PAUL TURTON, PRESENTER: Pat Conroy is the Member for Shortland. He’s in the Left faction and he’s been good enough to come on and share his take on things.
Pat Conroy, good afternoon.
PAT CONROY, MEMBER FOR SHORTLAND: Afternoon, how are you?
TURTON: Yeah good. Is it helpful when former leaders get stuff off their chests, these musings and formal essays?
CONROY: Oh look the Labor Party prides itself on being the party of ideas so as long as we are talking about positive policy ideas, I think that can only be a good thing. So I welcome the debate. There’s a bit of rewriting of history being conducted by my neighbour, but I welcome Bill Shorten’s contribution and his firm statement that we do have some good policies out there, and it’s our job as Labor MPs to make sure that everyone understands what they are and how they’ll improve people’s lives.
TURTON: You say that the Labor Party is a party of ideas. Isn’t that just the point? Isn’t that what Bill Shorten is saying - that there are too many ideas?
CONROY: Well no he’s saying and he’s recognising that he’s learnt, as we all have, from the mistakes of the last election campaign where we took too many policies to the last election. We didn’t spend enough time explaining them and we made it too easy for our opponents to run ridiculous, offensive, and amoral scare campaigns. So what we are doing now under Anthony Albanese’s leadership is concentrating on a smaller number of ideas, explaining them more clearly and succinctly to the Australian people, explaining how it will improve people’s lives, and giving people a good, positive reason to vote for Labor.
For example, our childcare policy will reduce the cost-of-living pressures for families in our area by between $600 and $5,000 a year. That’s a massive improvement in life for many people in our area. Our commitment to rebuilding manufacturing in this country and lowering energy prices will be massively beneficial to our region. So it’s about having a good number of ideas that we explain clearly to the Australian people how they will make people’s lives better and improve the country.
TURTON: Pat Conroy, is it impossible to take a new tax regime to the Australian public via an election?
CONROY: I don’t think it’s impossible, but you’d have to spend a lot of time explaining it clearly and countering the inevitable scare campaigns. Let’s be frank: scare campaigns were effective. They were lies upon lies that scared a lot people, most especially pensioners, with things like death taxes and other things. They obviously make it harder to put in place visionary tax policies such as we tried to take to the last election.
TURTON: And it’s affected the Coalition as well. Some would argue of course that the mistakes over the birthday cake delayed the introduction of a perfectly legitimate tax in the GST.
CONROY: Well I think there’s still strong arguments about the distributional impact of the GST. It’s a tax that hurt a lot of poor people, we shouldn’t gloss over that fact. But obviously the inability of Mr Hewson to explain it in 1993 made it very easy for Paul Keating to demolish it. So I agree with you that these are very complicated areas. And even John Howard when he introduced the GST in 1998, even though he spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Government advertising before the election, he still nearly lost that election. Kim Beazley in fact received a majority of the two-party preferred vote. So these policies are hard fought.
TURTON: Pat Conroy, is there a risk in dumbing down our policy program in this country for both sides of politics to the extent that you simply sit there and wait for the Government to fail?
CONROY: No I think we have to – what we have to do is learn from the last election where we had way too many policies, and if you’ve got too many policies, you just don’t have time to explain them to people. I remember standing on a pre-poll booth trying to explain our childcare policy - which was excellent - to a childcare worker who’d never heard of it. Now if our key demographic for that policy had never heard of it three days before an election, it just meant that we had too many policies.
That’s why we’re focusing on a smaller number of good, strong policies that will improve people’s lives and just explaining them and explaining them until people actually know what they are because it’s very hard in today’s media environment to get messages across. And I’m not blaming the media – it's just very fragmented. So for example, just talking about our childcare policy, talking about how we are going to lower energy prices, how we are going to reinvest in TAFE, how we are going to bring manufacturing back to this country, how we are going to make it easier to get ahead in this country. That’s really important. So that’s not shying away from the policy fight, but it’s being pragmatic and saying, well, we had something like 300 policies at the last election, how could you physically have time to explain all of those policies.
TURTON: Both you and I have referenced Joel Fitzgibbon in this conversation thus far, you a little more subtly than me, but given the lessons of the last Federal poll, do you expect that the environmental policy for Labor will change to better influence blue collar workers in this region?
CONROY: Well I think Joel, and I’ve said this publicly, has fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. Our climate policy that we took to the last election would not have impacted on a single coal miner working in a coal mine in our region that exports coal, and that’s the vast majority of them. The vast majority of coal that’s dug in the Hunter is dug up and shipped out of the Port of Newcastle. Our climate policy would not have impacted them one iota. Now obviously there was some argy-bargy around symbolism around the Adani coal mine in central Queensland, but Joel is fundamentally wrong to imply that our environmental policy would have hurt those workers. It would not have hurt those workers. Those workers were completely safe under that policy. That’s my main point.
The second point that I’ll make is that we can have good, strong climate policy as well as good, strong manufacturing policy as I’ve said numerous times on ABC 1233 and other places. We’ve got huge reserves of all of the key inputs to make batteries, to make electric vehicles, to make wind turbine towers, to make solar panels. We can rebuild our manufacturing, we can get cheaper energy prices while being serious about climate policy. They are not mutually exclusive, and I think Joel is wrong to argue that.
Now we have to make sure that we are managing the politics of this and the symbolism correctly, that’s really important, but the substance is there. You can do both things at once, and we should be doing both things at once.
TURTON: If the consensus is that Labor needs less messages sold more effectively, is Anthony Albanese the man to sell them?
CONROY: Absolutely, absolutely. And if you look at public polling, we are the best positioned Opposition amongst all the State, Territory and Federal levels of politics. In a pandemic, it’s natural that people really focus on what the Government is doing. That is natural. And if you look around the world, that is what has occurred, and so people are very focused on what the Governments at State and Federal level are doing, what the Premiers and Prime Minister are saying, and that’s where their interests lie. But if you look at polling, the latest Newspoll had us only down 49-51. Anthony Albanese is the only Opposition Leader in the country that has a positive approval rating, i.e. more people approve of what he’s doing than disapprove. We are in a really strong position to advance a strong policy agenda and win the next election, and Albo’s the person to do that for us.
I must say, and it’s ironic given I’m speaking about it, but the more time we speak about internal Labor matters rather than our good, strong policies or how the Government’s handling of the COVID pandemic can be improved, that’s a day less where we’re not out there fighting. And that’s something I’m concerned about which is we are spending too much time talking about ourselves, and that’s obviously a conversation I’ve had directly with Mr Fitzgibbon as well.
TURTON: Pat Conroy, I appreciate you making yourself available. Thank you.
CONROY: Not a problem, have a great afternoon.