17 September, 2012
Sky News AM Agenda
With Kieran Gilbert and Nick Champion MP
17 September 2012
8:45am
E & OE
Subjects: Polls, defence secretary, Sydney riot
KIERAN GILBERT:
Joining me now Labor MP Nick Champion and Liberal frontbencher Senator Mitch Fifield. Gents, good to see you both. Senator Fifield, first to you on the polls. Chris Pyne conceded that the Government’s approach on tackling Tony Abbott is working. We can see it in the numbers today, that trend continues. Is that a worry?
MITCH FIFIELD:
I think even the worst government can, on occasion, string a few weeks together which aren’t as bad as the previous weeks. And I guess that’s been reflected in the polls. There is no doubt that the Government has changed strategy. They are now targeting Tony Abbott in a very personal and vicious way. I think particularly appalling is the attempt to portray Tony Abbott as somehow anti-women. That’s not based in fact. It’s not based in his life. But it does go to show just how desperate the Labor Party is. They don’t want to talk about policy. They want to target personally the individual of Tony Abbott.
KIERAN GILBERT:
I’ll go to Nick Champion on that in just a moment but some of these things that have prompted the discussion about Mr Abbott’s character seem to have emerged from not within the Labor Party at least, former colleagues at university and so on.
MITCH FIFIELD:
It’s interesting when you look at the episode that Julia Gillard had recently in relation to her days as a solicitor. All of the information, all of the peddling of that was coming from the Labor movement. People in the Labor party. People in the trade union movement. The attacks on Tony Abbott are coming from fellow Labor travellers. So I think you’ve got to look at the source of the attacks and the source of the attacks on Tony Abbott are purely partisan ones.
KIERAN GILBERT:
Well they seem to be having an impact on the approval rating. The Government, it’s hard to deny, has really focussed in on that, those personal attacks on Mr Abbott’s character.
NICK CHAMPION:
Well look I think Mr Abbott is reaping what he sowed, and he tilled the soil with salt for so long that he’s finally being held to his own standards. He’s finally being held to account over his irresponsible scare campaign on carbon where he just overegged the pudding to such an extent that now he looks like a fool. He looks like an idiot now because he sort of talked it up so much and of course it isn’t the great disaster that he said it would be. And we’re starting to see the implications of liberal governments, which is cuts in jobs and then behind that, an idea about cutting wages which is why we hear people talking about $2 an hour and why the Liberal Party won’t reveal its industrial relations policy. And we know these policies are pursued by conservatives around the world, in the UK and in the US. And we know what it means. What it means is that sort of short-term vicious austerity ultimately means an attack on growth and flirting with recession. So people are starting to comprehend in their minds what Tony Abbott as leader of the country would mean.
KIERAN GILBERT:
But you’re talking a lot about the negatives of the other side though.
NICK CHAMPION:
Yeah that’s right.
KIERAN GILBERT:
Not much about the positives on your side.
NICK CHAMPION:
Well we’ve had a pretty positive agenda. I don’t think anybody could say, look at schools where we’re advocating a pretty significant reform program in schools. Look at disabilities where, for the first time, people with disabilities are at the front and centre of national politics. For forty or fifty years they’ve been ignored, and for the first time, they’re at the front and centre of national politics.
KIERAN GILBERT:
Well what about the Prime Minister? What about her performance? Because obviously many in your party think that she hasn’t been up to it, is making mistakes. Do you think that she’s finally got a handle on the job?
NICK CHAMPION:
Well the Prime Minister is probably the most determined person you’ll meet. Determined to, I think, construct a social safety net that helps Australians, determined to continue the great growth that we’ve had in our economy, determined to keep unemployment down and determined to construct a social safety net.
KIERAN GILBERT:
How much do the states hurt you in terms of these cuts that have been happening? We’ve seen suggestions that Tony Abbott phoned Barry O’Farrell and asked him point blank on school funding to reign it in a bit, and various other things where cuts have been made against what Tony Abbott says are core Liberal beliefs. We’ve seen cuts across the board in Queensland as well. The backlash is obviously flowing through a bit, isn’t it?
MITCH FIFIELD:
The states have to row their own boats and I support what they’re doing. New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland inherited economic basket cases, inherited debt, inherited deficit. They have to sort that out. They can’t go on living in dream land as Labor did.
KIERAN GILBERT:
You’re a Victorian and you know that back in 1993 the Kennett cuts hurt John Hewson didn’t it? So could you see a similar thing replicated here?
MITCH FIFIELD:
The onus is on all Liberals, state and federal, to explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It’s always the same story, whether it be state or federal. Labor leave a mess. Labor promise when they’re in opposition that they’ve become born again economic rationalists and that they’ve become economic conservatives. They get into government, they trash the joint and it always falls to us to clean it up.
KIERAN GILBERT:
Well there’s some issues with the defence cuts at the moment. The Defence Department Secretary Duncan Lewis is leaving only a year after taking the job and the speculation, front page of the Financial Review, suggests that it’s possibly linked to the Government not explaining how it’s going to pay for major new weapons systems because the cuts have been so big.
