Up close and personal with Cossie
July 28, 2008
Here is Stephen Mayne's story from the Crikey edition on Tuesday, 20 December, 2005.
15. Up close and personal with Peter Costello
By Stephen Mayne, exhausted Jon Faine fill-in
He might have banned Crikey from this year's budget lock-up and declared our ezine wasn't a reliable source over the Rob Gerard affair two weeks ago, but Treasurer Peter Costello was good enough to come into the 774 ABC studio for a 20-minute chat this morning.
Continuing a 10-year strategy of never taking a backward step or conceding a mistake, when asked to give his year a mark out of ten, the Treasurer reeled off the usual list of economic achievements from strong employment to the establishment of the Future Fund.
Asked to put policy aside and to assess whether December 2005 has been his worst month politically as Treasurer, Cossie again stuck to policy issues and said fronting up in the office on Christmas Day 1998 to come up with a $1 billion loan for Korea after it ran out of foreign reserves was his toughest day in the job and nothing compared with that.
After that, Cossie stuck by his line that he believed minimum wages would rise faster under the newly deregulated IR system, something that his Treasury doesn't believe. As for any suggestion that he was cute or even misleading in his parliamentary language, Cossie said he was completely vindicated by everything Treasury secretary Ken Henry had said. Crikey's Christian Kerr and The Australian certainly don't buy that line.
After that we raced through a range of issues. The Treasurer went out of his way not to blame Alan Jones for inciting the Cronulla riots because that was triggered by gangs of thugs, he said. Thugs who wrap themselves in the Australian flag are not to be condoned which was a different line to the PM who said he would never criticise anyone for patriotically using the flag.
On the NSW plan to float its 58% stake in the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, the Treasurer said the Commonwealth would like to sell its 13% stake as well, but would prefer if the Victorians also signed up to sell their 29% stake.
I read out this long quote from Malcolm Turnbull's December email newsletter which went out at 4.30pm last night:
" I believe we have the means and the will to tackle a new round of tax reform in Australia. If we cannot afford tax reform today, when will we be able to afford it? And if a Government with a proven and trusted track record of economic reform is not qualified to take it on, who else would have the courage, let alone the public trust, to do so? If not us who? If not now, when?"Asked why he opposed comprehensive tax reform, Cossie said he preferred an ongoing gradualist approach. We then had an exchange on the merits of increasing capital gains tax and reducing the top tax rate, but he did not accept that CGT concessions are largely enjoyed by the 3% of Australians on the top marginal rate and tried to take a stand against jacking up capital gains taxes.
The enlightening comments about Rupert Murdoch are covered elsewhere in this edition and the other interesting issue was his disclosure of a meeting this morning with ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel after yesterday's gathering of senior cabinet ministers in Sydney. The AFR reported today that the PM wants to exert some power over the regulatory decisions by the ACCC over Telstra but Costello said he was against this, so today's meeting would have been interesting.
Cossie exited the studio declaring that Reverend Howard Langmead of St John's in Brunswick, who was about to chat about church-going oncers that only show up at Christmas, was a very talented comedian who he'd seen dressed up as a clown. Cossie himself is more than a oncer and had attended his regular church service last Sunday night and was looking forward to doing the same with his family on Christmas Day.
Amen.
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