 trade stalls.   So what are you waiting for, get your Million Paws Walk gear from your local RSPCA shelter and get out and walk on Sunday May 17.   Bouncer   malcolmTue, 12 May 2009 00:03:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:466http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/465/An-Australian-Republic.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=465http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=465&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/465/An-Australian-Republic.aspx There are a lot of lessons from 1999 and I have learned at least a few of them. The republic should not be put up for another vote unless there is a strong sense in the community that this is an issue to be addressed NOW. That may have been the case in the lead up to the centenary of federation, but it is not the case at the moment.   In addition, in order to be successful a republic referendum needs to have overwhelming support in the community, bipartisan support politically and, in truth, face modest opposition. A republic referendum should not be attempted again unless the prospects of success are very, very high.   Losing a second time is a waste of time, money and political energy that could otherwise be spent on more pressing and immediate issues. So the minute one political party tries to make the republic a partisan cause of its own, it is likely to set it back. Keating's support for a republic was definitely a case of one step forward, two steps back.   The republic, if and when it happens, has to be owned by everyone. So what is the right time? Well, in 1999 I said that No meant No for a very long time. Those people who said that we could vote No and then have another referendum with another model in a year or two were, as I said at the time, either insincere or very naive.   But what is a long time? My crystal ball is as cloudy as the next person's but I do struggle to see how a republic referendum could get the level of support it needs to win during the reign of the present Queen. Not only is she much admired, but a lot of people quite reasonably will say that the vote in 1999 should last at least until there is a change of monarch.   I recall that Bob Hawke, more than ten years ago, was quite adamant that it was a mistake to have a referendum during the reign of the present Queen. He may have been right then. Certainly he must be right now.   malcolmMon, 11 May 2009 21:57:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:465http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/471/National-Families-Week-1016-May.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=471http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=471&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/471/National-Families-Week-1016-May.aspxSunday the 10th of May is Mother’s Day and also marks the beginning of National Families Week for 2009. 'National Families Week – celebrate how everyone makes a difference' – encourages all Australians to explore ways in which they can recognise, value and support the people who make a difference to the wellbeing of their family. As millions of families celebrate Mother’s Day, some for the first time, I would like to say thank you to the mothers and care givers who nurture our nation’s children and provide the love and care our kids need to ensure they grow up to be strong and resilient members of our community. On Mother’s Day and throughout National Families Week please remember those who provide support to the vulnerable and disadvantaged, and please give generously if you can.  malcolmMon, 11 May 2009 06:54:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:471http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/474/Salvation-Army-Red-Shield-Appeal-Launch-Parramatta.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=474http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=474&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/474/Salvation-Army-Red-Shield-Appeal-Launch-Parramatta.aspx“Salvation is freedom from the influences that crush the human spirit”. I was pleased to address the launch of the Red Shield Appeal for Western Sydney at the Parramatta Leagues Club. During tough financial times it is even more important to dig deep as the Salvation Army delivers many essential services to those in need –people who are vulnerable during good times, and even more vulnerable in tough times. The Salvation Army needs our support to open doors of opportunity to some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in our community. During the annual Red Shield Appeal, the Salvation Army is aiming to raise $73 million this year. In a climate of economic uncertainty, this task can not be achieved unless we all dig deeper so please give generously https://salvos.org.au/donate/secure-online-donations/?appeal=rsatall The National Red Shield Doorknock Appeal will involve around 100,000 volunteer collectors – which provides an opportunity for people to give at the door in support of the Salvation Army's good work. The doorknock will take place on the 23-24th of May, so if you want to help collect, or know someone who wants to be involved, click here www.salvos.org.au as the Salvation Army would welcome your assistance.  malcolmWed, 06 May 2009 20:10:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:474http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/464/Address-to-the-National-Press-Club.aspx#Comments4http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=464http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=464&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/464/Address-to-the-National-Press-Club.aspxWell thank you very much, Ken. All of us have great confidence in our nation. We have confidence in the energy and the enterprise, the enthusiasm, the capacity for hard work of all Australians and, of course, the great natural resources with which we are blessed. But as we consider these challenging economic times we need to have a budget next week that will be a platform for recovery. It must have a plan for recovery that is focused on jobs and is focused on delivering Australians the capacity to spring out of this downturn stronger than ever before. It needs to embody a clear and consistent strategy for growth. And if we look back at the Government’s conduct of the economy since its election, we have to ask ourselves whether they are capable of delivering such a strategy; whether they are capable of any consistency, any coherence; whether they are capable of deciding what they are. Are they Dr Jekyll, kind Dr Jekyll, handing out billions of dollars, or are they mean Mr Hyde, cutting back on essential services, tightening the belt, promising austerity. Extravagance on the one hand, austerity on the other – what is it to be? Nobody knows. We see today in the press, revealed by the Treasurer, that we, after, what, seven months of economic conservatism from Mr Rudd – that’s what he sold himself as, the great economic conservative – seven months of economic conservatism we are going to have at least, at least, seven years of economic austerity, seven years of deficit. And a Government debt, how large – he won’t tell us yet – perhaps we’ll find out next week but a debt that I suspect, I fear, will well exceed the $300 billion that the most pessimistic observers have been forecasting. Now what are the building blocks of a strategy that is going to deliver that platform for growth that is focused on jobs, jobs, jobs? Well the first thing, the fundamental thing, is that there must be not a penny more of debt than is absolutely necessary – not one penny more. You see, we can argue up hill and down dale the comparative benefits or merits of one spending program or another – this school hall versus that road, versus that port, versus that railway, versus that hospital – argue all of those points about spending, but the one thing that is unarguable, absolutely unarguable, is that if you have higher and higher levels of Government debt you guarantee that Australians in the future will pay higher rates of interest and higher taxes to pay it off. That is inescapable. That is absolutely inescapable. Now it follows, therefore, that when governments spend borrowed money they have to make sure they maximise the return for the taxpayer. It’s the difference, I suppose, between a family that borrows money to go on a lavish vacation or borrows money to renovate their house. At the end, after the vacation – the family that’s done that, they’re left with a debt and some snaps in the family album and some nice memories. The family, on the other hand, that borrowed the money to renovate their house is left with an improved asset and something of real value. And it’s exactly the same with nations, exactly the same with Australia. Debt which is incurred to fund investment in infrastructure