TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
PRESS CONFERENCE
PARLIAMENT HOUSE
8 June 2001
Ladies and Gentlemen we have before lunch completed a very successful and productive meeting of Premiers, Chief Ministers and myself and a representative of local government. The meeting achieved agreement on just about every matter that was raised. Particularly important agreement in relation to matters concerning human cloning. The commitment that we should have uniform comprehensive legislation banning the cloning of human beings. An agreement to develop uniform approaches to stem-cell research and related matters. The Health Ministers will be asked to look at that and then report back to us and also to consult the community very widely on it because it does raise very significant ethical and medical issues. And it is a matter that properly engages the concern and interest. We have every desire to take advantage of advances in medical technology and medical science which may provide relief for people who are suffering incurable diseases and major breakthroughs in many health challenges, in relation to many health challenges. Equally we don’t want to have such a permissive set of rules as to allow the development of undesirable practices. So that’s a very important issue.
We discussed and noted the progress being made in relation to the attack on salinity. We noted the progress which is considerable in relation to matters concerning reconciliation and also energy policy. Although there were some difference of emphasis at the margin in relation to that very considerable progress was made.
Overall it was a very successful meeting. I might make one observation. Not one complaint was raised by any of the Premiers about the GST. In fact the GST was not even mentioned, further evidence that we are now in the post GST era of the economic debate. Very interesting, not one Premier voiced any concerns to me about the operation of the GST. And I’m not surprised in a way because the GST is very good for the states and they’ve always been playing a double game. The Labor Premiers in particular on this matter, they really want the GST and away from their sort of natural habitat they react normally and they see its benefits and that’s why they didn’t raise it. Any questions?
JOURNALIST:
Mr Howard you reported on HIH.
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh I reported on HIH yes.
JOURNALIST:
Are you finding serious difficulty finding someone who can be freed up?
PRIME MINISTER:
No, no but it always takes time.
JOURNALIST:
Have you actually got a person yet and it’s a case of negotiating?
PRIME MINISTER:
When we have somebody, who we are in a position to announce as the Royal Commissioner we will do so.
JOURNALIST:
And when, what’s your estimated time now?
PRIME MINISTER:
I expect that would be soon but I’m not going to bind myself to a few days.
JOURNALIST:
What progress is being made on the reconciliation front?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well we just noted all the progress that’s being made at various levels. I mean there’s no disagreement on that, everybody’s in favour of practical reconciliation and I briefed the Premiers on the additional resources we’d made available in the budget for housing and for Aboriginal communities and we each exchanged views about the need to get more good news stories more widely covered by all of you. And we’re in uncommon and frantic agreement on that.
JOURNALIST:
Wasn’t there disagreement on the need for a national apology?
PRIME MINISTER:
I beg your pardon.
JOURNALIST:
Wasn’t there disagreement on the need for a national apology?
PRIME MINISTER:
It wasn’t raised. Who told you that was raised? Don’t believe your sources Louise. It was not raised.
JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister Dr Jensen doesn’t seem to be quite so satisfied with the progress being made on reconciliation.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well what’s your next statement?
JOURNALIST:
Well my next question, my question is, are you, do you believe that Doctor Jenson, he represents the community on reconciliation or do you think our political leaders represent the community better on reconciliation.
PRIME MINISTER:
There’s not really much disagreement in the community about reconciliation. Everybody’s in favour…..most people are in favour of some form of reconciliation. The disagreement’s about a formal national apology by the federal government. That’s where the disagreement is and everybody knows my view. It’s a well thought out conscientiously arrived at view which I hold to and which is reflective not only of my own personal views but also reflective of the views of the great majority of the members of the Liberal and National parties. I suspect also of a lot of people in the Australian community. I wouldn’t offer a view as to how many but certainly a lot. But people have different views on these matters and the point I would make is that men and women of good conscience being in good standing with all sections of the community and all groups with all sets of values can arrive at different views and still hold those views with good conscience and in good faith.
JOURNALIST:
Is Dr Jenson out of line…..
PRIME MINISTER:
No. I don’t presume to say anybody’s in line or out of line in relation to a view on something as difficult as this. I’ve arrived at my view after a lot of thought and it’s a view the Government has. It’s not just John Howard’s view. But I hold it conscientiously. It’s not capriciously or lightly held. I hold it very sincerely and I merely ask that the same charity I extend to other people in relation to the different views they have be extended to me by those same people. I don’t think there’s anything more I need to say about that. I’ve made my position quite clear.
