Telstra, family policy, education, Mark Latham Lindsay Tanner - Shadow Minister for Communications, Shadow Minister for Community Relationships

TV Interview with Maxine McKew

Transcript - Lateline, ABC TV - 20 February 2004

MAXINE MCKEW: Well, what a parliamentary fortnight.

As the country has sizzled in record summer heat, the temperature inside the Federal Parliament has been anything but static.

New politicians will get less when it comes to superannuation payouts but veterans' benefits are set to improve.

Noticeably, both issues caused uproar in Coalition ranks.

The first crack in Government discipline?

This week, Telstra was back on the political agenda with the extraordinary possibility that as majority shareholder the Government could end up owning both the Telco and the Fairfax media group.

But it was a seemingly soft issue that by week's end had captured a lot of column inches in the major broadsheets.

Mark Latham's claim of a crisis in masculinity was part of a broader pitch for a civil society that prizes good parenting and where workplaces recognise the complex needs of families.

As a pitch before the National Press Club, it had a distinctly under whelming effect on the Government.

To range over that and other issues I have been joined tonight by Joe Hockey, Minister for Small Business and Tourism, and by Lindsay Tanner, Labor's Shadow Minister for Communications and Community Relations.

Welcome to both of you for the first Friday forum of 2004.

Good to see you.

LINDSAY TANNER, SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS & COMMUNITY RELATIONS: Good evening, Maxine.

JOE HOCKEY, MINISTER FOR SMALL BUSINESS & TOURISM: Good evening.

Yeah, it's great.

MAXINE MCKEW: Joe Hockey, your colleague Alex Downer said of Mark Latham's Press Club speech it was a fusillade of cliches.

Is the Government misreading this one?

JOE HOCKEY: No, I don't think we are misreading it.

I don't want to add to the cliches by having my own, but it's fair to say that Mark Latham was short on substance and long on rhetoric.

I think now that he's going through, or coming to the end of, the honeymoon, it's becoming apparent to some of the more focused strategists that in fact Mark Latham hasn't got the substance that he pretends to have and, in fact, what he is doing is running out all these cliches that may be popular at first glance but are at the end of the day just cliches.

MAXINE MCKEW: They might be cliches, but the PM ended up saying, "Well, look, I got there first.

I said it all years ago."

That sounds a bit thin and defensive.

JOE HOCKEY: We back up our statements with facts.

We have had programs in place.

Mentoring programs have been in place.

Importantly, for example, in relation to boys' education, we've had a program involving 230 schools and best practice in boys' education.

So of course it would.

MAXINE MCKEW: So you've sat on your family policy for, what is it, two years now, as we learnt this week?

JOE HOCKEY: Well, no, that's not quite right.

The most significant family policy you can have is the new tax system, which in fact substantially increased family benefits.

So across the board we have had initiatives that have in fact delivered real benefits for families.

But Mark Latham hasn't backed up his attacks on us with any real solutions.

MAXINE MCKEW: Lindsay Tanner, there was cynicism as well about Mark Latham's Press Club speech and not just from the Government.

In fact, Michael Costello, writing in the Australian today, called it "intellectual fairy floss".

Now, you have to put the gloss on that floss, haven't you?

LINDSAY TANNER: We have built a society where we have less time with our kids, less involvement with our neighbours, less participation in community activities and our community is awash with social problems like loneliness, youth alienation and social dislocation, all of which feed the huge surge of problems like gambling addiction, drug abuse, youth suicide, all of the problems that we are all so conscious of in our community.

Now, Michael Costello is entitled to his opinion.

I would point out that he did write another article in the Australian last year praising my book Crowded Lives, on which much of Mark's position was based and very similar.

Of course, we have been working together on this whole process with me as shadow minister.

So we have a big agenda to tackle here.

The Government really hasn't been doing very much.

It has a program for everything but a solution to nothing and Mr Howard just trots out figures.

MAXINE MCKEW: What about Joe Hockey's point about substance?

How do you take issues as complex as, if you like, dysfunctional families and all the rest of it and turn that into a public policy without, I suppose, being absurdly authoritarian about it and interventionist?

LINDSAY TANNER: We certainly don't want to have a nanny state or be interfering in people's lives.

But what everybody has got to understand is that governments already are in people's lives whether it's the child custody and family law systems or all of the arrangements that apply in education.

These are the things around which people have to fashion their lives, and even in relatively simple things like phone line rental fees.

