LUKE GRANT: We thought we would have a chat to Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister. Julia Gillard will be a key member of the Community Cabinet meeting today and I am delighted to say she is on the line. Deputy Prime Minister good morning and happy birthday.
JULIA GILLARD: [Laugh] Thank you very much.
LUKE GRANT: Can I ask you, if you don’t mind me asking you, what a Prime Minister gives his deputy for her birthday?
JULIA GILLARD: I’m not sure yet, I will find out during the course of the day. [Laugh] But I can’t think of a better place to be celebrating my birthday than here in Newcastle.
LUKE GRANT: Well, it’s good to have you back here. I do want to ask you this and it is a perception that many Australians have. I think the facts are that the Prime Minister has been to New York more than he has been to Newcastle since he has been Prime Minister and we are the sixth largest region in Australia. There’d be some people here, who give you every one of their Federal seats minus one that being Paterson, who’d be wondering why we aren’t a bit higher up on the list of priorities at least for the PM.
JULIA GILLARD: I certainly think the Government travels frequently to Newcastle. Cabinet members, myself personally, I know Kevin has travelled here on a number of occasions and one of the reasons we do is this is a community where you can really learn what’s going on. I certainly remember when I was Shadow Minister for Health coming and meeting with your local health professionals who were doing things that the rest of the nation were looking at in wonderment and which were a new model of health care so there are great things to learn when you are in Newcastle. And we are showing that we think that this is a wonderful place to visit and to talk to people in through the Community Cabinet process; bringing the whole Cabinet into an open forum where people can just have their say about whatever is on their mind.
LUKE GRANT: Yeah, they are terrific events. I saw the one in Penrith telecast on Sky. You’ve got no protections have you. You would get some member of the community who’ll ask you whatever you want, straight to your face and you’ve got to come up with some sort of solution or at least try to get back to them. It is a little confronting, isn’t it because generally and with good reason, at times people in your position have to have some protection to come up with something that’s appropriate to say but in these things it’s kind of very open, isn’t it?
JULIA GILLARD: Well it’s very open, very spontaneous. I understand Newcastle responded to the invitation to come to the Community Cabinet forum with enthusiasm and the tickets were snapped up almost instantaneously. So we will be there with more than 500 local people and they can raise whatever’s on their mind. So people can raise the biggest of global events – I’m sure there will be some people who leap up and say what they think about what is happening in the US and the global financial crisis. But you also get people who leap up and ask a very personal question about something to do with them or their family. It might be they had a dealing with Centrelink and they weren’t happy or they’re perhaps looking to get a visa for a family member to visit and they’re having some trouble. So it can be from the global issue to the most personal of issues raised all in the same forum.
LUKE GRANT: And I would imagine this is because, and it’s a great realisation if it is the motivation, that in Canberra you’re kind of protected a little bit from what the man or woman on the street has on their mind. Is that why you do this?
JULIA GILLARD: I think the Rudd Labor Government and every member of Cabinet is really aware that the view from Canberra is not the only view in this nation; that it’s very important to get out in local communities and see what the view from that local community is. And we’ve had these Community Cabinet events in major cities – you’ve referred to the one in Sydney for example. This is the second one in a regional location and we went to an Indigenous community in the Northern Territory. So we’ve been to Mackay, now in Newcastle, an Indigenous community and into some of our big cities and each and every time you get different things raised and different perspectives, because the communities are different.
LUKE GRANT: Yeah, one of the things that I think appealed to lots of voters and plenty of people that have called me and spoken about it has been perhaps putting the heat on the oil companies and keeping the prices down there and also doing something with grocery prices. But you get the impression from people that FuelWatch and the grocery website really haven’t done much about the prices of both those commodities and I wanted to ask you that in the eight or nine or 10 months you’ve been in government, have you come to the realisation that perhaps it’s sometimes easier to look from the other side of the fence and think you can do things quicker than what you possibly can when in government?
JULIA GILLARD: The perspective we’ve brought into government is one where we’ve been absolutely fixed on delivering our promises. And I know that that can sometimes startle people – a politician delivering their promises – whoever heard of that? But that’s exactly what we’ve done, we’ve been delivering our promises. And what we always said about petrol and about grocery prices and the like is that we would be improving competition. And FuelWatch is a system which would deal with the thing that drives people the most crazy about petrol prices which is when they drive past the petrol station in the morning and see one price and drive past it in the afternoon and it’s gone up 10 or 15 cents. I think it’s that volatility, the fact prices or the perception prices go up in the run up to a holiday weekend and then they’re back down again afterwards, it’s that I think that drives people absolutely crazy and that’s what FuelWatch is there to deal with.