JOURNALIST:
[inaudible] Steve Bracks’ call for an inquiry into health and aged care?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well he raised it and the reason I didn’t agree with it is because he didn’t make a case. I mean it’s no good a Premier for some sort of partisan politician purpose because we’re a few months out from a federal election coming along and saying I want another inquiry into health without mounting a case. I mean I pointed out to him, and these figures apparently came as some surprise because they asked for them, that we have increased our funding for public hospitals by 28% in real terms over the next five years. But when you take into account the money we forewent under the clawback arrangements of the Australian HealthCare agreements when there was a big increase in the number of people with private health insurance, even if we had given the states the extra money that they asked for arising out of that review by Ian Castles of the cost of living adjustments under the health agreement, the states are a further $2 billion better off under the life of the agreements. I also pointed out to him, because he made great play of the impact on the public hospital system of people who were no longer sort of…..no longer be retained in the hospital system, they’ve been there beyond 35 days and they were in need of acute care and shouldn’t stay in the hospital, should go into a nursing home. And I pointed out according to state statistics that represented only 1.4%, 1.4% of the waiting lists of the state hospitals. Now my view simply is that the states run state hospitals. They have plenty of money from us. They can’t expect us to provide any more money given what we have done - the 28% increase, the forgoing of the clawback. It’s their problem. I mean in this federation we each have responsibilities. I don’t ask the states to fund the Army and if there’s something wrong with the Army I don’t go running to the states and say please Steve, please Bob give me some more money. I mean we’ve given them the money. The state hospitals are their responsibility. Now they have acute problems but I think they exaggerate them on occasions. And of course the plight of state hospitals is always a political football at the state level no matter who’s in power and I think both sides of politics at a state level have played a silly game on waiting lists over the years. The reality is that our health system’s better than any in the world with all it’s imperfections and I think it’s about time it stopped being used as a political football at premiers’ meetings and it was a particularly poorly researched bid, if I can put it like that, by the Victorian Premier. It’s almost as if he felt he had to do it for appearances sake.
JOURNALIST:
[inaudible] Prime Minister, I mean how can you discuss all these issues in just today?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it hasn’t become symbolic. A lot of work is put in by our officials in the lead up to it and I want to thank them. They did an extremely good job on this occasion and I thank the officials of my department, Dr James Horne in particular who did so much of the work on it. I don’t think it’s just symbolic at all. I think it is valuable to have these meetings, and the matters we discussed last night over dinner. I think it is important that heads of government get together in this way. I think it’s important that we try and avoid the overt political caucusing that goes on before hand. And I mean I accept all of that in good faith and we are having a federal election at the end of the year and I suppose they felt they owed their friend a few things.
JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister, we’re still waiting for the communique. We’ve been waiting longer for the communique…..
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it just shows how quickly we, you know, stuck to, you know, how effectively we stuck to our last.
JOURNALIST:
On the cloning Prime Minister, aren’t you back at square one? I mean the health ministers were considering this matter.
PRIME MINISTER:
No we’re not back at square one because you’ll find in the communique that the states….everybody has committed themselves to having uniform legislation banning cloning. Now that is a major advance. I mean at the moment we have legislation in three jurisdictions. But you’ve got a firm, unconditional commitment from all of the jurisdictions to have uniform legislation that prohibits cloning.
JOURNALIST:
I thought it was [inaudible]
PRIME MINISTER:
No no. Well see that shows the value of waiting for the communique and it shows the value of……
JOURNALIST:
[inaudible]
PRIME MINISTER:
No, well no. Just let me assure you that you will see, very clearly, saying that everybody commits themselves and I had those words put in – ‘commits themselves to uniform legislation prohibiting cloning’. Now that’s a huge advance, huge advance.
JOURNALIST:
[inaudible] regards to stem cell…
PRIME MINISTER:
We are going to consult the community and other groups on that and we’re going to take into account the health ministers, then it will come back to us and we’ll make a final decision. My view is that you have to try and strike a balance between the legitimate ethical concerns people have, particularly in relation to the destruction of embryos, and the desire to garner and harness all of the benefits that are available from medical science with these advances. It’s a delicate balance. I don’t pretend, I don’t presume to know exactly the right balance myself. I want to talk to people about it, I want to talk to some doctors, I want to talk to others who might want to express views to me. I don’t possess the capacity to state these things with such moral unconditionality.