That is an issue in my other portfolio.

That affects the ability of elderly pensioners' capacity to stay in touch with loved ones.

There are issues there that governments are in people's personal lives and what we do does affect their relationships.

The trouble is that we do it by accident.

Governments historically have not looked at relationship issues, have not put them at the centre of their decision making and that's what we want to change.

Some things government do are very positive, some are negative.

That's what we want to change.

And we will be producing serious policies that do address these issues but not big spending bureaucracies, not nanny state exercises, things that are about a national vision that relates to outcomes, not just doling out more money.

MAXINE MCKEW: Joe Hockey, you are shaking your head at this.

Why?

JOE HOCKEY: The new Labor is about intervention in people's homes, intervention in their families, intervention in their workplace.

Everything about Labor policy so far under Mark Latham is about more government involvement in people's lives.

And if you look at it, he's saying that he wants to regulate the family.

He wants to regulate parenting.

He's also saying that he wants to have his Communications Minister, should Lindsay Tanner ever become Communications Minister, right in there making business decisions in Telstra, in industrial relations.

He's saying the unions should have a right of entry to every workplace so that they can recruit new members.

And this new intervention, which smacks of Whitlamism, is about intruding in people's lives in a way that we haven't seen in Australian politics since Gough Whitlam.

And I think the more we can focus the spotlight on Mark Latham's grander plan of government intervention, the better it will be for Australians because they will start to understand what he really does stand for.

MAXINE MCKEW: Lindsay Tanner, is it revived Whitlamism?

LINDSAY TANNER: If we're talking about cliches and rhetoric, we just had a perfect example of it.

We want to address the issues, we want to tackle the problems Maxine.

That kind of rhetoric just doesn't take anybody anywhere.

All the Howard Government talks about when you raise a very serious issue like mentoring, which is fundamentally important to dealing with the fact that many of the mechanisms through which our society used to help young people move through the path to adulthood have eroded or broken down, all the Howard Government can say is, "Oh, we're spending money there, "we're spending money there."

No vision, no strategy and no outcomes.

All it is just piecemeal pieces of money.

JOE HOCKEY: Why do we governments have to regulate everything?

Why do governments have to regulate it?

LINDSAY TANNER: We are not talking about regulating anything.

We are not talking about regulating anything.

JOE HOCKEY: Of course you are.

LINDSAY TANNER: What we are talking about is assisting people.

What we're talking about, actually, is knocking down obstacles.

For example, it is quite difficult for mentoring organisations to get training for mentors.

That's a problem for them.

Screening processes with respect to the police, that's a problem.

The lack of a national voice for these organisations, that's a problem.

These are problems that government can deal with.

That's the sort of thing we're going to do.

MAXINE MCKEW: Gentlemen, I do want to move on to what certainly looked like a corporate crisis involving our biggest company this week.

Joe Hockey, what questions are left in your mind at the end of this week about Telstra's board, in the wake of that leak about a plan for a Fairfax takeover?

JOE HOCKEY: No questions, Maxine.

The board has a responsibility under the Corporations Law to make decisions in the best interests of the company.

If a board makes a decision, we assume it is in the best interests of the company.

MAXINE MCKEW: What do you mean there are no questions?

What if that deal had been a goer?

That would have meant the Government would have ended up indirectly running a media company?

JOE HOCKEY: Which is all the reason why governments shouldn't own companies that are participating in the business of communications.

MAXINE MCKEW: So the PM would have used this as an argument for a renewed pitch to sell Telstra?

JOE HOCKEY: Well, I think there is a continuous pitch being put out there.

The Government should not own telecommunications carriers just as governments should not own airlines - and I assume Lindsay agrees with me on this - governments should not own banks, governments should not own serum laboratories.

It shouldn't own a whole range of businesses.

And telecommunications is another relatively high-risk business that governments should not be involved with.

MAXINE MCKEW: Lindsay Tanner, Telstra is clearly...

JOE HOCKEY: Sorry, by the way, don't forget we already own a media organisation, which we're appearing on tonight.

It's not landmark stuff here.

MAXINE MCKEW: And we'll argue just how well you fund that on another occasion.

Let's move on.

Lindsay, Tanner, Telstra is clearly on the march.

Given that this deal has fallen over, it's still clearly on the march for media content.

If that is their growth strategy, why would Labor oppose a majority-owned public entity getting bigger and more prosperous?

