Transcript: Joint Doorstop Interview, Forbes NSW

TRANSCRIPT OF THE HON. TONY ABBOTT MHR

JOINT DOORSTOP INTERVIEW WITH SENATOR BARNABY JOYCE,

SHADOW MINISTER FOR WATER, THE HON. JOHN COBB MHR,

SHADOW MINISTER FOR AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SECURITY AND

SENATOR SIMON BIRMINGHAM,

SHADOW PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY FOR ENVIRONMENT,

FORBES, NEW SOUTH WALES

 

Subjects: Murray-Darling Basin Authority community information session; interest rates; illegal boat arrivals.

E&OE……………………….………………………………………………………………………………..

TONY ABBOTT:

 

Look, I really appreciated the chance to be at this meeting today. I think that this whole water issue is by far the biggest issue for regional Australia right now. I think it’s a little bit embarrassing for the Government that they are hiding behind public servants the way they are. In the end this is an issue for government, not for bureaucrats and I think country people ought to feel really let down by the fact that the Prime Minister and the Water Minister have refused to front any of these meetings over the last month.

 

But you know it’s not just an issue for country people, this is a cost of living issue for all Australians because if the agricultural sector is devastated by water cuts, that means the price of everyone’s food goes up. So, this is a big issue for the whole of Australia and it is yet another Labor stuff-up, it is yet another Gillard mess, it is yet another day when my colleagues and I are going around Australia having to deal with the consequences of the arrogance and incompetence of this Government. I’m now going to ask Barnaby and my other colleagues to say a few words – starting with you Barnaby.

 

BARNABY JOYCE:

 

Thanks Tony. Well, look, it might be in Forbes but it’s about food. It might be about water but it is going to be about your wallet and how much money comes out of it. The fact is in Australia we’ve got to be able to feed ourselves and to do that we have to utilise a resource.

 

You’d like to say that this is the biggest stuff up the Labor Party has ever done, but you know, it is only two o’clock in the afternoon; who knows what they could do by the end of tonight. The Labor Party seem absolutely incredible in their incompetency. Everything they do it turns into an almighty and utter cluster stuff and what this is is another primary example of how they’ve got good honest people taking them away from their work, taking them away from what they need to do, so they had to come to town to demonstrate that their lives are about to be turned upside down.

 

Now, we’ve got nothing to hide about in the Coalition. We set this Act up, we’re proud of this Act, if anybody has got any queries about this Act, even in the last week, we said, ‘ok, well, we’re quite happy to have as a term of reference the capacity of the parliament to look at any ambiguities in the Act’. But it was the Labor Party that once more went into hiding. It’s the Labor Party that voted against it with the Greens and an Independent. We’re saying to the Australian people that with Tony here, and with Cobby here, and with Fiona here, and with Heffo here, with Simon here that we want to make sure that we look after Australia’s capacity to feed itself, we want to look after Australia’s capacity to do the right thing by regional Australia, that we will put our backside and our mouth where our policy is and that is come to regional Australia, listen to the people, make sure that we come up with a solution that brings fairness and transparency and a better outcome. What we say to the Labor Party is you won’t even offer up your minister to go to one of these meetings. Thank you.

 

JOHN COBB:

 

Thank you. Look, just three and a half years ago I brought John Howard here, the then Prime Minister, to Forbes because of drought. Three and a half years later Tony Abbott who under any normal thing would be Prime Minister now, he’s here as the leader of half the Australian parliament because of the potential of a Labor Party man-made drought permanently in the Lachlan Valley, but also in the Murray-Darling Basin.

 

This is about people. The biggest resource in the Murray-Darling Basin are the two million people who live in it – there won’t be too many of them left if Tony Burke, the Minister for Water, keeps refusing to face the music and to face the people whose lives he would devastate. You can count on the fact that half the parliament, the current parliament is not going to allow that to happen. Thank you.