NICK CHAMPION:
Well if you look at that story further on there’s also speculation he might become ambassador to NATO, and that would also be a reason for leaving wouldn’t it?
KIERAN GIlBERT:
So you’re suggesting that
NICK CHAMPION:
Well I’m just saying that story is full of speculation. It seems to me there’s been probably too much of an emphasis on one part of the speculation and not on another.
KIERAN GILBERT:
The defence people that
NICK CHAMPION:
I mean leaving to take another job is a pretty good reason for leaving an organisation. People do it every day of the week in my life.
KIERAN GILBERT:
There are real concerns in defence about the cuts though.
NICK CHAMPION:
Well clearly we’ve had to make some tough decisions about in the longer term, making sure our budgets are balanced, that you take a prudent approach to fiscal discipline after the Global Financial Crisis. What we’re against in the Labor Party is this very short term austerity which you see in the United Kingdom which flirts with a double-dip recession. That’s what the Liberal Party stand for. Short term austerity, cutting jobs, cutting wages and ultimately cutting growth and risking recession.
KIERAN GILBERT:
Duncan Lewis has been around for a while, even though he’s been a department secretary for only a year, he was a national security adviser for a long time before that. So the suggestion that he’s only a blow in is not correct. He’s been around for a long time at senior levels, so if he was to move on it wouldn’t be entirely unsurprising.
MITCH FIFIELD:
People don’t often leave the position of Secretary of Defence after essentially a year. It’s a big job. We don’t know if that is indeed the case, it’s just speculation in the papers at the moment. If you were Duncan Lewis, someone who cares deeply for the Australian Defence Force and its capability, you couldn’t blame him if he’s feeling a bit unhappy at the moment.
KIERAN GILBERT:
To finish, the disturbing images in Sydney at the weekend, the riot. Now this is an important thing, I think, for an Australian to look at and obviously I want to get your views on this this morning. What did you make of it and what do you think of the response of the Muslim community, from the leaders? Do you think that it’s been appropriate, has it been sufficient, Mitch and Nick?
NICK CHAMPION:
Look I think you read the papers today with Waleed Aly and Ed Husic, you see the great strands of moderate Muslim opinion condemning these riots and rightly so. And what we’ve had over the last couple of weeks are some idiots provoking some thugs and that’s not acceptable at any level. It’s up to moderate civic society to push back against that.
KIERAN GILBERT:
Your thoughts Senator Fifield, because I suppose the risk here when we face circumstances like this which were unacceptable, totally unacceptable, that we overegg it, to borrow Nick Champion’s phrase, in terms of the reaction against multiculturalism generally.
MITCH FIFIELD:
You don’t want to overegg it. I’ve been pleased with the strength of the condemnation by Muslim leaders of what we saw on the streets of Sydney. I think it was apt what one of the leaders said, which is that you don’t want to judge a religion on the basis of some boofheads. But by the same token I think we would be naïve if we didn’t recognise that there was a cohort amongst the people in Sydney on the streets who do not support western liberal democracy, who do not support free speech and who find our way of life anathema. We would be naïve if we didn’t recognise that there are some people who don’t embrace the Australian ethos.
KIERAN GILBERT:
Tony Abbott, I think captured it well when he said that migrants are obviously entitled to maintain their heritage and their links and their identity but not their hatreds when you come to Australia. You’ve got to leave your hatreds at the door. I think that that’s a fair request.
NICK CHAMPION:
Labor and Liberal and the Australian community generally are on a unity ticket about this sort of stuff. That you leave your hatreds elsewhere and you adopt the Australian way which is to get on, get a job, raise your kids, worship your own religion but do it peacefully and in a democratic fashion. And I don’t think that there’s terribly much more that can be said other than that we deplore violence when it occurs.
KIERAN GILBERT:
The other thing that we should also point out is that there are many Australians of Muslim background and heritage and religion that have made enormous contributions to this country, Senator.
MITCH FIFIELD:
Absolutely. That’s why it was a good observation by one of the Muslim leaders that you don’t want to judge a religion by the boofheads. And there certainly were boofheads on the streets of Sydney. But the message that we all want to send is that if you want to be part of the Australian nation, you’ve got to sign up to pluralism. You’ve got to sign up to tolerance. And if you don’t like that, well we’ve got news for you, it’s what we insist on in Australia.
KIERAN GILBERT:
I think the police did very well from what I saw, your thoughts on that?
NICK CHAMPION:
It was handled the best way possible by the Sydney police. It was a difficult situation.
KIERAN GILBERT:
It was indeed, and the federal police were involved as well. Your thoughts just finally?
MITCH FIFIELD:
It’s good to see police across all levels working together. It’s important to find out who instigated this, who put that message out. We want to pursue it, we want to find who they are and we don’t want this to happen again.
KIERAN GILBERT:
Absolutely. Senator Fifield, Nick Champion, good to see you both. Have a good week.