LINDSAY TANNER: The arrogance of the Howard Government on this issue is just unbelievable.

We just heard it from Joe Hockey again.

John Howard is effectively saying to the Australian public, which is overwhelmingly opposed to Telstra being sold, and to the Parliament, which has voted against it, that if it's not prepared to cop Telstra remaining in public ownership, he's going to use Telstra to buy up half the Australian media which is fundamental to the health of our democracy.

An independent media is - they tried to buy Channel Nine and they want to buy Fairfax and you're pushing cross-media ownership law abolition, which would allow them to buy both.

And they've got the money to do it.

Telstra is one of the most financially strong telecommunications companies in the world.

JOE HOCKEY: That's fantastic.

LINDSAY TANNER: And it makes its money out of its traditional activities.

It's lost bucketloads of dubious investments in Asia in the dot.com world and the markets are saying, "Get back to your basic role.

Get back to what you're supposed to doing and deliver good dividends."

Well, we say the same thing.

MAXINE MCKEW: What would the markets say if any future Labor Government would turn around to Telstra, assuming they make a successful media play over the next 12 months or so, you would say, what, that Telstra should divest that?

What effect is that going to have on the market and private shareholders?

LINDSAY TANNER: I wouldn't say it.

I'd do it.

It is simply an outrage to suggest that we could have a government owning the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Fairfax newspapers.

It is extraordinary that the Howard Government is saying this is OK.

The impact on our democracy would be appalling.

You would have a situation where I, as Communications Minister, would be the ultimate boss of half the serious media in this country.

The fact that the Government is suggesting that that is all right really raises questions about the standards of the Howard Government.

We don't want to have a government, Labor or Liberal, owning commercial media in this country.

It would be a disaster for democracy and a disaster for public debate.

MAXINE MCKEW: Joe Hockey, I am sure a lot of people in your electorate of North Sydney would say, "You've got to be joking.

"This is a company that can't even hang on to a decent section of the mobile phone market and they're going to get into media."

Explain that to us.

JOE HOCKEY: There are more than a million Australians that own shares directly in Telstra, including a number of members of the parliamentary Labor Party.

MAXINE MCKEW: And feel rather aggrieved, by the way.

JOE HOCKEY: Well, I'm not so sure that's the case.

Look, I agree the Government shouldn't necessarily own newspapers.

I agree with that principle.

But I also agree...

MAXINE MCKEW: Not necessarily?

There's a caveat?

JOE HOCKEY: Fine, we shouldn't own newspapers.

MAXINE MCKEW: Oh, good.

OK.

LINDSAY TANNER: We're making progress here.

JOE HOCKEY: But we shouldn't own telecommunications carriers either.

And this is precisely our point.

Governments are notoriously bad at being shareholders in businesses, commercial businesses.

The Labor Party knows that.

They sent two state banks broke and a range of other businesses in the states broke as a shareholder.

We have Lindsay Tanner now saying that he will be the boss of Telstra if he becomes Communications Minister.

His qualification for that job is that he was an adviser to Senator Barney Cooney.

That is his total qualification to be the boss of Telstra.

MAXINE MCKEW: Joe Hockey, I would have to say you in the Government are the boss of Telstra at the moment.

The Government could sack the entire board of Telstra tomorrow if it wanted to.

JOE HOCKEY: And, Maxine, I don't think the Government would because we have to respect the interests of the other 49 per cent shareholders.

LINDSAY TANNER: Let me tell you why Telstra is different.

Telstra is still predominantly a monopoly.

It makes almost all the profits in Australian telecommunications.

It's still over two-thirds of the entire industry.

JOE HOCKEY: Well, that is factually incorrect.

LINDSAY TANNER: It is factually correct.

It delivers essential services.

It is fundamental to the functioning of our society.

We do not have full competition in telecommunications.

Telstra is different.

And if we have a privately owned Telstra, it will be a giant private monopoly too powerful for any government to effectively to regulate, trying to spread its power into media and it will leave town faster than the banks, and people in the bush know it.

MAXINE MCKEW: OK.

Gentlemen, I want to move on just to the politics of the past parliamentary fortnight.

Joe Hockey, what do you think happened in the past fortnight?

Did the earth move?

JOE HOCKEY: Oh, not for me, unfortunately.

LINDSAY TANNER: You are hard to please.

JOE HOCKEY: I am hard to please.

Look, we are there for the long term.