 

SIMON BIRMINGHAM:

 

Thanks Tony. Tony Abbott has done today what Tony Burke has failed to do and that is turn up, turn up to these Basin communities and actually listen to peoples grievances, turn up and see just how wrong Labor is getting this process. Three years ago the Labor Party was left with a framework for balanced reform, reform of the Murray-Darling that could preserve communities, preserve the economy of agricultural production and restore environmental flows. They have stuffed it, they have botched it and what we have now is a process where they can’t get agreement on the Water Act, they’re unable to deliver any type of meaningful reform and it is all being held up and delayed.

 

What we need is for the Prime Minister, for Tony Burke to agree to front up to these communities, to agree to ensure that they and the Murray-Darling Basin Association get themselves on the same page because what we have seen today is that the Authority is standing off at 20 paces with their own legal advice against, it seems, the Government with different legal advice.

 

We need one interpretation of the Act, we need a commitment to move this forward, to end the delays, to end the stuff-ups, to get the fair balanced outcome. That’s why Tony was here listening today; that’s why Coalition MP’s have been at nearly all of these Authority meetings, that’s why we challenge the Government to front up and do the same.

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

Thanks Simon. Now, I’m just going to say a few words about a couple of other issues and then we’ll throw to questions. Look, first of all on banks, it’s not good enough for the Prime Minister to be angry. People facing cost of living pressures, people facing higher mortgage interest rates, they want action – they don’t want anger; they want action from the Prime Minister.

 

What we’ve seen is Wayne Swan, the Treasurer, he’s been angry more than 30 times over the last couple of years and it hasn’t made any difference to interest rates. We want action. We’re not going to get action from the Government. That’s why today my colleagues Joe Hockey and Bruce Billson have announced that there will be a private member’s bill go into the parliament in the last sitting fortnight of the year to try to give the ACCC power to act against price signalling. What we have seen from this Government is bluster and procrastination. What the hard pressed Australian public need is action and that’s what they’ll get from this Coalition.

 

Also just on the subject of boats. We’ve had two more boats overnight. That’s 116 for the year, it’s 30 since the election and it’s no accident that there has been a new surge of boats since the return of the Gillard Government because the Gillard Government has completely lost control of our borders; the Gillard Government is sending the wrong signal to people smugglers and this is yet another Labor stuff up, yet another Gillard mess.

 

QUESTION:

 

Just on the banks Mr Abbott, isn’t Julia Gillard right in the sense that, say if you’re a Commonwealth customer, the only thing that you really can do is change banks. Is that a fair comment?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

What’s the point of changing banks if there’s no competition and all the banks are offering the same interest rates? That’s why it’s very important that we take real action and take it soon. The Government is talking about maybe, perhaps bringing in some possible reforms in December. Well, that’s too late for this year’s parliament. It means that nothing can possibly happen until the middle of next year at the earliest. People have got to pay their mortgage every month and yet the Prime Minister is putting off for yet another month any serious action to help.

 

QUESTION:

 

Mr Abbott, with the public consultation, why pick Forbes to come to out of all of the public consultations?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

Look, I would have liked to have come earlier, but parliament was sitting and I hope this won’t be the last consultation that I come to but certainly I’ve been, and where is the Prime Minister? Barnaby and Simon have been to several of these. I don’t think there’s been a single one that hasn’t had a parliamentary representative from the Coalition and yet Tony Burke has not been to a single one, the Prime Minister has not been to a single one.

 

QUESTION:

 

If this process is so stuffed up, would there be merit in canning it altogether and starting from scratch?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

We do need a plan. There’s not doubt about that. We do need a plan, but it’s got to be the right plan and you can’t trust Labor to give you the right plan because this is not just the Labor Party, it’s a Labor-Green Government with effectively, on this issue, Bob Brown as Deputy Prime Minister.