that increases the productivity of Australia will, in time, pay for itself because it produces a stronger economy, it generates more jobs, more income and, therefore, more revenues to the Government. Now Labor endeavours to dumb down this debate, as they always do, by saying that if you agree or concede that there should be any level of debt – even a dollar – then you are giving them carte blanche to have as much debt as they are recklessly prepared to incur. And they do the same thing with the deficit. They say if we concede that the economic downturn is going to put the Government into deficit then we are giving them a carte blanche for any level of deficit. Now that defies common sense and it is an insult to the intelligence of all Australians. We need to know that we have a Government that will incur no more debt than is absolutely necessary and will keep the deficits as low as possible and will have a plan to restore us to surplus. That is the challenge. And yet we see from this Government so many mixed messages, so much confusion. As I’ve travelled around Australia I meet so many people scratching their heads about what the Government’s economic agenda is. They ask themselves – and they ask me – what are we going to get for all this debt, what is actually going to be left. In Cessnock in the Lower Hunter, in the week that the $42 billion cash splash was being debated in the press they were saying, ‘well, he’s sending out all these cheques for $900 but what about the F3 Link that links the Newcastle Freeway to the New England Highway. He’s not doing anything about that.’ Mind you, that’s in Joel Fitzgibbon’s electorate so I guess someone who can’t manage to pay the SAS on time would struggle to get a freeway underway. In Mackay, in Queensland, they asked why there was no funding for the missing northern rail link, and in Gladstone they asked why there was no money for their airport. Vital bits of economic infrastructure for which the Government has allocated nothing. And everywhere in Australia people ask why so much has been spent on handouts and so little or nothing spent on maintaining and upgrading hospitals. Remember this, the $23 billion in cash splashes could have paid to complete the duplication of the Pacific Highway from Brisbane to Sydney to Melbourne, right across to Adelaide, or it could have paid for 19 new public hospitals. And instead, what have we got for it, well, $23 billion went out the door. Most people, sensibly, used it to pay down debt. It didn’t deliver one job. It didn’t deliver any economic growth. Unemployment has continued to rise. Economic growth has continued to go backwards. But what it did deliver was $23 billion of debt. And you see the spin of the Government is well demonstrated in the way they talked about the cash splash back in December, as was revealed last night on Channel Seven with the documents they obtained from the Treasury. You could see there that there was no reasonable basis at all for the Government to say the $10 billion handed out in cash in December would create 75,000 jobs. That was, at best, an unreal outcome, a highly unreal outcome, based on the assumption that every single dollar of it would be spent and would be injected into the Australian economy, which of course would never happen – 80 per cent of the money was saved. It was always inevitable most of it would be saved and so it was. But the Government went out there and said this would create 75,000 jobs and they had no basis for saying so. So how can we trust them? The plan for recovery that the Government produces – and it should produce one in the Budget next week – must be a credible one. We have to remember that a high level of debt today, which the Government would justify as being necessary to deliver a fiscal stimulus, will undoubtedly be a fiscal drag tomorrow. I mean, if we think of Australia as an athlete, as a runner, what is the Government’s job? The Government’s job is to enable Australia, enable that athlete to do their best so there should be no more hurdles in that athlete’s way than can be avoided. There should be no lead weights put in his pockets or heavy backpacks put on his back. And yet that is what the Government is delivering to us with these higher and higher levels of debt. Inevitably this will slow the economy and we are in a very competitive world. We must ensure that we give Australians the best chance to do their best. It’s the same with this hopelessly flawed emissions trading scheme. Who knows where that will end up? The Government seems to change it by the day. What we do know at the moment is that what they have is guaranteed to slow our economic recovery, cost us jobs, export jobs – tragically – export prosperity and export the emissions as well. No economic gain. In fact, a serious economic loss and no environmental gain either. Now one of the key elements in this strategy has to be – the strategy the Government should undertake – is building confidence. Confidence is absolutely vital, and Mr Rudd recognised that and that’s why in 2007 he went around trying to present himself as a younger version of John Howard, the great economic conservative. He went to the expense of buying television ads and posing in front of office buildings, talking seriously, gazing at us earnestly through his spectacles about what an incredibly conservative person he was. Well of course he’s now become a democratic socialist. Although when we see this he’s switched of course to being a democratic socialist, which is just another way of saying you’re a socialist that doesn’t believe violent revolution – that’s what a democratic socialist means, which is a relief I guess. That’s some consolation for those of us on the conservative side of politics. But I’m reminded, when I think about his socialism, of the very shrewd observation Margaret Thatcher made about socialists when she said: ‘the problem with socialism is that at some point you run out of other people’s money.’ And Kevin Rudd I’m afraid has run out of all the money that Peter Costello and John Howard left him and he’s now borrowing money from the rest of the world. So his commitment to economic conservatism didn’t last very long and he reminds me of the man who groggy and hungover on New Year’s Day resolves to abandon his wild and reckless way of living, only to go back to his bad old ways the moment the hangover wears off. Now what are we to make of a Government that has this Jekyll and Hyde approach to the economy? You know the other day I was in Launceston and I went into a radio station there and they were having a competition, and people were being asked to call in and say what they were going to spend their $900 cash handout on. And the wackiest, the three wackiest entries were going to get another $900 – that’s the sort of mindset that Kevin Rudd has encouraged – and I wondered as I listened to that, just thinking about the debt that all of those nine hundred dollars were going to impose on Australians in the future and thinking about all of the jobs they would cost, all of the tax that people would have to pay, I wondered if there would be another competition which might invite people to call in and say what they might have spent their wages on if they had the job that they’d lost. Or how they might have spent the extra tax they had to pay to fund Labor’s debt or what they might have done with the money that they had to pay for medical services no longer available to them thanks to Labor’s budget. So no wonder people are confused. If there was enough money to announce a $43 billion National Broadband Network a few weeks ago, how can there be questions about whether it’s possible for the Government to finance critical health spending such as cancer drugs? If there was enough money to handout $23 billion in one-off payments, how can there be any question of the Government meeting in full its commitment to increase the single age pension? And since there was $3 billion available to put pink batts in the roofs of most Australian homes, how can there be any need to curtail part pension payments or concessions to self-funded retirees on modest incomes – many of whom have already suffered devastating losses in their superannuation funds? And since fourteen and a half billion dollars is being spent on primary school libraries and assembly halls, surely there can be no need to squeeze middle class income by increasing the cost of family’s private health insurance. And surely there can be no possibility of Labor reneging on the July 2009 and 2010 income tax cuts – so emphatically promised to Australians at the last election and now enshrined in legislation since the 2008 Budget. Tax cuts which I would remind you the Treasurer said would reward the hard work of Australians, would be a down payment on a more internationally competitive tax system, would create an additional 