TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
RADIO INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LAWS,
RADIO 2UE

19 March 2001

LAWS: Prime Minister good morning.

PRIME MINISTER: Good morning John.

LAWS: It’s hardly a thunderous body blow is it?

PRIME MINISTER: No. It’s a bad result. It’s a big swing but it’s not a Bass or a Canberra. It’s not a total wipeout. It’s not as big as the polls suggested, I feared, the Labor Party believed would happen. So even though we may just miss out on the seat - we might, might not just miss out, we might just win – despite all of that. It could have been worse but I wouldn’t want any of your listeners to think that I don’t get other than a pretty direct message and will do what I can to respond to that message consistent with not abandoning sensible policy.

LAWS: Has this whole thing come as a bit of shock to you personally? I mean in your quieter moments if you have any these days do you think well what went wrong, how did this suddenly happen so quickly because it was a massive turn around very quickly wasn’t it?

PRIME MINISTER: Well certainly when I did the reshuffle in December all the indications were that in a by-election, although we would cop a normal by-election swing that we ought to hold it comfortably. We had some research done late in November, very detailed research, and it indicated that the Government’s position in that electorate was very strong. Now a lot of things have happened since then. It’s more the accumulation of events over the past few weeks that has presented the difficulty.

LAWS: Yeah because it all happened together.

PRIME MINISTER: It did all happen together. I’ve called it the equivalent of political carpet-bombing.

LAWS: Yes, saw that.

PRIME MINISTER: And you had Western Australia, you had Queensland, you had the upward push of world oil prices, you had the December quarter national accounts, the pressure on the dollar, that Auditor General’s report on road funding which unfairly gave the impression although it was not the case that there’d been some short changing of road funding. There never had been and that’s even been acknowledged by the Labor Party.

LAWS: Yeah but you know it’s all about perception and that’s the problem.

PRIME MINISTER: I accept that John. When you put all of those things together you couldn’t have had a by-election in a worse set of circumstances.

LAWS: No you shouldn’t have had a by-election at all.

PRIME MINISTER: Well I took a reasoned risk on that. I had an alternative. I could either have a limited reshuffle with John Moore staying on as Defence Minister until the election, or a bigger reshuffle with John leaving Parliament. He was not willing to stay on the backbench and not be a minister. Now he made that plain to me. So it was my decision to have the broader reshuffle and have a by-election as a result.

LAWS: But tell me this – when you say that he wouldn’t sit on the backbench, he wouldn’t stay there if he wasn’t a minister.

PRIME MINISTER: Well I could have removed him as a minister but he would then have resigned anyway.

LAWS: Yeah so what was the reason for that – vanity?

PRIME MINISTER: Well I don’t know. That’s a matter you should take up with him. I can only state the situation as it was. John had been a good Defence Minister. He’d done a very good job and there were no grounds for my removing him. But we talked about his future and he said well look, I’m not going to run at the election and my personal preference would be to go now and if I go now from the ministry I will go from the Parliament but if you want me to stay I will, but my personal preference would be to go now. Now as it happened I thought there was advantage in having a broader reshuffle which included making Peter Reith Defence Minister and that enabled me to promote some other people. And there is a time in the life of a government where a broader reshuffle can be beneficial. Now I took all of that into account. I knew that there was always a risk with the by-election. I understand that and I know a lot of people don’t like by-elections. I also recognise though that rejuvenation of a government’s an important part of a Prime Minister’s responsibility. I considered all of these things, I had some research done. I discussed it with the party organisation and we resolved on that course of action. Now as things have transpired….

LAWS: [inaudible] idea.

PRIME MINISTER: Well with the benefit of hindsight, but isn’t that life?

LAWS: That is life. Does the Ryan result offer a political snapshot of the nation’s mood generally do you think?

PRIME MINISTER: They always do to some extent, these by-elections. I have no doubt that a lot of people decided this is a by-election, we’ll give them a tickle up. We can always go back to them in the general election. It’s not changing the government. We don’t like by-elections. We don’t like this, we don’t like that. We’ll give them a tickle up. Now the tickle up was bigger than normal, but much less than the catastrophic by-elections in Bass and Canberra.

LAWS: Except that it’s difficult to compare with Bass or Canberra by-elections. I mean you can’t really say there is no comparison given the outcome of the general election still isn’t known.

PRIME MINISTER: No. I think….I mean if you look at the magnitude of the swing, and I’ve looked back over the years, this is very much like what happened in 1988 and 1989 with the Hawke Government. You may remember we won the seat of Adelaide at a by-election with a swing of about 8.5%. We then secured swings of over 11% in both Port Adelaide which was Mick Young’s old seat, a very Labor seat, and Oxley which of course was the by-election necessitated by Bill Haydon’s resignation. And then that of course became very famous didn’t it in 1996 when it was won by Mrs Hanson. So it’s more similar to those in magnitude, and of course you remember that it took another eight years before the Labor Party was defeated. Now there is no set of previous circumstances that exactly fits the current situation. These comparisons are interesting and they’re the sort of things you expect from people who have an interest in them to make. But I think we do see some linkage as far as the dimension is concerned between what happened in Ryan and what happened in those by-elections during the Hawke years.

