Subjects: Candidates, Tim Wilson, Gender Equality, Labor Party, Bill Shorten, Childcare
EO&E…………………………………………………………
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
I want to bring in my first guest this afternoon, Government front bencher and Liberal campaign spokesman, Simon Birmingham. Simon Birmingham. Welcome.
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
G’day, Patricia.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
This Liberal candidate, Peter Killin, who is running in the seat of Wills. Has he now stepped down?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Yes, I understand he has and that of course is the appropriate thing, we don’t wish to see people as our endorsed candidates who have such views. These views belong in the past, as a Government, we are proud to have people like Tim Wilson as members. Tim is part of the future of the Liberal Party and a leading part of the future of the Liberal Party. I have no doubt that his approach to liberalism, his values will be the ones that well and truly prevail across the Party into the future. Now we have, yes seen today, I think a fairly messy day for both major parties in terms of candidate problems, you’ve identified and gone through the list of those, a couple of ours in
Victoria, for Labor one in the seat of Melbourne, an NT Senate candidate as well, and these are a reminder that, even for these unwinnable spots and they’re probably all unwinnable on both sides of the ledger, the party systems should have done a better job in identifying some of these issues.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
OK, you are going to equivalents, but this candidate wrote, “The homosexual lifestyle is distressingly dangerous and carries appalling health risks.” This is the second candidate to go. How did he get preselected in the first place? What’s wrong with the Party’s processes that would allow someone like this, who said things like this, that you can find online, to be preselected?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Well clearly that process failed, there’s no excuse for that.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
But how did it fail Simon Birmingham? How?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Somebody didn’t check appropriately during the candidate vetting process, that’s self-evident. It’s an obvious statement of fact in terms of how that occurred and what occurred, just as obviously the Labor Party failed to see that their NT Senate candidate was making such crude remarks about Jewish Australians or Jewish people in general. Now in the end, that’s a failure of both major parties in terms of such vetting processes, neither are or were particularly likely to be elected to Parliament, but it’s clearly a failure and I imagine, post-election that both parties will be going back and taking a second look at what type of double-checking, triple-checking has to be in place for people who nominate even for these unwinnable seats.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
This of course comes after your candidate Jeremy Hearn was dumped as the Liberal Party’s candidate in the seat of Isaacs after that conspiracy filled anti-Muslim rant he posted online last year. The question really is, given these extreme views, extreme anti-gay views and extreme anti-Islamic views here, is there a systemic problem in the Liberal Party?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Well, Patricia, I hate to do it but is there a systemic problem of anti-Semitism in the Labor Party? They’ve ditched two candidates now in relation to anti-Semitic views, in the end, yes, there are clearly problems in relation to these isolated candidates and what we’ve seen in terms of the candidate who was removed this morning, is that the PM, the Party took swift action as soon as those remarks were made public, as soon as we became aware of them ourselves. And said, well then that’s inappropriate, that’s not excusable and this guy’s gotta go, he doesn’t reflect the values of the Party, our the Government and particularly not the values of the Prime Minister.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
But Peter Killin urged conservative Christians to join the Liberal Party in order to help stop gay people from being elected to office and Party positions. How concerned are you about the fact that this just isn’t about one guy in one seat, he’s calling on others to join your Party to stop gay people having positions of power in the Liberal Party?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
I’m proud of the fact our party has preselected and elected to the Parliament Tim Wilson, Trent Zimmerman, Trevor Evans, Dean Smith and we’ve actually got a very proud record there in terms of supporting gay Australians as candidates in their election to the Parliament and that is helping to boost the diversity of the Parliament. There’s a continual process of work to be done around boosting that and getting those best possible outcomes. But as I said before, I’m confident that those four and others who follow will shape and frame the future of our Party and the Government far more than those whose views belong in the past and who have been ditched as our candidate.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
