bob katter, page-115

Like I said vert you libs don't believe or trust anyone and then expect everyone to believe and trust whatever you libs say.

One of abbotts silly sayings.

It's kind of like the fine print on the bottom of the packet saying, 'use this product, but by the way, it might kill you'

And this one.

Transcript
KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: With the Government's Budget now laid out as its economic blueprint for the next few years and the Opposition starting to open up on its policy detail, the 2010 election campaign has begun, regardless of when the Prime Minister actually calls it. The Opposition has already made plain it wants to tear away the facade of Kevin Rudd's claim to economic conservatism and Tony Abbott's own economic credentials will also have to withstand a barrage of scrutiny. Kevin Rudd has some broken promises to overcome and Tony Abbott also has some explaining to do on his own reputation for policy backflips. I interviewed the Prime Minister last week after the Budget, and tonight, a short while ago, I interviewed the Opposition Leader in the wake of his Budget speech.

Tony Abbott, this afternoon a veteran accounting academic, Professor Bob Walker from Sydney University, has questioned your Budget speech claim that you'll save $4 billion by freezing 12,000 public service jobs in two years. He says you've made a billion-dollar mistake, either by overestimating wages or assuming that all these people will leave their jobs at the start of each financial year. Your response?

TONY ABBOTT, OPPOSITION LEADER: I haven't had a chance to look in detail at his claim, but I believe that my team have done a conservative costing, and I think, Kerry, if there really was a big problem with our costings, the Government would have been out of the blocks on Friday.

KERRY O'BRIEN: So do you know whether you did it on the basis of people leaving their jobs all at the same time each year?

TONY ABBOTT: My understanding is that we accepted that people leave their jobs over the course of the year rather than all in one big hit.

KERRY O'BRIEN: In government, you would dump the Government's tax on mining, but in the process you'd also walk away from the two per cent cut in company tax that the Government will fund from part of its tax on mining. So the mining companies'd be happy, but every other company, big and small, including many who aren't sharing in the mining bonanza would essentially pay more company tax as a result. Now that doesn't bother you?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, I think that people understand that if you rob Peter to pay Paul it's not necessarily such a great outcome, particularly when the initial robbery is a triple whammy tax. It's a tax on the half a million jobs directly or indirectly in the mining industry. It's a tax on all the retirees who rely on those shares and dividends to prosper. And it's a tax on consumers who will pay higher prices because of the big new tax on the mining industry. So, I think people understand, Kerry, that if you do a big hit on the industry which more than any other is responsible for our prosperity, there are no winners.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You'd also repudiate the Government's tax cut on interest earned in the bank accounts of ordinary Australians. So, does that bother you?

TONY ABBOTT: In an ideal world, sure, you would like to go ahead with some of these things, but we don't live in an ideal world. We live in a world where we've got a $58 billion deficit. That's the one thing that you can absolutely count on in the Government's Budget.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Well, coming down, coming down to a surplus in three years.

TONY ABBOTT: Yep, if everything they say comes right and if there's no further surplus shattering blowouts in their spending programs, and they have been pretty accident prone, Kerry. But I don't think, to get back to the fundamental point, that you improve our economy by slowing down and handicapping the most successful part of it.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You appear to have had some success in the polls painting Kevin Rudd as somebody other than who he said he was before the last election, that he's a spendthrift rather than a fiscal conservative. But on what basis can we trust you are who you would have us believe you are, particularly when you asked the public on the day you became leader not to judge you on your past actions?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, look, obviously they do make certain judgments about my past. I mean, I've been public life for quite a long time now, Kerry, and I know that there are some people who don't like what they see. Others do. I hope that over time they'll see me growing into the job. But I don't underestimate the difficulty of the task. I certainly expect to go into the election as an underdog.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But part of that judgment is judging whether they can trust you at your word, at what you say at any given time. In February this year you said in a radio interview, "We will fund our promises without new taxes and without increased taxes." A month later you announced that you'd fund six months paid maternity leave by putting a new tax on big companies. I'm not quite sure how you justify such a fundamental U-turn in such a short time?

TONY ABBOTT: And, the point I tried to make at the time was that I didn't like the levy very much, but if we were going to have a paid parental leave scheme any time soon, a decent paid parental leave scheme any time soon, it had to be paid for and this was the least bad way of doing it.

KERRY O'BRIEN: OK, so you are prepared, having promised one month no new tax whatever, no increased tax to pay for policies, one month later you find a rationale that says we're gonna have to find a new tax for this. Yet when the Government says it wants to impose a new tax on mining companies in order to pay for, in part, a cut in company tax, a cut in - an introduction on - an extension on the compulsory super and various other measures, you say that's not justified. So your tax is justified, theirs isn't.

TONY ABBOTT: But what I'm saying, Kerry, is that this $9 billion-a-year hit on our most successful industry is fundamental economic vandalism. I think that a decent paid parental leave scheme is not only long overdue, is not only socially visionary, but I think it is a fair dinkum productivity measure. I think it will help the economy in a way that this $9 billion hit on the mining industry won't.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But what you haven't explained is how you can make one promise in one month and then completely change it the next. What happened in that month where you had this sudden explosion of vision?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, again, Kerry, people will make their own judgments about me and if they ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: No, but I'd like you to explain it. Tony Abbott feels with conviction we will not have a new tax in any way, shape or form, we won't have a new tax; a month later, you do.

