Mark Butler,Opposition Spokesman for Climate Change and the Environment, Radio interview with Pyne

Date:  12 February 2014

HOST: Joining us now is Chris Pyne, Liberal MP for Sturt and Education Minister. Good morning to you Chris Pyne.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning Matthew, good morning David and I assume good morning, Mark Butler?

HOST: You assume correctly. Mark Butler, Labor MP for Port Adelaide, Opposition Spokesman for Climate Change and the Environment, good morning, Mark Butler.

MARK BUTLER: Good morning to you.

HOST: Christopher Pyne, if we could begin with you, we know that thousands of jobs are going to be lost in South Australia because of the demise of the car industry. What are you, you as a South Australian MP and Cabinet Minister, going to do about that?

PYNE: Well, I’m doing exactly what the Government was elected to do, which is to create the economic environment in South Australia and the rest of the country that will mean that those Holden workers, of which there are about 1,900 in Adelaide can find even better jobs than they currently have. What I want to do for South Australia is to allow the mining industry to actually develop and grow, rather than being stultified by state and federal government red and green tape. I want to give a lower tax regime by immediately abolishing the carbon tax and the mining tax, both of which Labor is standing in the way of, put a tough cop on the industrial beat by bringing back the Australian Building and Construction Commission, which Labor is trying to stop, a registered organisations commission so that union workers aren’t ripped off by dodgy union officials, all of which will build the economy. And particularly for South Australia, I’m on the committee with Ian McFarlane.

HOST: So, you’re hoping they’ll get jobs in mining and then there’s a sort of a vague promise that they’ll pick up jobs generally somewhere in the economy because we’re going to remove some taxes?

PYNE: Well, the way the economy works in Australia -

HOST: - That sounds very hands-off, that sounds very hands-off.

PYNE: The way that the economy works in Australia is that hundreds of thousands of jobs are created every year and hundreds of thousands of people move jobs every year in Australia, which is why the workforce doesn’t remain static. But the unemployment rate itself doesn’t dramatically alter, but that’s exactly how economies work.

HOST: But we know from the Mitsubishi example that 30 per cent of the people who lost their jobs never got jobs again, 30 per cent of them were under-employed, and the remaining 30 per cent maybe picked up something, so -

PYNE: - in South Australia. Now I’m sitting on the committee with Ian McFarlane discussing the transition within the manufacturing sector in Adelaide and Melbourne and, as the education minister one of the areas where we can quickly develop our workforce and develop our research and grow jobs is in higher education, as well as mining, agriculture, aquaculture and technological development. There’s lots of very positive things happening in South Australia and Australia and I want to be part of that. I’m not in the doom and gloom brigade.

HOST: Mark Butler, from your perspective, is it a bit rich for Bill Shorten to pretend that the problem with the blue collar workforce in Australia, particularly in our motor industry, has just happened in the last few months? Like it’s all Tony Abbott’s fault? Like he crashed the car at the end?

BUTLER: Well, we knew through the course of last year that Toyota and Holden both had plans to continue to invest in Australia provided they could get a certain level of support from the Government. We knew that through our discussions with them and if you don’t believe that, just have a look at their written submission to the Abbott Government’s own Productivity Commission Inquiry. If they had confidence that this Government was in there for the long haul, we know from their submissions to the Productivity Inquiry that Holden and Toyota would have also been in for the long haul. But what’s amazing about Christopher’s contribution this morning, and also from the Prime Minister yesterday, is this extraordinarily cavalier attitude to what’s happening. With the death of the car industry that we’ve tragically seen this week, we’re going to see the most profound hit to Australia’s industrial and employment base since the 1980s.

HOST: Mark Butler, do you see as a factor the very generous, some would say, work conditions negotiated by the unions and granted by Toyota, by Holden, by Ford?

BUTLER: This is the appalling thing. After turning their back on the communities like the Goulburn Valley for example – we talked about this last week – with SPC Ardmona and now particularly South Australia and Victoria, the Government wants to blame workers for being too greedy for wages that are at or below the Australian average wage. We were talking about SPC last week. People there earn two-thirds of the average wage, only -

HOST: But that doesn’t apply in the motor industry, does it?