65,000 jobs, would enhance incentives for tax payers to upgrade their skills, would deliver assistance to working Australians and would be a first stage in the Government’s tax plan to flatten Australia’s personal income tax system. So if the legislated tax cuts are reversed will Labor concede that as a result hard work will not be rewarded, our tax system will be less competitive, our productive capacity will be diminished, more jobs will be lost, skills formation will be stifled, families will fall under more financial pressure, that Australia will not be prepared for its future economic challenges, and no, its plan is not after all to flatten our personal income tax system. And for the absolute peak, the acme in economic recklessness and inconsistency, consider Labor’s announcement of the $43 billion National Broadband Network. Now I just remind you that last year the Government observed and I quote: “..efficient public infrastructure investment requires …decision making based on thorough and rigorous cost-benefit analysis….a commitment to transparency at all stages…a public sector financial management regime with clear accountabilities and responsibilities.” You can just imagine the sanctimonious, earnest way the Prime Minister would have read that out if he’d been asked to – real determination, real consistency – but when Labor’s tender for a National Broadband Network failed, and they were left with nothing, with no policy, the Prime Minister announced that he would deliver to 90 per cent of Australian households and businesses a 100 megabits per second high speed broadband network, which would cost $43 billion, would be commercially viable, that the private sector would invest in – but they wouldn’t be able to buy 49 per cent, so he’d have to push a few back, it would be such a great deal – and he then went on television and encouraged mums and dads to invest. He made all these claims about a $43 billion plan without any business plan at all, not a line. Think about that. If any of the business people here today or watching this broadcast on television were to do that themselves they would find themselves down at ASIC so fast, dealing with some very unpleasant issues about their conduct – this was recklessness of the highest order. The next day the Treasurer was asked: you’ve said this is commercially viable, how many people will take up the service? Didn’t know. And what will you charge them? Don’t know that either. He didn’t know anything. They plucked that number out of the air and put it out there as yet another promise. Not a line of analysis, and, as many have demonstrated, it’s perfectly plain that even if you make very generous assumptions about the take up rate of this service, and a realistic cost, it cannot possibly be a commercially viable service. Now it’s often said that a vision without resources is a hallucination. Well let me say a $43 billion vision without any business plan, without any way of knowing how or whether it can be paid for, is more than that, worse than that, it is a very dangerous delusion indeed. Now by contrast we in the Coalition have set forward a positive agenda. We have developed, following our work with the community through our Jobs for Australia program of forums – and we’ve held nearly 50 of those around Australia, public meetings, and we have a website www.jobsforaustralia.com, on which we’ve had over 300 submissions – we’ve been reaching out, talking to business, particularly small business which is the engine room of the Australian economy and getting ideas to form our own platform, our own plan for recovery. And so when Mr Rudd says that the only alternative to his plans is nothing, that’s one of his favourite lines, he puts up some proposal or other and then he says if you don’t agree with that you agree with nothing – that’s Mr Rudd’s way – his way or nothing, if you don’t agree with him then you have nothing to say. Well we have a lot to say, it’s just a pity that the Prime Minister isn’t listening. Let me run through some of the proposals we’ve made, practical proposals as alternatives to his big spending, ineffective so-called stimulus programs. We propose that instead of the April cash splash we bring forward, for less than half the cost, the July 2009 and July 2010 income tax cuts. Now, surely now after the experience of the December cash splash of which 80 per cent was saved, it is perfectly plain that increases in permanent income, which is what this would have been, were more likely to boost spending than one-off handouts. In another proposal which has a very modest cost, arguably over time no cost to the budget at all, we’ve proposed that businesses be able to carry back losses. So if businesses make an operating loss this year or next, they should be permitted to ‘carryback’ up to $100,000 against taxes paid in the past three years. Now tax loss carrybacks are allowed in many countries, many comparable countries and they obviously do a lot to bolster cash flow, particularly in small businesses in these tough times. That is a good suggestion, a practical suggestion with very little cost to the budget because obviously a tax loss carried back – and so you recover the tax that you paid in the year when you made a profit – a tax loss carried back cannot be carried forward. So it’s really a timing issue. We proposed that the employment costs for small business be reduced as an alternative to some of the measures in the $42 billion fiscal stimulus. This would have actually reduced the on-cost of employing Australians for small businesses and by rebating a portion of the Superannuation Guarantee contribution. Recognising that the key focus for stimulus activity, if the Government is spending in that direction, should be on investing in economic infrastructure, we proposed that the increased funding for high quality public infrastructure – at least 50 per cent of all stimulus outlays should be directed to that end and that is areas such as road, rail, ports and other economically productive assets. So far under Labor, it’s been more like five per cent. We’ve proposed – again a practical measure with a modest budgetary cost – green depreciation for buildings, doubling the depreciation that building owners can take advantage of for investments in green refits, increasing the water or energy efficiency of buildings. We’ve proposed an approach using the internet to dramatically streamline red tape. One of the most common complaints we’ve had from small business at our forums is just the simple hassle, the red tape hassle of being in business. You know I think often in this town here in Canberra big business gets a very good hearing and big businesses have a lot in common with the public service. A middle level executive in a large company, a bank for example, has a fair bit in common with a bureaucrat in Treasury or Finance. But a small business person has to be everything. They have to be the chief executive, the chairman, the accountant, the HR officer, the information officer – have to do everything and the amount of red tape and regulation we impose on small businesses makes it very hard for them to do their job of creating the jobs Australia needs. So we’ve focused on that, reacted to that, responded to that. You’ll recall that here at the Press Club I’ve previously proposed that we should reform our business bankruptcy laws. At the moment our insolvency laws, unlike those in the United States, pay far too little regard to reconstruction and rehabilitation of businesses. All too often insolvency results in a fire sale, destruction of value, loss of jobs, bad result for the business and the economy all around. The focus should be on reconstruction and rehabilitation. And so a system closer to the US Chapter 11 regime would be very valuable. Again that is an example of a positive proposal that we have made in this case – as with many of our proposals – with very modest, in this case, no budgetary cost and in the others with a modest budgetary cost. Now they aren’t our whole plan of course – we’ll continue to develop that as we go forward towards the next election – but we have to remember that as a matter of our track record we have delivered solid, sound, responsible economic management. Remember that in 2007 Mr Rudd inherited zero net Commonwealth debt. In fact by running 10 surpluses in 12 budgets, the previous government, the Howard Government, had paid off $96 billion in debt left behind by Mr Keating and accumulated net assets of about $45 billion, or four per cent of GDP. So we took $96 billion of Labor debt, we paid it off and we had $45 billion in the bank, cash at bank. That was what Mr Rudd was left with. He was dealt the best hand of economic cards any prime minister could ever seek. And now we’re promised seven or more years of huge budget deficits. Sounds like an even more frightening version