But you mentioned all of those candidates who are gay, they’re all men. That brings me to the question of women in the party because there’s a Liberal candidate for a once-safe New South Wales seat of Paterson who says women are not getting pay rises because they are not interested in money matters and other business-related stuff. What do you make of that comment?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Well Patricia, I think the entirety of the remarks there need to be taken a look at because my understanding is and I haven’t read them all myself but so far as I’ve been briefed, this was actually a discussion about addressing gender pay disparity and that the comments were made about some of the issues in terms of how you best overcome that. That the candidate in question has cited the clinical prowess, expertise and care in the medical profession delivered by women as a reason as to why women should be expecting to receive, if not pay equity, then even greater pay in some instances, but was equally identifying some of the reasons as to why that didn’t seem to be the outcome and how would you address that and how would you best achieve gender pay parity. So I think that’s important to realise. While we are on that topic, it is also important to realise that, in terms of gender equality and pay rates, that gap widened when Labor was last in office and has narrowed under our five and a half years in office, so we’ve seen some positive outcomes there in terms of the gender pay gap closing, in terms of women’s workforce participation reaching all-time highs under our Government. And they’re things we are passionate about continuing to achieve and advance.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
Outgoing Minister Kelly O’Dwyer once told colleagues the Liberals are widely regarded as homophobic, anti-women, climate change deniers during a crisis group of Victorian MP’s. Don’t these stories, because there was another story of another candidate linking gays to pedophilia and of course the one today, the Islamic – Islamophobia comments, doesn’t it demonstrate that the Party has a problem? They can’t all be isolated incidents, can they?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Well Patricia demonstrates a need to be ever-vigilant and that some of those processes as we said before clearly fell down. Now, equally, the Labor Party have to answer why it is, even today, they were still preferencing the candidate for the Northern Territory Senate who they said they disendorsed but they were handing out how-to-vote cards that gave the number two vote to that candidate. Someone who Bill Shorten today said he had met yet has been photographed with his arm around. You know there’s – you’ve got to make sure in terms of the accountability of the major parties, that the media doesn’t run a double standard here. Ultimately, the Labor Party have had multiple problems. A candidate who makes fun of rape, in the case of the Labor candidate for Melbourne, a candidate with strong anti-Semitic views up in the NT and an earlier one of course withdrew.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
Sure.
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Because of you know, other issues so.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
Sure but Simon Birmingham there is actually another one too.
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
There are problems here that we all have to address.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
…there is another one too Mr. Singh, who’s running in the seat of Scullin, who has made the comparison between same-sex marriage and pedophilia, but he’s still your candidate. Why is he still your candidate?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: :
Well I think we – look in relation to those remarks, I think you’ve got to look carefully at exactly what was framed, how it was put there, but I want to be very clear Patricia and there’s no place, there’s no place…
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
…but when should same-sex marriage ever be compared to pedophilia?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Well I’m not sure whether that is an accurate reflection and I haven’t reviewed those remarks myself but I want to be very clear. We’ve taken a strong stance today in relation to candidates who should not have been preselected. But they will not fly the Liberal flag for us, and they are no longer endorsed candidates, and that’s the approach that should be taken. Now of course there is a lesson about making sure there’s tougher vetting in the future, but that lesson is one that the Labor Party needs to learn in relation to their candidates too. It’s not been a great outcome for either major party on that front today but these are not the issues, I trust, that the election will be determined on, either because we’ve got to get this back on to the policy debate and the issues and the choice that is there for Australian’s future. It is not a choice about candidates in safe Labor seats or Labor candidates in safe Liberal patches who aren’t going to get elected anyway.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
But on this.