JOURNALIST:
Have you had time for a response to the British elections?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes. I’ve kept abreast of that. I congratulate Mr Blair on his election win. It’s always praiseworthy when you win a second time. It’s always a matter of comment and moment. It becomes even more praiseworthy as the years and the number of victories go by. But he’s done very well. I congratulate him. I commiserate with my colleague in fraternal party terms William Hague but it seems a long time ago that the prospects of a conservative victory were fairly distant. It was a question of whether the conservatives would make up considerable ground. It seems at this stage that the turnout may have been as low as 55% which is quite concerning given the history of politics in the United Kingdom. That would probably be the lowest turnout since one of the polls in World War I in 1918. What does it say? It probably says that a lot of people who might normally have voted for the conservative party didn’t wish to but couldn’t bring themselves to vote Labour so they stayed at home. Perhaps it also means that a lot of Labour voters thought their mob was going to win anyway so they didn’t bother. I congratulate him. Mr Blair and I have worked together very well and we’ll work together again in the lead-up and at the CHOGM Meeting in Brisbane later this year. The relationship between our two countries is very important and both of us place a great deal of store on it and I know that we’ll work together very closely over the next three and a half years.
JOURNALIST:
Will you be sending him a message?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes I have already sent him a message and I spoke to Mr Hague a few days ago on the telephone and I’ll probably ring Mr Hague again over the next few days.
JOURNALIST:
What did you think of his campaign? Mr Hague’s campaign?
PRIME MINISTER:
I beg your pardon?
JOURNALIST:
What did you think of Mr Hague’s campaign, the sort of campaign he ran?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I didn’t follow it all that closely and I didn’t see a great deal of it but you know that old saying in politics that you know you’ve got to sort of be, you know you’ve got to be in reasonable shape when you enter the campaign. I mean you can win or lose during the campaign period but if you’re fifteen or twenty behind when the whistle goes it’s a bit hard to make up that difference. But if you’re only three or four behind, that’s an entirely different matter, isn’t it?
JOURNALIST:
When are you planning on blowing the whistle?
PRIME MINISTER:
My current intention is to have the election at the end of the year.
JOURNALIST:
Will you rule out an election before CHOGM?
PRIME MINISTER:
My current intention is to have an election at the end of the year.
JOURNALIST:
Okay so if you can get between three and four you’ll go?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well the last one I was seven behind.
JOURNALIST:
Mr Howard what do you think of the possibility of Prue Goward being a presenter of a new ABC Sunday morning programme?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I will leave that entirely to the ABC, I’m not going to start commenting on that. I don’t think it’s sensible or fair.
JOURNALIST:
This year was an election year obviously and you’ve more Labor premiers than you had a few months ago. So what was the mood like in COAG?
PRIME MINISTER:
Very cheerful. We were all very polite to each other. We had a very pleasant dinner last night and we talked about politics and we talked about the state of the nation, we talked about football and we talked about cricket, the British elections, the impact of politics on family life and a whole lot of other things.
JOURNALIST:
It was unusually short for a COAG meeting, wasn’t it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it’s not the length, it’s the quality of the meeting and the fact that we worked so very hard.
JOURNALIST:
… the Labor states misused COAG then to put pressure on yourself in the leadup to the federal election?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I didn’t feel under any pressure. Anything else?
JOURNALIST:
[inaudible]
PRIME MINISTER:
I am sorry, I’ve got a bit of a cold and my hearings even worse than usual.
JOURNALIST:
Yesterday we saw the unemployment rate creeping up towards 7%, have you considered perhaps bringing some of your job programmes announced in the Budget forward?
PRIME MINISTER:
I thought yesterday’s unemployment figure was in all the circumstances a little better than might have been the case. There’s a resilience in the unemployment figures, there’s a resilience in the labour market which is encouraging, I don’t want to put it any more strongly than that. The economic indices at the moment are moving very clearly in the right direction. There is no doubt that we are over the transition impact of the GST. There’s no doubt that the downturn at the end of last year was an aberrant downturn due to some one-off factors and there’s little doubt that the decisions taken by the Government over the last six months to provide additional spending in a number of high priority areas were not only good policy decisions but they were also economically well judged. The home savings grant increase is only now beginning to have an impact and that sector of the economy will be going very strongly over the next six months.
JOURNALIST:
[inaudible]
PRIME MINISTER:
Karen?
JOURNALIST:
I was just going to ask you if Peter Beattie convinced you of the merits of Queensland wine or if he was going to stick with [inaudible]?
PRIME MINISTER:
He gave it to me, I haven’t sampled it yet.
JOURNALIST:
Do you have a preference?
PRIME MINISTER:
No I am neutral on that. As I am neutral at the State of Origin as I will be on Sunday night, I’m neutral on wine.