TONY ABBOTT: Well, again Kerry, I know politicians are gonna be judged on everything they say, but sometimes, in the heat of discussion, you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark, which is one of the reasons why the statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth is those carefully prepared scripted remarks.

KERRY O'BRIEN: So every time you make a statement, we have to ask you whether it's carefully prepared and scripted or whether it's just something on the fly? No, seriously; this is a very serious question.

TONY ABBOTT: But all of us, Kerry, all of us when we're in the heat of verbal combat, so to speak, will sometimes say things that go a little bit further.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Mr Abbott, we're not all leaders of major political parties who are either Prime Minister or aspiring to be.

TONY ABBOTT: True, true, true.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Would you agree there is extra onus on you ...

TONY ABBOTT: Absolutely right. Absolutely right.

KERRY O'BRIEN: ... to be accurate and honest and make promises that can be trusted?

TONY ABBOTT: Absolutely right.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But that time, you couldn't?

TONY ABBOTT: But the thing is I made a statement in a radio interview in February and then I think in March I made a commitment to paid parental leave. Now, ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: Which was the opposite of what you'd said the month before.

TONY ABBOTT: Well, it wasn't absolutely consistent with what I said the month before.

KERRY O'BRIEN: It was the opposite! One month you say no new tax, the next month you say a $2.7 billion tax.

TONY ABBOTT: OK. This is an argument that we could well have had in March and we did have it in March and a lot of people pointed out back then that there was a bit of inconsistency and I accept that. There is a bit of inconsistency.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Is that why your colleagues over the years have come to call you "The Weathervane"?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, I don't know that I have been much called that over the years. I think that was a phrase that was bandied around in one context. I think the argument from the Labor Party much more often has been that I am so consistently on one side of the argument that I'm some kind of conservative ogre - I thought that was the argument that the Labor Party put more often.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But this business about times when you're - what you say can be believed or trusted and times when we should accept that it's not necessarily the truth - it makes it very hard for people - I mean, if we go back ...

TONY ABBOTT: If you gave an Andrew Olle Lecture, that would obviously be the distilled essence of what Kerry O'Brien thinks on a particular issue.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But I'll say again: I'm not aspiring to be the Prime Minister of Australia, no matter what I say.

TONY ABBOTT: But I'm just - I mean, people will make their judgments of me, Kerry, and I accept that and I understand that, and some of them will say, "Ah ha, he said this in a radio interview in February and then a month later in March he made a commitment on paid parental leave which is not completely consistent with that former statement."

KERRY O'BRIEN: No, no; it was the opposite! It was the opposite of the first statement, Mr Abbott?

TONY ABBOTT: And some people, Kerry, will judge me very harshly.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But I'd like to hear you acknowledge this. It wasn't just a little bit different; it was the complete opposite. One was no new tax, the other was a new tax of $2.7 billion within a month.

TONY ABBOTT: And, Kerry, at the risk of just repeating over and over again an argument that we've had before, I said at the time I would be prefer not to fund it this way and I would hope when the Budget returned to surplus that we wouldn't have to do this increase in the tax burden, but nevertheless that was the least bad way of proceeding at the time.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But we are going to hear a lot from you over the next few months leading up to the election and what you are saying ...

TONY ABBOTT: You're not gonna hear any big promises from me.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But what you are saying is that the public are not going to know from one day to the next when you are saying something that's absolutely rock solid and when it's not. Are there two Tony Abbotts? The real Tony Abbott and the Tony Abbott who tailors what he has to say to whatever audience he has in front of him. We've talked about - I'll say this quickly. We've talked about the time you told the audience in a Victorian country town that the climate change argument was "absolute crap". And then you told me later that you were just being loose with your language. "It didn't represent my true position," you said. How are we to know when we're hearing your true position and when you're fudging the truth?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, again, I think that most of us know when we're talking to people or when we're listening to people, I think we know when we can put absolute weight on what's being said and when it's just the give and take of standard conversation.

KERRY O'BRIEN: This is sounding suspiciously like core promises and non-core promises?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, look, Kerry, I'm doing my best to try to give a reasonable, intelligible answer to your questions, but as I said, this was a subject that was run up the flagpole and down the flagpole lots of times back in March because you're not the first person to have noticed what you think is a serious inconsistency.

KERRY O'BRIEN: When you say you won't bring back the Australian Workplace Agreements of old under WorkChoices, you'll just tweak the existing legislation, is that the real Tony Abbott or are we being loose with the language?

TONY ABBOTT: That is a very considered position.

KERRY O'BRIEN: OK.

TONY ABBOTT: That is a very considered position.

KERRY O'BRIEN: So that one's real?

TONY ABBOTT: Look, you haven't sprung me, you haven't sprung some question on me out of the blue. I mean, we haven't slipped from one subject onto another subject. I mean, this obviously is gonna be a very important issue in the election campaign. Labor and the unions will run the mother of all scare campaigns here. It won't be true. We will work within the current legislation.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But you're going to change it. When you say you're gonna work within it, you will make changes to it.

TONY ABBOTT: I want it to be more flexible and more workable, but we're talking about flexibility upwards here, not downwards. Labor's safety net stays.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Tony Abbott, thanks for talking with us.

TONY ABBOTT: Thanks, Kerry.


You libs just make it up as you go. lol.