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
The choice about the policy issues for the future.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
I think it is but these issues do matter as well. So on this candidate, Scullin, will you review…
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
And I’ve addressed them for a long time in this interview now.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
You have, absolutely. But will this candidate for this seat, Mr Singh be reviewed as well given his homophobic comments? It seems like one candidate today has gone from Wills, but will this other candidate be reviewed as well?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: I have no doubt that, if there are issues to be looked at, they will be being looked at.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
But are they being looked at?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: Well I’ve got no doubt if there are issues to be looked at, they will be looked at Patricia. Now, I think what is important though is that we do get back out of looking at candidates who are unlikely to be elected into the issues that matter in this election. And it you know, it is an election where there are radical policy differences between the parties and that’s been lost a bit in debates about these candidate issues, or about preference matters or otherwise, whereas the radical policy differences between the higher-taxing agenda of Bill Shorten or our plans to eliminate the 37 cents in the dollar tax bracket, the higher spending agendas of Bill Shorten or our carefully-calibrated plans that invest wisely in areas like extra support in mental health, extra home care places in aged care, these are the areas that I trust the election can and will be fought on over the next two and a half weeks.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
Your party and your side of politics has been going pretty hard on Bill Shorten and his childcare policy, but his childcare policy seeks to help people, working families on lower incomes with childcare fees when the cost of living has been going up, wages have not been growing very fast and clearly people are feeling the pinch, but you’ve been consistently been going after this particular policy. Is it worth looking at your own childcare system so that you can back-end it more to help people at this level?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Well, we are a Government that actually has delivered a complete overhaul of the childcare subsidy system in Australia. So on the 1st of July last year, a new childcare subsidy came into effect, that new subsidy has had the effect and the impact according to ABS data, the Bureau of Statistics data, that over it’s first nine months of operation, out-of-pocket expenses in relation to childcare for Australian households are down an average of nine percent now that’s a good positive outcome and shows that our reforms have worked in that sense. Previous experience is when Labor has tipped billions of dollars in extra subsidies into childcare, all it’s seen is that childcare fees have gone through the roof, providers have in those circumstances been able to jack their prices up, they’ve been the winner, they’ve increased their profits, families are no better off, taxpayers are worse off in paying huge extra subsidies without seeing any benefit. Whereas our reforms, informed by Productivity Commission work, have actually delivered more support for hard-working families. A family earning $80,000 with a couple of people working and a couple of children in childcare, is around $8,000 a year better off under our reforms as a result of those being put into place. The risk with what Bill Shorten’s Labor Party is proposing as part of just a big-spending agenda is that it ends up purely fuelling fee increases again and we’ve seen that today
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
They have said they’ll have price caps if that happens, they have said that, that’s part of the policy.
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Well no, no, they’ve said they’ll think about how they might deal with fees after the election. They haven’t actually said they’ll have caps, they haven’t detailed any policy in relation to caps. They’ve threatened there could be but not actually said how they’d do it or what they’d do, and we’ve seen that one of Australia’s largest childcare providers, in what is a sector generating $1.3 billion of profits already, has today or yesterday leapt on Labor’s policy and flagged fee increases clearly thinking if there were to be a change of Government that they want to get in ahead of that and profiteer out of it, and that’s not going to help families and it’s going to leave Australian taxpayers worse off as well.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
Just very briefly, are you comfortable with the wages that childcare workers that look after your children, my children, are paid?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Patricia look I’d love to see many parts of Australia receive higher wages but we have a wages system in Australia, an independent umpire in the Fair Work Commission that sets award wages. Some childcare providers pay above those award wages that’s welcomed, that’s to be encouraged where providers can afford to do so and choose to do so. But I do think there are serious questions to be answered about Labor’s policy which again lacks any detail in terms of how it would deliver wage subsidies to childcare workers, so it’s yet another case where Mr Shorten’s answer is, “we’ll work out the detail of delivery after the election”, rather than being up-front beforehand. And also then the bigger question of what happens with the precedent your setting by saying the Government, who traditionally pays public sector wages, public servant wages and pays social safety net support to millions of Australians, starts for the first time to be starting to pay wage subsidies in the private sector. And if you’re paying wage subsidies in the private sector, where does that end, you’ve seen of course Mr Shorten’s position on that has changed multiple times in the last few days where childcare was to be the first, then of course a there would be a consideration of aged care after the aged care royal commission, now it seems childcare is the one and only. It’s very unclear but it’s a $10 billion spend, as it already is, and it could end up going anywhere under what the Labor Party is proposing.
PATRICIA KARVELAS:
Simon Birmingham, pleasure always to speak to you, thanks for coming on.
SIMON BIRMINGHAM:
Thank you Patricia.