JOURNALIST:
Mr Howard on the national energy framework, could you just spell out what the detail of that and the decision to put greenhouse targets in them, what impact will that have on ….
PRIME MINISTER:
No, no there wasn’t a decision to put greenhouse targets in, there was a decision of the examination or the inquiry to look at the feasibility of having them.
JOURNALIST:
What’s your view on that?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I think we ought to look at the feasibility. I wouldn’t put it any more strongly than that.
JOURNALIST:
Why shouldn’t they be enforceable though Prime Minister?
PRIME MINISTER:
Because it might do great damage to Australian industry and cost a lot of Australians their jobs.
JOURNALIST:
Did you canvas with the premiers either last night or today your proposed amendment on bonuses and what ….
PRIME MINISTER:
No and they didn’t ask.
JOURNALIST:
It does have to go to the states, doesn’t it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh yes, but it will go in the normal way, I didn’t canvas it with them no.
JOURNALIST:
Did Mr Beattie ask for some money to compensate for the Governor’s salary?
PRIME MINISTER:
No that wasn’t raised either. What else did they brief? Give me a list of what they briefed and I’ll tick them off, say yes, no, yes, no.
JOURNALIST:
Mr Howard are we seeing a new John Howard? You talked in the Party Room earlier this week, had a philosophical discussion about you know the merit of intervening in the market to for instance help out HIH and One.Tel employees and victims. And you talked about Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had done similar things. Are we seeing a sort of new…
PRIME MINISTER:
No, I think it’s always, no I think I remain essentially the same as I was. But I was always somebody who didn’t believe that untrammelled, unrestrained, unconditional market forces were the only way of tackling every single problem. To quote that old adage, it’s a bit like saying the markets right or wrong is like saying is my mother drunk or sober? I mean there do have to be occasions when there’s a market failure or there’s a public interest in intervention. I mean my view about the role of government is that the government has a limited but strategic role in modern society. And that is, if you go back to the speech I delivered to the Australia Unlimited Conference organised by the News Limited organisation in 1999 I think it was, probably that plus my Menzies lecture of 1996 or 1997. I know that I’m accused by people such as Gerard Henderson and Michelle Gratton as never delivering prepared texts. But I have delivered some over the years and they are two that really set out better than any two I can recall my philosophical framework I bring to government. And you will not find anything I’ve said about One.Tel or HIH which is inconsistent with either of those speeches. One of them delivered in ’96, one delivered in ’99.
JOURNALIST:
Which companies are more worthy than others?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it depends entirely on the public interest. It’s not the worth of a company it’s the public interest. I mean it is not good for capitalism to have hundreds of thousands of battlers hurt by the collapse of a huge insurance company in circumstances where they think they’ve been unfairly treated. That is bad for capitalism, very bad.
JOURNALIST:
Mr Howard you spoke at the Party Room…
PRIME MINISTER:
Three more and then I must go. Dennis?
JOURNALIST:
Yes, you spoke at the Party Room the other day about the idea of having a modest redundancy package for MP’s who only served a short term. Is that entirely appropriate because aren’t MP’s in effect sacked rather than made redundant when they lose an election?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I thought redundancy, particularly voluntary redundancy was often a different way of putting to someone that they were going to perhaps be compulsorily made redundant. We’re still looking at that, it’s not certain it’s going to be adopted but it’s still being looked at as an option.
JOURNALIST:
Mr Howard just back on HIH. Did you discuss with the Premiers the need for a broader review of the corporate law which was part of their statement issued last night? That there needed to be…
PRIME MINISTER:
No, no and they didn’t raise it.
JOURNALIST:
Do you see a need to look at it more broadly than just the issue of clawing back?
PRIME MINISTER:
I think inevitably Steve when we look at the bonus things we’ll probably have a looksee at some of those related matters. But they didn’t raise it. One more.
JOURNALIST:
You were going to discuss hardship cases in relation to HIH. Did you do that?
PRIME MINISTER:
Hardship cases. Well that’s covered by our scheme.
JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister what do you mean by not certain levels of redundancy?
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh well I’m waiting to hear what the committee says about it. It’s one of the issues. But the main thing we’re looking at is the 55. And we said we’d look at the pluses and minuses of the modest redundancy arrangements for people who might go out say after only two terms.
JOURNALIST:
Do you think that might be a good idea…
PRIME MINISTER:
Look it’s worth looking at. I want to hear what the people have got to say about it, the colleagues. Okay.
END
