DI COVENY GARLAND: On the line, Simon Birmingham, the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and the Environment. Good Morning, Simon. SIMON BIRMINGHAM: Good morning, Dianne. How are you? DI COVENY GARLAND: Oh well, It’s Monday. Things have got to look up, haven’t they? SIMON BIRMINGHAM: I can hear you now. …
LYNDAL CURTIS: Hello and welcome to Capital Hill. In the midst of a bitter political debate, we’re seeing some areas of commonality between the Opposition and the Government. One of those is the need for welfare reform, but just how to accomplish the task? The other area of agreement is on the need for the body set…
DAVID BEVAN: … we’re going to talk to Senator Don Farrell. Now, he’s a South Australian Labor Senator. He’s Parliamentary Secretary for Urban Water and he’s bought into the debate over recycled water. Remember we had this debate here in South Australia about… just over a year ago during the state election campaign. MATTHEW ABRAHAM: And it’s…
LEON BYNER: … moving to water, because what is interesting is that, as you know, some months ago we had a nasty drought and then Mother Nature gave us a wonderful reprieve but a key parliamentary inquiry into the River Murray [House of Representatives Standing Committee on Regional Australia inquiry into the impact of…
DAVID BEVAN: Now, something that we have just escaped from and that is the drought. We’ve had years of drought. The River Murray looked like it was in serious… well, it didn’t look like it, it was in serious, serious strife and yet when the Murray-Darling Basin Commission [Murray-Darling Basin Authority] said ‘you need to change…
LYNDAL CURTIS: Welcome to Capital Hill, where the attention’s been split today between Canberra, Perth and Indonesia as the regional processing centre gets discussed in Canberra but not necessarily in Indonesia and the Prime Minister has announced a review of the way the Goods and Services Tax is distributed between the states. To discuss these many…
KIERAN GILBERT: Welcome back to AM Agenda. With me now from Adelaide, the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change [Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment], Simon Birmingham, and from our Sky News Centre I have Labor MP Ed Husic. Gentleman, good morning to you both… ED HUSIC: G’day. KIERAN GILBERT: Senator Birmingham… SIMON BIRMINGHAM: G’day.…
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: Stephen Conroy clearly thinks the communications industry is his own little plaything. Well, it’s far from a plaything it’s an industry that employs tens of thousands of Australians that turns over billion upon billion of dollars in revenue. This is a very serious industry and it deserves to be treated as far more…
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: The Labor Government’s carbon tax arrangements are unravelling before their very eyes already. What we see today are revelations that Ministers don’t think tax cuts are possible as part of compensation. Now, I stood here just a couple of days ago and predicted that there would be absolutely no reduction in income tax rates…
MARTIN KING: How weird? From ‘climate change denier’ we’re suddenly talking about the Holocaust. To me it’s just a bizarre nexus, a bizarre link, but a link that made Christopher Pyne see red. Was this a Julia Gillard dig? Was the Prime Minister being mischievous? And Julia Gillard would be well aware of comments made by Climate Change Minister…