Radio Interview ABC AM
15th October 2007
UHLMANN: Kevin Rudd, good morning.
RUDD: Good morning, Chris.
UHLMANN: Now, love him or loathe him, people know the Prime Minister. Who are you Kevin Rudd? Why should you lead this country?
RUDD: Well,
people ask me
Chris, why I want to
become Prime Minister of the country. My
answer is when I look out to the future I see new challenges facing the country
and I want to be there as this country’s leader, dealing with these challenges
head on. Three big ones. One is how do you build long-term economic
prosperity for
Australia once the mining boom is
over? And to me that means bringing on
an education revolution, investing in 21st century technology and
infrastructure like broadband, fixing the Federation, the last remaining
frontier of micro-economic reform and getting the country ready for the rise of
China, the rise of
India. The other big challenge is
offering help to working families under financial pressure.
Mr
Howard just
said he understood that, well that’s the same
Mr
Howard who said that working families had
never been better off. Finally, on the
question of climate change and water and where
Mr
Howard stands on that, who knows? But what I want to do is act decisively,
nationally and internationally on climate change to make sure that we don’t
produce for the next generation of Australians a future which is fundamentally
undermined in terms of economic environmental
matters.
UHLMANN: But looking at working families, you can’t make their groceries any cheaper; you can’t make their petrol any cheaper can you?
RUDD: On the question of working families under financial pressure, let’s look at how it’s impacting on them at the moment. Mr Howard said just before to you that he made no promise about keeping interest rates at record lows. Well he did. That was the Liberal Party advertisement and they’ve gone up five times since then, rents are out of control, and then the other pressures with grocery prices and petrol prices are well known. But here are two areas where you can provide real assistance to working families. One is Workchoices, if you have an industrial relations system which Mr Howard brought in once he seized control of the Senate which strips away penalty rates and overtime from working families that affects people’s ability to deal with cost of living pressures.
UHLMANN: Will groceries and petrol be cheaper under Labor?
RUDD: Chris, I’ve never made that undertaking in the past. What I’ve said is, in the case of petrol, that we needed a National Petrol Price Commissioner and once we made that position clear Mr Costello was very quick, after eleven years, to then act and say we better have some sort of formal inquiry ourselves.
On groceries, we said it’s time that we had a proper inquiry into the way in which competition was working in the groceries sector because when you look at the overall effect of grocery price increases and the rest on family budgets, Mr Howard’s boast that working families have never been better off, doesn’t stack up and it shows how much he’s got out of touch.
UHLMANN: Alright. Now, it’s a Labor mantra to say that the Prime Minister will do anything or say anything to get elected, are you any different?
RUDD: I believe that you’ve got to be absolutely upfront with people about what you can fix and about what you can’t fix. And my plan for the country’s future, the new leadership I have on offer, has these as concrete commitments. If I’m elected, we ratify Kyoto. If I’m elected, we abolish Workchoices. If I’m elected, we invest in an education revolution. If I’m elected, we end the buck-passing between Canberra and the States on hospitals and if I’m elected we build a 21st century high speed broadband network for the entire nation, city and country. Those are very concrete commitments.
UHLMANN: Isn’t leadership about doing hard things at hard times? Now, last week Robert McClelland simply articulated Labor policy on the death penalty and you publicly slapped him down. Doesn’t a leader stick by what he believes when things get tough?
RUDD: Well, that’s absolutely wrong. Our policy on the death penalty has been consistent throughout time. One, global opposition to be advanced through the United Nations. Two, we’ve always said that we’d intervene on behalf of individual Australians convicted on capital sentences abroad and three, when it comes to foreign terrorists who have been convicted that we don’t intervene. Now, the problem which occurred last week was of course the sensitivity which arose because of the timing of those statements as it related to the fifth anniversary of Bali.
UHLMANN: If it’s a matter of principle, the timing is irrelevant. It just makes it harder for someone who’s a leader.
RUDD: No, Chris. I was going to make one other point as well which is that the other problem with the statements made last week was it left open the possible interpretation that interventions would be made on behalf of Amrozi and that was not our policy. So the statements I made were absolutely consistent with where I have been and where we’ve been as a Party on the death penalty from the beginning.
UHLMANN: In the past, Labor has called the Medicare Safety Net a sham, now you’ve embraced it, what do you believe?
RUDD: When it comes to Medicare and the overall medical system, it’s important that we’ve got a plan to deal with the long term explosion of health and medical costs across the country.
UHLMANN: How can it be a sham one day and a good idea the next?
RUDD: Well, when it comes to a whole lot of people out there who are now dependent upon the Medicare Safety Net and given that they are under financial pressure right across the system through the sorts of cost pressures we spoke about before, the judgement we reached was that in these current circumstances it’s not the right time for those sort of things to be dealt with. That’s why we’ve committed ourselves to maintaining it into the future with no qualification in terms of when it would expire. We will commit to it, just as the Government has committed to it, into the future.
UHLMANN: Does Australia need someone who’s touting themselves simply as a younger version of John Howard? Why shouldn’t people stick with the original?
RUDD: Chris, what Australia is asking for is new leadership with fresh ideas for the nation’s future and fresh ideas to help working families. You see, with Mr Howard there is no plan, that’s why from within a few hours of the election being called, we are bombarded with a negative campaign, a fear campaign, which was laced through his interview with you just now. The thesis of which is if you vote for me as the next Prime Minister of Australia, the sky will fall in. Can I say Australia can do better than that. Let’s have a vision for ourselves to have the best education system in the world. That’s what I’m committed to and that is not something we’ve heard anything from the Prime Minister on for the eleven years he’s been in office.
UHLMANN: Finally, will you take up the Prime Minister’s challenge of a debate this weekend under the terms that he set?
RUDD: Well, in terms of new leadership, can I say the best thing you can do with debates is to have a number of them during the course of an election campaign so that all the policies are tested.
UHLMANN: You can start Sunday?
RUDD: Can I just say Mr Howard has a proposal from us for three debates. I wait with interest his response to the three debates proposal because what he’s done in every previous campaign, apart from bombarding the country with negative advertising, is have a debate early on when many of the policies are not out there to be debated and I think that’s the problem here. This Sunday we are one week into a six week campaign. Mr Howard should respond to our proposal for three debates. I look forward with interest to seeing what his response is.
UHLMANN: Kevin Rudd, thank you.
RUDD: Thanks, Chris.