of the Pharaoh’s dream, doesn’t it? We had seven months of economic conservatism or prosperity followed by at least seven years of austerity and deficits. And what will the debt be at the end of it? $300 billion frankly looks optimistic. And this $300 billion is a telephone number or a very long telephone number but it means $15,000 of debt for every man, woman and child in Australia. So a family of four, it means $60,000 of debt. That’s what our children are going to be left with by the Rudd Government. It is a frightening prospect for them and it underlines the way in which this Government with its classically Labor addiction to debt has undermined our confidence as a nation, our economic confidence, and above all and worst of all impeded our capacity to recover from this downturn. Because just like that athlete at the starting blocks ready to go, so is Australia, so should Australia be poised to recover from this downturn and we need a government that is clearing the path ahead of us, taking the hurdles out of the way, ensuring that we are not weighed down with any unnecessary burdens. But instead we have a Government that is addicted to debt. A Government that does not know whether it is Jekyll or Hyde. Does not know whether it is spending up big – well, it has spent up big – or a government that is going to tell people who have just received $900 in a one-off payment in April, tell them in May that they are going to lose vital services because of the need to tighten their belts. And what have we seen for those cash handouts? We have seen no more for the people in Mackay, the people in Gladstone, the people in Cessnock, the people all around Australia who say, where is the investment in tangible economic infrastructure? Where are the roads, where are the ports? Where is the value that has been created by this Government? And the answer is – there is none. We go in to this difficult time, this next phase, with vastly more debt than we should have and it is not solely a result of the economic downturn. There are tens of billions of dollars thrown onto the shoulders of Australians by the deliberate, wrong-headed, mistaken, reckless policies of the Rudd Government. Now we recognise that Australians have put a lot of faith in Mr Rudd. They’ve elected him as their Prime Minister and they want him to do well; they want him to succeed. They’ve cut him a lot of slack because of the global recession. But now Australians are starting to see the result of Mr Rudd’s lack of discipline, lack of leadership. They’re seeing the results of his weakness. I ask you this: when did Mr Rudd last make a tough decision? When did he make an unpopular decision? All he’s done is be Santa Claus. He has handed out money left, right and centre. They’re foreshadowing some tough decisions in the budget. We will see. We’ll see what it contains. But right now all we have seen are weak decisions, lack of leadership on every front and the problem is as Margaret Thatcher so wisely observed, the problem with socialists like Mr Rudd is that at some point you run out of other people’s money. And he hasn’t just run out of other people’s money, he’s run out of ideas. He needs to have in the budget next week a plan for recovery. For the sake of all Australians, I hope he does. I doubt that he will. But I say this to you my friends, that when the time comes we in the Coalition, all of my colleagues here today and assembled together in Parliament, we will return to government with your support and we will put Australia’s finances back to right. We will return the budget to surplus. It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick. I fear we are going to be left an almost inconceivable level of debt by Labor but you know we have done it before and we will do it again because we will stand up for Australia. We will make the tough decisions, the strong decisions. We will lead where others have not and Australians know they can count on us to get it right, to get our finances right, to ensure that Australia rebounds from this downturn and realises its potential, its enterprise and its energy and the prosperity that that will deliver. Thank you very much. [ends]  malcolmWed, 06 May 2009 06:53:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:464http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/463/Retirement-of-Mick-Keelty.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=463http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=463&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/463/Retirement-of-Mick-Keelty.aspxThe Coalition places on the record its enormous respect and gratitude for the important work Commissioner Mick Keelty has performed on behalf of the Australian people. Commissioner Keelty has overseen the transformation of the Australian Federal Police into a modern law enforcement and counter-terrorism agency focussed on national security. During an intensely difficult period Commissioner Keelty has ensured his force has been rightly focussed on keeping our nation secure. Plots have been uncovered and important arrests have been made. On his watch, no terrorist attack has occurred on Australian soil. Commissioner Keelty’s leadership in the wake of the terrible Bali and Jakarta bombings has been historically significant. Not only has it helped to ensure the perpetrators of these evil attacks were brought to justice, it has also established a high level of police and security co-operation between Australia and Indonesia. It is this co-operation with Indonesia that is a continuing vital link in underpinning the security of our nation and our region. Commissioner Keelty should be proud of the legacy he leaves behind and we wish him all the best in his future endeavours. 6 May 2009  malcolmWed, 06 May 2009 05:31:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:463http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/460/Million-Paws-Walk.aspx#Comments2http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=460http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=460&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/460/Million-Paws-Walk.aspxDear all, We have another special guest blog from Bouncer, from the RSPCA today. Enjoy!   Cheers Mellie   Bouncer's Blog Hello everyone, I’m getting very excited now.  Less than three weeks now until the biggest multi site event Australia has seen gets under way.  I am of course talking about Million Paws Walk.  For the past few weeks I’ve been in training.  I am so excited about getting ready to walk for the RSPCA, I can’t wait to see thousands of my fellow four legged friends and their families out having a great time, all in the name of animal welfare.   Did you know that Million Paws Walk will be held at over 70 locations Australia wide.  I am of course walking in the most important one, the one in our nation’s capital.  But before the walk I will be making a special visit to Parliament House.  On Thursday 14 May I will be visiting our federal elected representatives and reminding all of them to get out to their constituencies and take part in a walk somewhere.   You too can help, it’s easy, register online at www.mpw.org.au or if you cant walk on the day why not set up a sponsorship page and help raise money for the RSPCA?  Why not get a corporate team together.  I know staff from the Taxation Department in Canberra are planning on a big team!   I better get going, I’m off to check out my sponsorship page, why not sponsor me here:   Cheers Bouncer malcolmMon, 04 May 2009 23:38:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:460http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/459/Time-to-get-it-right-on-Climate-Change.aspx#Comments1http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=459http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=459&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/459/Time-to-get-it-right-on-Climate-Change.aspxThe Rudd Government’s backdown on its proposed Emissions Trading Scheme means that Australia now has time to get this critical area of economic and environmental policy right. While the Government has proposed introducing a temporary fixed carbon price from July 2011, the ETS as originally envisaged will now not commence operation until July 2012. This means there is now time to get design of the ETS right and answer many crucial questions left unexplained by the so-called Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – in particular its near-term impact on jobs, investment and Australia’s regions. Introduction of an ETS represents the largest policy-driven change to the Australian economy in history, a fact only belatedly acknowledged by the Prime Minister. Yet the changes proposed today by Mr Rudd and Senator Wong make their already-complex scheme even more complicated and fail to address several of the key objections levelled by