 

QUESTION:

…based on the water plan that you guys put together and it’s all the criticism that they’re levelling at it is because of the Water Act, so is a new Water Act needed?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

Let me just put it very bluntly here. The former government set it up, the current Government has stuffed it up. This whole process has been completely bodged by the current Labor Government.

 

QUESTION:

 

What do they need to do differently? Apart from turning up?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

Well, the first thing they’ve got to do is listen to people. They’ve got to come down out of their ivory tower and actually talk to the people who are going to be impacted by the decisions and that’s what you just don’t ever get from this Labor Party. They make decisions in an ivory tower, announce them, they create massive public anger and then they run away at the rate of knots. It’s just a fundamentally bad way of governing. It’s no way to govern a country and yet it’s all you ever seem to get from the Rudd-Gillard Government.

 

QUESTION:

 

Mr Abbott, you’ve been listening today. What’s your plan? What would you do?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

I would never make the kind of announcements that this government has made without serious public consultation and that’s what’s been fundamentally lacking here. Any sense that real people’s real lives are on the line. Real communities, real livelihoods are on the line here but there’s no sense of that from this Government and why would there be given that they haven’t even got the decency to attend these consultations?

 

QUESTION:

 

Bob Katter is suggesting that future water buy backs be put on hold until the economic consequences of this plan are known. Would you agree or endorse those thoughts?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

I certainly think that it is typical of this Government that they have gone so far, they have announced so much that has such extraordinary consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods without ever having a serious socio-economic study. They should have done the socio-economic study before they made all these announcements rather than make the announcements and then think ‘oh, hang on, maybe we need a study’.

 

QUESTION:

 

So should the water buy backs be suspended then?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

I think it’s very important that everything is done in accordance with the right plan and this plan is not the right one.

 

QUESTION:

 

So given that’s the case, wouldn’t it be prudent not to allow anymore water buy backs?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

I just want to make it very clear that everything ought to be done in accordance with the right plan and this is not the right plan as it stands.

 

BARNABY JOYCE:

 

I think it’s important if you’re looking at the buy back just to look at how the Labor Party’s gone about it. Let’s go through their top three. The top three being Toorale – $23.75 million, and it doesn’t actually deliver water into the Darling River. So that was your tax payer’s money there, in fact it’s not yours – you borrowed the money from overseas, which you’ve got pay back. So that’s decision number one. Then they purchased $302 million worth of water off one family, the Kahlbetzer family, Johnny Kahlbetzer, went to uni with him, great bloke, obviously smart as a tac and Johnny obviously thought that Penny comes round once in your lifetime and when she turns up you’ve just got to make the most of her. Reason being that Penny bought a lot of air and not much water. Then of course we’ve got the Menindee storage lakes where the Coalition put $400 million on the table and whilst we were waiting for them to redevelop the Menindee storage lakes, we waited and waited and waited until even God couldn’t wait anymore and it rained and they filled back up with water. So, it’s not a matter of whether you buy water back, obviously there is a process and we’ve put aside money to do it. It’s whether you are diligent and methodical in how you go about it and this Labor Government has been completely… they just don’t know how to manage anything and this is the problem. They just lack the management expertise, they lack the experience on the ground and that’s why you get these massive stuff-ups.

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

Ok, any other subjects?

 

QUESTION:

 

Are you aware of a man by the name of Peter Andrews, who’s done lots of work and claims to have some of the answers? Should we be listening to people like that?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

Look, I certainly think we need to listen to a range of voices. I think I have visited his farm, not for a long time, but I’m not going to set myself up as the expert in all things agricultural. Any other questions?

 

QUESTION:

 

Is today your birthday?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

Let’s not have any singing, ok?

 

QUESTION:

 

It’s Tony Burke’s birthday, too.

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

What do you know, hey?

 

QUESTION:

 

How old?

 

TONY ABBOTT:

 

Look, I might have to stop answering questions if they’re going to get too personal, alright? Ok, thank you.

 

[ends]