LAWS: Okay. Many people in Ryan are pretty comfortably off, they earn quite a lot of money. And they are less likely consequently to have been hurt by the GST, yet they still turned their backs on you or on the party to be more precise. Many of them said that it was because of the GST. What might happen in other less affluent seats?

PRIME MINISTER: Well obviously John if that sort of swing were repeated in the general election we’d be history, but it is a by-election. It’s always important to bear in mind that even in the most affluent suburbs of Australia there are people on modest incomes.

LAWS: Sure.

PRIME MINISTER: And I mean we both know the great cross section of Australian society and you get affluence in some of the not so well off communities and you get modest incomes in the very affluent suburbs. And there are a lot of people in a seat like Ryan who are self funded retirees, there are a lot of people in small business. For different reasons they may have concerns, I’m certainly getting those concerns from some of their number in other parts of Australia, and from people in my own electorate.

LAWS: Yet John the thing I don’t understand is why weren’t you aware of these concerns before? Have you been left in the dark by people around you?

PRIME MINISTER: Well if you go back to the research tools that are available to a political party they weren’t coming through as strongly at the end of last year. Sometimes you get in politics unexplained mood changes, you don’t hear many complaints from people and then a number of things happen and people say yeah that’s right and what’s more he should have done this as well. And you get an explosion of criticism. And I think there has been a degree of that occurring over the past couple of months.

LAWS: Okay but all of the criticism wasn’t unfounded.

PRIME MINISTER: Well I’m not suggesting it is. I don’t pretend for a moment that the criticism that’s been made of the Government on a number of issues is unfounded and what I have to try and do is sift through the criticism. Those points of criticism that are reasonable I’ve got to try and respond to, those that are not reasonable I’ve got to try and answer and point out why I can’t be expected to respond to it. Now that’s part of the job that a political leader, particularly a Prime Minister, has.

LAWS: Not an easy one.

PRIME MINISTER: Not it’s not an easy one because you have to still keep a steady hand on the tiller as far as the whole country is concerned, while at the same time looking after concerns people have that will bear down on your future and their future.

LAWS: The point that I’m making however is why is it that you weren’t aware of these concerns before, have people been keeping you in the dark or have you really lost touch with reality?

PRIME MINISTER: No I think I’m aware of a lot of these concerns.

LAWS: But you didn’t act on them.

PRIME MINISTER: Well some of them. You take something like the Business Activity Statement, that has been written up as a backflip in order to appease the voters of Ryan. That’s not right, I said in December of last year that if fine tuning of the Business Activity Statement were needed the Government would do that. Now the reason we didn’t do it straight away was that we felt that we had allow people to do two returns and get the experience of that to make certain that the changes we were to make were the right ones. So that’s not really a backflip, there was an acknowledgment by me as far back as December that there was a problem with that.

LAWS: Was it also an acknowledgment that the Opposition’s idea wasn’t such a bad one?

PRIME MINISTER: Well the Opposition’s idea came late in the piece after parliament had resumed. They didn’t say anything in December.

LAWS: No.

PRIME MINISTER: But look I’m not one of those people that disagrees with every single thing that the Opposition says. It’s the Opposition that disagrees with just about everything I say, but anyway I won’t drag you into that.

LAWS: You’ve got a Cabinet meeting in Brisbane today. Is this going to be a hot meeting or a cool level headed meeting?

PRIME MINISTER: It will be reflective, it will be very reflective. It’s long been arranged that we would have a meeting in Brisbane today, we’re not doing it in the wake of the Ryan by-election it just happens by coincidence to be held the Monday after it. But we’ll obviously talk about the by-election as well transacting some general business. But we’ll obviously have a long political discussion, you would expect us to do that. LAWS: Most certainly.

PRIME MINISTER: I’ll want the contribution of my colleagues.

LAWS: Okay thank you very much for your time and what must be a slightly depressing time for you as Prime Minister.

PRIME MINISTER: Well it’s pretty hectic and challenging but I’ve had a lot of those experiences in my time. I think the next election is going to be very hard for us but I counsel people against assuming that there’s going to be a change of Government. We’re going to fight like never before to put our case, to identify the weakness of the alternative and to remind people that when Mr Beazley was last there he ran up $85 billion of debt and we had 17% interest rates and unemployment went to 11.2%.

LAWS: They’re three figures you’ll never forget John.

PRIME MINISTER: No, but nor should I.

LAWS: And nor should the people.

PRIME MINISTER: Nor should the people. They are relevant to the choice that has to be made at the end of this year.

LAWS: I agree with that. Okay again thank you very much for your time Prime Minister, it was good to talk to you.

PRIME MINISTER: Thank you.

END