business and community groups: • There is still no forecast of the near-term impact of the ETS on jobs and economic growth. • Australia’s trade-exposed industries are still placed at a disadvantage to their competitors, even though the disadvantage is less severe than in the original scheme. • There is still no assurance that overall emissions would be reduced by investment in complementary abatement measures such energy efficiency. The energy efficiency measures that the Government has proposed are largely tokenism. • There is still no scope for abating Australia’s overall emissions by offsetting or crediting biochar, better land management and other green carbon measures advocated by the Coalition. • Australia’s largest export earner, the coal industry, is still treated anomalously. In short, Mr Rudd and Senator Wong have tinkered with a deeply flawed proposal that still looks likely to damage the economy, yet has not so far been demonstrated to be the most cost-efficient or effective way to reduce carbon emissions. Rather than attempting to push the increasingly complex and compromised existing ETS through the Senate in pursuit of political goals, they should refer its design to the Productivity Commission to assess whether it meets the nation’s economic and environmental objectives. “For months the Coalition has raised concerns about the Government’s flawed proposals,” said Andrew Robb, Opposition spokesman on Emissions Trading Design. “Today’s announcement does little to address our fundamental concerns. Australian export and import competing businesses will still pay a hefty tax that our competitors won’t pay.” “There is still no analysis of the effects of this policy on jobs, regions and industries,” said Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull. “There is scant recognition of complementary measures and no evidence this is the best way to reduce emissions. While the Government has delayed the start date, that’s less important than getting the details right so we don’t send jobs and industries offshore.”  malcolmMon, 04 May 2009 07:08:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:459http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/458/Doorstop-Interview-Potts-Point-Sydney.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=458http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=458&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/458/Doorstop-Interview-Potts-Point-Sydney.aspxSubjects: Rio Tinto/Chinalco; tax cuts; Budget. E&OE………………………………………………………………………………… MALCOLM TURNBULL: I make no apologies for standing up for Australia, for standing up for our national interest. Mr Swan has accused me of raising “reds under the beds” scares because of what I have said about Chinalco. Let’s be quiet clear about this – it is a fact that Chinalco is seeking to acquire a position of enormous influence over our second largest natural resource company, Rio, and will have enormous influence over our biggest iron ore deposit, the Hamersley iron ore deposits. This is a transaction of enormous national significance. Now Chinalco is a Chinese government company. It is for all intents and purposes a transaction between Rio and the Government of China. The senior executives of Chinalco are appointed by the central organising committee of the Communist Party of China. That is a fact. Now these raise very big issues of national interest and national sovereignty and for Mr Swan to politicise them and trivialise them shows us he is not taking his responsibilities of defending Australia’s national interests seriously. Let me just now turn to the other matter that Mr Swan raised relating to tax cuts. Labor went in to the last election promising tax cuts which were then duly passed into law and they are due to come in to effect on July 1 this year and July 1 next year. Mr Swan is now indicating or hinting that those tax cuts are going to be abandoned and that Labor will renege on its election promise and seek to repeal the legislated tax cuts we have. And this just underlines the confused nature of the Rudd Government’s economic policy, their Jekyll and Hyde approach. On the one hand they have borrowed 23 thousand million dollars, $23 billion dollars and given it away in cash splashes, running up our debt to what is approaching record levels, and then in the next breath they say we will have to tighten our belts and they are going to renege on commitments they gave to the Australian people and which the Australian people relied on in electing them into government. This is a government whose economic policy is all over the shop. They don’t know whether they are tightening their belt or throwing money around like Santa Claus on steroids. They have no coherent economic strategy and they must stick to their election commitments. What we need from Labor is a plan for recovery. That is the big difference between us and Labor. Labor lurches from spending to reneging on election tax cuts. They are all over the shop. We are consistently standing up for a plan for recovery. That is why we have laid out a clear six point plan for small business that will enable small business to continue to grow, to keep people on the payroll, to create and maintain jobs. We need leadership; we need a plan for recovery. We are offering one. Labor isn’t. QUESTION: People are aware of the financial situation and specifically Wayne Swan was not ruling out scrapping the tax cut for high incomes earners, could that be the way to go? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Mr Swan and Mr Rudd took those tax cuts to the election and they were elected. They then passed them into law. They then chose to borrow $23 billion dollars and give it away in a cash splash. So what type of confused economic approach is this that has a government on the one hand handing out money in a completely unprecedented way and then on the other hand breaking its word and reneging on its commitments? You see there is no consistency there. They are either being Santa Claus or they’re being Scrooge McDuck. They don’t know what they are. They don’t know whether they are handing money out or tightening the belt. This government is deeply confused about its economic policy. What we need is clarity. We need leadership and we need a plan for recovery. That is what we are offering. QUESTION: The Government has announced they may have a shortfall in revenue of $115 billion dollars. What is you view on that and the cash hand outs that have already gone out? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well there was always going to be, given the economic circumstance, there was always going to be a decline in government revenues particularly in terms of company tax. So the Government knew that was coming. But even though they knew that was coming and even though they knew that the economic impact of these cash splashes is very modest, very modest indeed – because the bulk of the money is saved not spent and you have had the IMF confirming that only a week or so ago – even in the light of that knowledge they then went ahead, borrowed the money and gave it all away. QUESTION: On the Budget, what is your view on the Government’s announcement about the support for cancer treatments and the PBS? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well it is vital that the Government continue to provide real support and effective support to sufferers of cancer. This is a very, very high health priority. We are very concerned in this confused approach that the Government is taking, this Jekyll and Hyde approach, where on the one hand they are giving money away in an unprecedented fashion, on the other hand they are going to be cutting back on essential services, reneging on election commitments. What are the Australian people to make of a government that is on the one hand throwing money out the door, borrowing billions, throwing it out the door in cash splashes and then on the other hand threatening to cut back on tax cuts that have already been promised and legislated for, on vital medical services, cutting back on benefits to self-funded retires and pensioners. This is a Government that is deeply confused. It does not have a plan for recovery. Its policies are completely inconsistent. You can’t be spending like Santa Claus on the one hand and then cutting back on vital services on the other and expect people to think you know what you are doing. The difference between Labor and the Coalition is that we have a clear plan for recovery. That is our focus and our commitment. [ends]  malcolmSun, 03 May 2009 02:33:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:458http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/454/Power-Balance-in-Asia-The-Coalition-perspective-Address-to-the-Lowy-Institute.aspx#Comments72http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=454http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=454&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/454/Power-Balance-in-Asia-The-Coalition-perspective-Address-to-the-Lowy-Institute.aspxWell thank you very much, David. It’s great to be here today, and congratulations to David for what you and your family do in so many ways, but particularly in establishing the Lowy Institute – it’s an enormous contribution to the extent and the quality of public debate in Australia. Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me begin today with a story about a spectacular Australian success in the export markets of Asia. It is about a milestone very recently achieved, but scarcely acknowledged. In 2008, Australia’s merchandise exports to one Asian market grew by a spectacular 50 per cent. And, for the first time ever in a calendar year, Australia’s exports to that same market surpassed the $50 billion mark – more than four times greater than our exports over the same year to the United States. So which of our customers am I talking about? If you think the answer is China, think again The dramatic jump in exports growth to Japan in 2008 rated barely a footnote in a statement by Trade Minister, Simon Crean, on February 3 despite the fact that, in the months of November and December, the value of our exports to Japan exceeded the value of our exports to China, the US and India combined. Is anyone as surprised as I am by how little attention this has received? You might have thought this stellar performance in our trade with Japan would have figured more prominently in government efforts to keep up the confidence of Australians about our capacity, at least initially, to withstand the difficult global economic conditions we face. Instead, a front-page report in the Sydney Morning Herald had the Prime Minister seeking to calm Australians with news of how he had received a personal assurance from Premier Wen Jiabao that, “China’s demand for exports would remain strong enough to prop up the Australian economy in the face of the global economic slowdown.” I raise this simply to make the point that sometimes we tend to become a little too fixated on China in our strategic thinking, to the exclusion of other nations and other issues. For all the inevitability of its expanding strategic footprint, we need to remind ourselves that China is but one major power among several major powers in the region. In that context, our strategic partnership with our great ally, the United States – and the web of other US alliances across the region , including Japan, as the second largest global economy – will remain absolutely critical as far into the future as the eye can see. Yet such is the extent to which China has become the headline story in our foreign policy, economic and strategic debates that I feel duty bound to devote much of our time here today to setting out the Coalition’s perspective on how relations with China should best be managed within our broader foreign policy. Australians must always think clearly and objectively about our foreign relations and those with China in particular. For it is not helpful either to exaggerate fears or expectations of China’s role as the coming world power. In this, I subscribe to the formula  articulated by my good friend, and a great Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, who said our approach to China’s re-emergence as a great power should be characterised by “a spirit of ambition without illusion.” Above all, relations with China must be rigorously guided by the same principles that guide China’s relations with us – national self interest. I spent some years of my business life pursuing mining ventures in China. These found me not so much in the big cities, but in provincial cities and towns negotiating access to mineral resources. As a result of that work I established what was, I believe, the first Sino-Western mining venture, a zinc-gold mine in Zhangbei Country in Hebei Province at a place called Caijiaying. As I travelled around dealing with provincial and municipal governments, geological bureaus as well as central ministries in the capital, I learned to respect how different Chinese perspectives were to our own. Yet there were also some fundamental similarities. I found the keys to business success were straightforwardness, clarity of expression and above all, strength of commitment and purpose. There were many moments of great insight into the realities of Chinese administration. On one occasion, I was spending a lot of time in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province, discussing gold mining joint ventures with the local geological bureau, which had of course access to all the relevant geological data. The Director of the Bureau and I had been looking closely at some deposits in the hills behind Dalian when he said we should jointly develop the Paishanlou gold deposit. I told him I had seen the then Premier, Li Peng, sign a joint venture to develop that deposit with the largest gold mining company in the world, Barrick Gold Corporation, in Beijing and in the presence of the Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney. The Director said, yes, that had been done. But the people in Beijing had cut him out of the deal – and so he had refused to give them any of the data. How do you get away with that? I asked.  “Shan gao huangdi yuan” he replied “The mountain is high and the emperor is far away.” I stayed out of that one – but I also noted some time later, Barrick pulled out of the deal complaining they couldn’t get the data and the Liaoning Geological Bureau developed the mine themselves, opening it in 1998. However against that reality of considerably more local autonomy in fact than most people realise or recognise, you have to set 3,000 years of a highly centralised and elitist administrative culture. China has a sense of itself, and its exceptionalism, that is unique. The Chinese know that three hundred years ago they were the wealthiest and strongest nation in the world. Then they became weak and vulnerable. European nations a fraction of their size plundered China and carved out concessions – be they territorial, political or commercial. And indignity of indignities, tiny Japan, conquered and occupied much of their nation. We should never forget that freedom from foreign ownership and control of China’s resources was a key objective of Mao’s revolution. No wonder his first words as he stood, triumphant on Tienanmen, were “Zhongguo renmin zhan qilai le” – The Chinese people have stood up! Then decades of communism saw China’s potential suppressed and diverted. Catastrophic political measures like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution devastated generations. Chinese of our parents’ generation would have been excused for thinking that history was, for China, just a series of unrelenting humiliations and calamities. Today, all that has changed. The rapid growth in Chinese wealth and power that frightens many in the West is, from a Chinese perspective, simply a return to situation normal – a return to a time when China, once again, is standing up as the great power it has been for almost all of recorded history. So with those reflections – both general and personal – let me now set out some of my views on how Australia can best position itself for ongoing success in the Asia-Pacific and in particular in terms of our relations with China. In doing so, I want to stress the importance of Australia demonstrating consistency of purpose, a coherent set of principles, fidelity to the values of the Australian people and maximum transparency in the conduct of its relationships across the region. The rapid economic growth in China and India, in particular, is giving both countries greater geopolitical clout. China is stepping into the role of a great power more rapidly than India but it would be naive to imagine India is going to be far behind.  