BUTLER: The motor industry does not have wages above the Australian average wage by and large. It just simply doesn’t. If you look at the comments by Toyota, as much as the Government likes to spin them, the critical factor here, acknowledging all of the critical pressures upon Australia’s manufacturing industry because of global competition, a high Australian dollar that admittedly is coming down considerably – the lack of interest that this Government has shown to the sector was a critical factor.

HOST: So union demands, union pay and conditions, you say have absolutely no impact on the profitability or the operations?

BUTLER: Of course they have an impact, but no one’s made the case that -

HOST: What did you do about trying to change that?

BUTLER: - that car workers or cannery workers, we have a situation in Australia that we’ve had for a quarter of a century where unions and companies bargain under an industrial framework that for collective bargaining purposes largely hasn’t changed since the very, very early 1990s.

HOST: And for a quarter of a century we’ve -

BUTLER: No one -

HOST: - seen SPC go down the gurgler.

BUTLER: We see this rhetoric from the Prime Minister, particularly from the Employment Minister Senator Abetz, that the reason why cannery workers in Australia, who earn two-thirds of Australia’s average wage, are not going to get support from this government, car workers is because they’re greedy and they’re overpaid. No one has made that case. Compare it to the Australian average wage; no one has actually made that case.

HOST: Christopher Pyne, do you acknowledge that South Australia along with Tasmania, they are the states that are suffering the most at the moment? And that South Australia needs something specific? Now, Jay Weatherill -

PYNE: South Australia does need something specific. It needs a government that wants to grasp the destiny of our state and not be a mendicant state turning up to Canberra saying, ‘Woe is me, give me more money’.

HOST: Christopher Pyne, that’s rhetoric and it’s all very well and good -

PYNE: It’s not rhetoric.

HOST: It is rhetoric.

PYNE: That works. No, David, your solution is -

HOST: No, no, no. I’m not -

PYNE: Your solution is -

HOST: I’m not offering you a solution. I’m asking you a question.

PYNE: Yeah and I’m answering it.

HOST: What specifically are you going to do to help South Australia?

PYNE: One of the things that I’m going to do is, through this committee that I sit on with Ian McFarlane, is make recommendations that will actually grow the South Australian economy for the medium to long-term in areas where I know that we are internationally competitive and can be best at.

HOST: And that’s not manufacturing?

PYNE: Of course it is. It’s highly technical manufacturing in very finished goods. Of course it is, but the answer to every solution is not, ‘give me more money from Canberra’, which is Jay Weatherill’s answer. It’s, let take South Australia’s destiny in our own hands and reduce our taxes and reduce regulation. It took the approvals for Olympic Dam seven years from the State Government and in that time BHP Billiton had the luxury of pulling out because it had taken so long. The South Australian Labor Government is culpable for Roxby Downs not expanding. And there are so many things we can do with our state. Does anybody seriously believe that mining ends at the Queensland and Western Australian and Northern Territory borders? And yet there is more exploration and mining in the Northern Territory than there is in South Australia.

HOST: But they’re hardly high-end, smart jobs, are they? No reflection on, I mean, I put breakfast radio presenters in the same category.

PYNE: We want as many jobs in South Australia as possible. We want to take the shackles off South Australian business, whether it’s the federal government or the state government. At the moment in South Australia, we have a state government that wants more intervention, more regulation, more taxes. Jay Weatherill said so himself, said that was the answer to South Australia’s woes.

HOST: Christopher Pyne, do you think the Olympic Dam expansion will go ahead should there be a Marshall state government and an Abbott Canberra government?

PYNE: I have no doubt that a Marshall Liberal government on North Terrace and an Abbott Liberal government in Canberra will move whatever mountains are necessary to move to make Olympic Dam grow and expand for South Australia’s future. But I’m absolutely confident that with the Labor Party being as aligned to the union movement as they are, they will continue to use Roxby Downs as a honey pot for higher wages and for higher taxes.

HOST: Mark Butler, you better just have a word here to finish.

BUTLER: Well, there is no basis for Christopher to say that. It’s very clear that BHP made the decision they made on Olympic Dam for the same reason they pulled a whole range of capital investment out of projects all across the world. It was about the international commodities market. It was a great tragedy they did it, but it had absolutely nothing to do with North Terrace, as much as Christopher might say that Stephen Marshall will suddenly change BHP’s investment behaviour, it’s utter rot.

ENDS