Mark Latham is enjoying a honeymoon.

MAXINE MCKEW: You said at the beginning that his honeymoon was coming to an end.

JOE HOCKEY: That is what I said.

I think he has enjoyed a honeymoon to date, but I think it is coming to an end.

I saw a turnaround.

The National Press Club speech was an important moment because it started to reveal the true Mark Latham as someone who has no deep policy thinking, who has no policies that have practical application.

MAXINE MCKEW: I'm sorry, but what he said at that Press Club speech has dominated the broadsheets for two days.

That's not bad.

Let me ask you about your own team.

Two party room revolts, one over super, the over veterans.

Two senior ministers humiliated in Peter Costello and Tony Abbott.

When is the last time this happened?

JOE HOCKEY: Well, Maxine, I could raise a number of occasions where there has been robust debate in the party room over a range of matters.

Mandatory sentencing in the Northern Territory is one example.

A whole range of issues have had robust debate in the party room.

MAXINE MCKEW: This is a party room that didn't crack over Iraq, it didn't crack over Tampa and it cracks over super entitlements.

That's a really good look.

JOE HOCKEY: I wouldn't go so far as to say that.

But I would say that we not rattled.

We are focused.

We are very focused on the job at hand.

I think you will see some great policy announcements rolled out over the next few months that will illustrate that we have policy substance compared to the Labor Party, which is about policy rhetoric.

MAXINE MCKEW: Lindsay Tanner, I guess the continuing lead in your saddle has to be Simon Crean in that Treasury portfolio, an obvious target for the campaign?

LINDSAY TANNER: I don't see any basis on which you can claim that, Maxine.

Simon has had extensive experience in the portfolio.

And he's already scored a good hit in the last couple of days about APRA, which Joe knows only too well, and its failure to pursue the National Australia Bank's deficiencies in its risk management model.

So I don't see there's any problem there.

It is the Government that is fraying at the edges, that has these revolts in the party room.

What has been revealed by the change of leadership in Labor Party is that John Howard has run out of ideas, he's passed his use-by date and the Australian people are starting to get tired of him.

MAXINE MCKEW: But Lindsay Tanner, Labor could be left with the Hobson's choice, surely, later this year of having to agree with how the Coalition spends the warchest or repudiating programs if wins government.

LINDSAY TANNER: This is a problem I know only too well, having been Shadow Finance Minister prior to the last election, Maxine.

It is difficult, but we've already in various areas said that we are not going to continue with government commitments.

For example, in the Medicare and health area we have said that the spending programs they have put forward we'll do differently.

Similarly, with universities, their deregulation of university fees and the way they are spending the money we are going to reverse into it in a different way.

So we'll have fully funded programs that are built on doing things differently from the government.

We are not just going to follow on from the commitments they make.

We will have a surplus and we will have an economically responsible approach to government.

JOE HOCKEY: And they will have increased taxes.

They have already flagged that with their university promise.

They will increase the tax on mining companies by $400 million.

LINDSAY TANNER: What exactly do you call a slug on students, Joe?

The people who have to front up to $100,000, $150,000 university degrees?

That's not a tax?

What do you call that?

That's what you're going.

JOE HOCKEY: Well, a lot less than what the State Labor Governments are charging for TAFE.

MAXINE MCKEW: Just one quick final one to you, Joe Hockey.

John Howard is not going to be able to avoid the question on the precise date of when he will quit politics this time around, is he?

JOE HOCKEY: That's a matter for John Howard.

MAXINE MCKEW: No, it is not.

It's a matter for the electorate and the political fortunes of the Liberal Party.

JOE HOCKEY: I think John Howard is there for so long as he wants to be there, of course subject to the whim of the Australian people.

If the Australian people choose to re-elect him as PM at the next election, then it is a matter for him to determine when he wants to retire, if he chooses to retire.

LINDSAY TANNER: When's the Costello challenge, Joe?

You'll be the campaign manager.

When's the challenge?

JOE HOCKEY: I note that Donald Rumsfeld is in his 70s and a large number of leaders around the world are into their 70s.

Look, this is a matter for the PM.

MAXINE MCKEW: I will ask you later in the year if you want to review that comparison.

For the moment, gentlemen, we are out of time.

Lindsay Tanner and Joe Hockey, thanks very much.

JOE HOCKEY: Thanks, Maxine.

LINDSAY TANNER: Thanks very much, Maxine.