And given the spectacular impact on living standards of rapid economic development in China and India, as indeed across most of East Asia, we should regard these changes overwhelmingly as a positive. If you take the APEC economies as an example, which together account for three billion people, poverty has halved in just 20 years. By any measure of the human happiness index, that represents an astonishing quantum lift in prosperity and security. This owes much to the embrace by Asia, including by the world’s largest communist state, of many of the principles of economic liberalism. For this reason, we in the Coalition approach our engagement across the Asia-Pacific with a sense of confidence and optimism. This does not mean there will not be many challenges. To our far north, Russia appears frustrated, and sometimes fractious. North Korea remains dangerously unpredictable. In central and south Asia, non-state actors such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban, through their campaigns of terror and insurrection, seek to undermine the very viability of nation-states, not only Afghanistan but, increasingly, and troublingly, Pakistan. Nearer to home, Burma remains incorrigible, and Thailand divided. Even in the Pacific, among the small states in our direct sphere of interest, and responsibility, we have seen democracies demeaned and diminished by resort to power through the barrel of a gun. These are difficult times, made many times more difficult by the shock to the global economy. No longer can we count on the cohesive effects of the general lift in the comfort index arising from a lengthy global boom. In Australia’s case, one immediate effect is the fall-off in volumes and prices for our exports of coal and iron ore to the leading markets and it might be some time yet before we see a repeat of those record-breaking trade figures for 2008. This changing landscape will demand that we demonstrate superior management skills to ensure our interests are protected and enhanced. This brings me to the performance of the Rudd Government. Anyone watching the Prime Minister’s helter-skelter diplomacy in these past months might be left puzzled as to where exactly we are seeking to position ourselves in our relationships with the leading powers of Asia. Several Asian capitals could also be forgiven for being slightly mystified. What were the Japanese to make of Mr Rudd’s baffling decision to exclude Tokyo from his first major trip to the region as Prime Minister? What were Jakarta and Singapore to make of his rush-of-blood commitment to reinvent the architecture of the Asia-Pacific before consulting properly on the implications for existing regional fora? What was New Delhi to make of the Rudd Government’s talk of stronger and deeper ties when measured against Labor’s boycott of uranium exports to India, for reasons owing far more to internal politics within the ALP than to principle or national interest? Strength of purpose communicated with clarity and consistency should always be the hallmark of our foreign policy. The Prime Minister’s approach to China has not been as clear and consistent as it should be, or given his background, as we would have expected it to be. His attempt to present himself, for example, as some kind of intermediary between the United States and China is neither helpful nor convincing. Nor does it seem to be particularly welcome on either side. The relations between the United States and China are rich, complex… and very capably managed by experienced people. The risk of Mr Rudd representing himself as some kind of trans-Pacific interlocutor is that he will be perceived by the Americans as being overly sympathetic to China and by the Chinese as a bearer of other people’s messages, rather than an advocate of his own. We must never forget that great powers, like great rulers, regard deference as their due. So those who seek to earn brownie points, by flattering or favouring a great power are at risk of being seen as doing no more than what is expected, at worst as showing weakness. I was disappointed, therefore, by the manner of Mr Rudd’s recent very public advocacy of China having a larger shareholding in the IMF. Now at one level this is no big deal. After all, the Howard Government supported changes to the IMF to allow China to have a greater role at the G20 meeting in Melbourne in 2006. But the persistent way Mr Rudd advocated this agenda on his recent overseas trip begged at least two questions. First, why single out China? What about India? What about Brazil or Russia? The membership of the IMF reflects the economic order of a generation ago, that is true, but China is not the only country whose economic stature has dramatically grown. Second, why was the Australian Prime Minister running this line so relentlessly? On his most recent trip to New York, Mr Rudd became so seized by the imperative of greater global engagement with China that he forgot he had a great story to tell American audiences about the strength, stability and security of our own economy and financial system, as an attractive destination for business and investment Then came the controversy over his Defence Minister’s receipt of substantial gifts of travel to China which he had not disclosed. All of a sudden, Mr Rudd became very sensitive to criticism about his approach to China. This led to his refusal, on a television set, to sit next to the Chinese Ambassador to Britain, Fu Ying, who was previously Ambassador in Australia and well known to many of us. Let me say, I will never decline the opportunity to sit next to and converse with Ambassador Fu. Now if this episode appears erratic, what are we to say of the recent high-level briefings to the media about the strategic underpinnings of the Government’s Defence White Paper? Let me state this plainly: it makes no sense for Australia in 2009 to base its long-term strategic policy on the highly contentious proposition that Australia is on an inevitable collision course with a militarily aggressive China. For our own part, Australia should be proactive, working with our allies, in encouraging China’s constructive engagement with the region and globally, across the whole gamut of economic, environmental and security challenges facing the world. We are at our best when we are honest, upfront and true to ourselves. Neither an intermediary, nor an apologist, but a straightforward, respected and distinctively Australian voice in the great debates of our time. Given China’s experience through its history of unwelcome foreign intervention, it is important China be reassured that we in Australia have no interest in policies of containment, directed at China or anyone else. In longer-term defence calculations, we must be extremely careful not to confuse our analysis of China’s aspirations for a credible modern military with an assumption that building more sophisticated defence systems will necessarily translate in the decades beyond into an aggressive mindset of force projection. China has shown no inclination since the 1970s to export its ideology. Having spent some time working in both China and Siberia and knowing a little about the strength of feelings on both sides of the border, I must say that I have been very impressed by the way China has recently confirmed its borders with Russia. Very large Chinese territories in the north east of China were acquired by the Russians following the unequal treaties of Aigun (1858) and Beijing (1860). China’s pragmatic acceptance of these historical wrongs is not indicative of a nation intent on a program of global expansion. So while it would be unwise to discount entirely any contingency which may arise from a shift in the regional balance of power, nonetheless I believe the Prime Minister would have been wiser  and stayed closer to the facts, if he had avoided rhetoric about an Asian “arms race”. Let’s be very clear about this: there is no conceivable security challenge for Australia in the foreseeable future – be it border protection, preventing the spread of swine flu, or indeed any emerging regional tensions – that will not involve Australia working closely and co-operatively with key allies such as the US and Japan as well as our other friends and partners across the region. We need China to be a responsible stakeholder in helping meet these challenges as they arise, and over recent times China has demonstrated an increasing readiness to step up to this responsibility. We welcome China’s broader engagement and look forward to China playing a leading and constructive role. As Alan Dupont, reflecting on the recent media leaks about the strategic calculus of the Defence White Paper, pointed out in The Australian (April 14, 2009): “It makes no sense to allow worst case assessments of China’s intentions and capabilities to determine the next 20 years of Australian defence spending and strategy, especially when these views are based on prejudice rather than informed analysis…” Under the Howard Government we had enormous success in building a much stronger, broader and deeper relationship: •    opening dialogue at the highest levels across the issues of security, defence and human rights; •    better using people-to-people links going back six generations, •    and developing mutual understanding through the tens of thousands of young Chinese students choosing Australian universities for their further education. What’s more we did it while at the same time also strengthening our ties with the United States, Japan and India – a very significant diplomatic achievement. This was a commonsense approach to the conduct of relations between two countries so vastly different in traditions and values while never forgetting that a readiness to stand up resolutely for one’s own interests is a respected quality, in Asia as