LUKE GRANT: Yeah, see I was in Sydney yesterday, and the price there, I could have got it for $1.44 a litre, and coming to work today it’s $1.53 here. Now even though FuelWatch might be a good system in letting you know when the prices go up and down, it still won’t help me get petrol for eight cents a litre less which is what they’re paying in Sydney, 120 Ks down the road. I mean I just find that sort of thing ridiculous. How is that the case and FuelWatch can’t stop that from happening.
JULIA GILLARD: What FuelWatch can do is to let you know what the prices are in and around your region and it’s worked in WA so that when people did know those prices and knew that those prices were going to be there for 24 hours, they would then time their petrol buying to get the best possible price. So I think that that is of use to people to know where the cheapest price in their locality is so that they can plan their petrol buying, they can look on the website or even get the information through on their mobile phone and say ‘right, well when I’m dropping the kids off to school I’m definitely going to swing by x or y petrol station because they’ve got the best price’.
LUKE GRANT: What about pensioners? I know it’s been a bit issues in the Parliament over the last week and the Coalition have had a bit of a crack about why there hasn’t been that $30 a week increase. Now I know the answer – they had 12 years to do something and they did nothing as well, but it just seems to me with $20 billion plus in the pot, the people that are doing it toughest, shouldn’t they get a bit of a hand now, rather than next year?
JULIA GILLARD: We did give pensioners a bit of a hand in the May Budget, to use your terminology. We did extend for older Australians a $500 cash bonus. We increased the utilities allowance to $500 so that’s there to help with the bills that come in quarterly. $128 of that was paid in the last couple of weeks and pensions have been indexed in the last couple of weeks, so for a single older Australian, their pensions gone up by just over $15. Now we understand that these measures take a bit of pressure off but more needs to be done and that’s why we’re having a comprehensive review to make sure we get this right. The pension system is the bedrock of our social security system. It’s related to all other forms of allowances. It relates to things like rents in public housing. So if you’re going to make a difference you’ve really got to do it in a careful and comprehensive way so that the money actually gets through where you want it to get through.
LUKE GRANT: But you can understand pensioners saying look, we’ve got all this surplus now and even our own Treasurer says he couldn’t live off the pension. Couldn’t there be something else you could do now rather than have them wait another 12 months?
JULIA GILLARD: I can understand the frustration and I can understand that it’s built up over 12 long years as you say that people have waited and waited and waited and they didn’t see action from the former Government so now that there’s a fair degree of frustration out there. I meet a lot of pensioners as I move round and talk to them about how tough they are finding it. The Government does want to deal with this though in a proper and comprehensive way and we have delivered the Budget measures to take a bit of pressure off.
LUKE GRANT: All right, a couple of quick local things before we go. The first of those is the F3 link. This road would just remove a lot of congestion from around the very fast growing Maitland area. It’s been a bit of a football. Joel, your colleague Joel Fitzgibbon, made noises prior to the election that it would be something that would be on the table. It just doesn’t seem to be happening. Will there be any light shed on that today?
JULIA GILLARD: We are trying to deal with nation building right around the country. I mean every community has got a major infrastructure issue that it says has been neglected for a long period of time so needs have just built up right round the country. The former Government obviously didn’t have a nation building approach. We want to have a nation building approach. That’s why we’re creating a new fund, the Building Australia Fund, with $20 billion in it but it appears from today’s newspapers that the Liberal Party is going to try and block the creation of that new Nation Building Fund in the Senate which seems to me remarkable because we need to get the Fund in place, we need to be out there looking for infrastructure projects that are going to make a difference to the nation.
LUKE GRANT: Yeah. I think this is a yes or no one - there was a promise regarding an MRI licence for Maitland. It hasn’t been delivered yet. Will we get that today?
JULIA GILLARD: Well I’d have to defer that to my colleague Nicola Roxon but we’re certainly a government very focussed on delivering our election commitments.
LUKE GRANT: What sort of birthday cake will you have?
JULIA GILLARD: [Laugh] I’m not sure. It’s not a remarkable birthday, it’s not ending with a five or a zero; it’s one of those inconvenient ones in between where you just feel that little bit older. I’m sure during the course of the day I will probably manage to find a piece of cake and I will enjoy it.
LUKE GRANT: But are you jam, sponge and cream? Lamington? Pavlova? You know, what’s the cake of choice for the Deputy PM?
JULIA GILLARD: [Laugh] Look, I’d have to say if I had every choice in the world I’d actually go for a fruitcake. That’d be my favourite.
LUKE GRANT: OK, I hope you have a great day. Really appreciate your time.
JULIA GILLARD: Thank you very much.
LUKE GRANT: Nice to talk to you again. That’s Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard
ENDS