elsewhere. Which brings us to the question of China’s investment strategy – a strategy which offers opportunities and risks for a country like Australia. A key Chinese strategy today is to acquire access and, preferably, control of natural resources around the world. China knows that as its economy continues to grow it will need to import more and more of the world’s natural resources. Its growth, and demand for those resources, in recent years surprised everyone and this surge in demand resulted in a spike in prices before the recent downturn. So it is in China’s interest to be able to secure as much of these natural resources and do so in a way that ensures it will have enough supply in the future when growth returns to keep prices low. And that is why China’s state owned companies are busy buying resource assets on every continent, including our own. In this sense there are parallels between China’s strategy today and Japan’s in the 1970s – but they only go so far. China’s acquiring companies are all state owned enterprises. They are in every respect agents of the Government and their activities, their access to finance are dependent upon their acting in accordance with the strategic direction of Government. The global financial crisis offers enormous opportunities for China in pursuit of this strategy as it does for every cashed up investor. While the rest of the world is deleveraging and asset prices are plunging, China is there with the largest cash stash on earth ready to take its pick of cheap assets. So in a nutshell what is China’s national interest? It is to use the opportunity of the global financial crisis to acquire as many premium resource assets around the world so that it emerges with a global portfolio of sufficient scale and diversity to enable it to secure long term and low cost access to the natural resources it needs. Now, what then is our national interest? Australia’s national interest is to ensure wherever possible that the control of its major natural resource assets remains in the hands of companies that will pursue the development of those assets in a way that will maximise the economic returns for Australia. We should be very wary of acquisitions where the commercial interests of the would-be purchaser may be at odds with the Australian national interest. Peter Costello’s decision to block Shell’s acquisition of Woodside in 2001 was a good example of such an approach. Mr Costello took the view that Shell, owning a number of competing natural gas assets, may have had a commercial motive not to fully develop the Woodside resources. Does it matter that a Chinese company is a state owned enterprise? In my view it does matter a great deal. One may well ask – why would we allow the Government of a foreign company to acquire assets in Australia we would never contemplate an Australian Government acquiring? The hot issue in this context at the moment is the proposed Chinalco/Rio transaction, currently before the Foreign Investment Review Board. Rio is in need of cash to pay down the debt it ran up when it bought Alcan at a massive premium to its share price in July 2007, just a month or two before the sub-prime crisis hit financial markets. Chinalco had earlier staged a raid on Rio buying 9% of its shares on market as a means of blocking BHP’s now withdrawn takeover offer for Rio. The Chinese Government plainly saw it as not in its interest, as a big and growing buyer of iron ore, for the two largest iron ore producers in Australia to get together. The financial crisis delivered an opportunity to go a lot further and the Rio/Chinalco deal will deliver to Chinalco interests in Rio which will not simply block any other party from taking over Rio, but which will give Chinalco direct management involvement and a high level of influence right down at the operating level of Rio’s most important assets including in Australia its Hamersley iron ore operations as well a range of its aluminium assets. The object of the Chinalco acquisition is plainly strategic. This will give Chinalco, and hence the Chinese government, the seat of greatest influence and access to information about production, costs, pricing and marketing strategies of our second largest resource company. Rio promotes the transaction on the basis that Chinalco is paying a big premium to the current market value of the assets. That only serves to emphasise the strategic nature of the transaction. This could be described as a classic case of “same bed different dreams” or “tong chuang yi meng”.  The shareholders of Rio are dreaming of selling commodities at the highest possible prices. The Chinese side is dreaming of securing long term, reliable supplies of all those commodities at what they would call reasonable, and what others may regard as low, prices. I have three major concerns about acquisitions of this kind. First, there is the matter of state owned enterprises. Assurances that they act the same as private companies are not persuasive. After all we know that even Australian government owned businesses do not operate in the same way private companies do! In China the chief executive and senior executives of the major SOEs two or three rungs or below are appointed directly by the Central Organisation Department of the Communist Party. The architect of the Rio deal, Mr Xiao Yaqing, is now a Vice-Minister in the Government. Indeed it is worth noting that the transaction documents would allow Chinalco to transfer its interests in the operating joint ventures including the Hamersley iron ore mines to another Chinese Government state-owned enterprise. The deal therefore is, for all practical purposes, between Rio and the Government of China itself. Second, there is the matter of conflict of interest. It is obvious that there are concerns with a major purchaser of our commodities acquiring a position of considerable influence and access to information in the operations of a leading producer of those same commodities. Third, there is the matter of mutuality. There is no prospect that an Australian or any foreign company would be able to acquire a stake of this kind in a major Chinese resource company – not least because they are all state owned. Based on what we know from the public domain, it is the view of the Coalition that the Chinalco/Rio transaction should not be approved by the Treasurer in the form in which it has been presented. None of these remarks should be regarded as being unsympathetic to Chinese investment per se. And indeed there are growing concerns about, and opposition to, Chinese state owned corporations’ acquisitions in other countries including the European Union and the United States. One ready solution for China, of course, is to privatise these state owned corporations so that they can be seen to operate entirely independently of the Government. Given that the fastest growing and most dynamic firms in China are invariably, privately owned, that should be in China’s interests as well. So in summary; in dealing with China, as with all great powers, we should be straightforward and strong in clearly articulating our own national interest. If we wish to express our approach in Chinese, then we could paraphrase Mao Zedong and say: “Aodalia renmin zhan qilai le” – The Australian people have stood up. [ends]  malcolmFri, 01 May 2009 04:10:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:454http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/455/Kings-Cross-Festival-Pooch-Parade.aspx#Comments2http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=455http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=455&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/455/Kings-Cross-Festival-Pooch-Parade.aspxGet your prettiest dog finery together this weekend for the Potts Point Pooch Parade and Show at the Kings Cross Festival. Malcolm has the lucky job of opening the Festival and more importantly, judging all the pretty pooches at the show. Unfortunately this means that Mellie’s beauty pageant dreams will be overlooked because the judges could be potentially biased if she entered the show.    Instead, Mellie, Spook, Bandit and I will be on the prowl for any bacon and egg rolls or other such delicacies. We hear there will be a number of chefs and restaurants about – plus interactive food demonstrations – so we have been practising the ‘fake nonchalance then pounce on food’ technique. We also find the ‘big eyes sad face’ technique also works well on particularly dog friendly looking humans.   All the pooches will be about from 10am with judging to begin at 11am. The Festival is under the trees in Fitzroy Gardens beside the El Alamien fountain in Macleay Street, Potts Point.   For more information about the festival, visit http://www.kingscrossonline.com.au/events/   Cheers JoJo malcolmFri, 01 May 2009 04:08:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:455