HOST:
The Assistant Treasurer's on the line, good to talk to you again.
BRADBURY:
Evening Steve, good to be with you.
HOST:
What worried you about those posters, I mean isn't that just a business wanting to get a message out there?
BRADBURY:
Well look, there's nothing to stop a business from expressing a political point of view or putting up political material but the particular placards concerned, they run the risk of putting the business in a position where they may be seen to be misleading their consumers about the reason that their prices have increased. And just to be clear upon this, the placards involved suggest that the owner of the business is apologising to customers for increasing prices as a result of the carbon price. Now, if there are price increases and they are only occurring because of the carbon price, then of course no one's been misled and there's no problem. But if they're out there jacking up prices for a whole host of other reasons, whether it's about beefing up their margins, whether it's about covering cost increases in other inputs, whether it be wages or rent or other costs that the business faces, then clearly, on the face of it, that placard would be misleading consumers. And this is what we're really concerned about. People that make claims in relation to the carbon price need to be able to justify and back up those claims, otherwise they're ripping consumers off and they're hiding behind these false claims in doing so.
HOST:
But I presume Brumby's has a high electricity bill, and you need electricity to bake bread, unless they're doing it in wood-fired ovens, which I suggest they wouldn't be doing and if they were they'd be getting an even bigger whack with the carbon tax, so isn't it reasonable to make an argument that your loaf of bread is more expensive because the carbon tax has started?
BRADBURY:
In the case of Brumby's –
HOST:
Or are you saying they've got to wait until they get their next electricity bill for these cost increases to move into their cost structure?
BRADBURY:
In the case of Brumby's, the big kerfuffle here was really based around the fact that a memorandum had been sent out by an executive within the company that had suggested that you just increase your prices as part of the usual quarterly or annual increase in prices and that you could somehow blame the carbon price. That was an attempt to jack up prices and to just pin it on the carbon price. If people are experiencing increases in their costs, and we've always said there will be some modest increases in people's costs – across the board we're looking at less than one per cent, around 0.7 per cent – but if your costs as a business are increasing, then it's legitimate for you to recoup some of those costs. But if you're increasing –
HOST:
And do you have an objection , sorry to interrupt, but do you have an objection there then, if someone puts a note up in their bakery that says your bread's more expensive today because of the carbon tax?
BRADBURY:
Well the question will be – and you put yourself in a dangerous position just by engaging in this sort of political commentary because it may be, and this would be a matter that the ACCC would have to investigate, but it may be that there are other cost increases that you are shielding and hiding behind the explanation of the carbon price. Businesses increase their costs on a regular basis. You don't need a carbon price for businesses to do that. Wages go up, rents go up. In fact, many of the discussions I have with small businesses, they are the two input costs they are constantly complaining about, that wages and rents are a huge part of their bills. Now when people increase their prices and that's as a result of wage rises or it's as a result of increases in rent, you don't see people putting up pamphlets and posters saying this is as a result of wage increases. Now the point that I'm trying to convey, and this is really important for businesses to understand, is that if you make a claim and that claim ends up being misleading then we have very strong consumer laws that stop you from being able to make those claims. If you do that, then the ACCC obviously will investigate these matters where it's brought to their attention and there are some pretty stiff penalties that can be imposed if people are out there making these claims.
HOST:
What did you make of the Melbourne-based funeral company trying to suggest to people who had purchased a burial plot that that piece of dirt was going to cost more because of the carbon tax?
BRADBURY:
I understand that the particular company concerned has apologised and they have said that their prices are not increasing as a result of the carbon price, so they've made that very clear. Clearly –
HOST:
Well there was one funeral company in Melbourne – Lapine I think – suggesting a cremation would cost more because of the carbon tax.
BRADBURY:
Oh, and look we will have to let individual businesses make those judgements but the particular case that has come to prominence today for which the company has now apologised, I understand there's no reason to dispute the version of events put forward by the family, but it would appear as though some staff member within this particular business has made a claim that clearly is a false claim in the circumstances. The ins and outs of that is something that obviously will be the subject of further investigation by others but I would make this point, and that is there is no justification for burial fees to be increased by the prices we are talking about in this particular case and in fact the company concerned has suggested that those increases in price were just part of an annual review of prices that were not driven by the carbon price. So if there's any suggestion that there's someone out there blaming those price rises on the carbon price then it would seem to me that those statements are misleading.
HOST:
Do you agree with your New South Wales Labor colleague Sam Dastyari that the Greens are a ‘loopy' party?
BRADBURY:
Well I've always taken the view that the Australian Labor Party is a very different organisation to the Australian Greens Party. We have very different values on many issues. I think we often see in very sharp relief some of those differences that exist and you just have to go back to the last sitting week of Parliament to see that when we were trying to put in place offshore processing, when it came to the Senate, we had the Australian Greens standing side by side with the Australian Liberal Party and the National Party to block offshore processing. Now that's something that I found a bit hard to stomach, I think there clearly would have been other people within the Labor Party that would have felt the same thing, particularly in circumstances such as this where many people are out there expressing their concern for loss of life at sea, but then when a Government has a plan to put in place to try and address that, we get the kind of Senate obstructionism that frankly we haven't seen for some time.
HOST:
Would you expect to get some of that Green vote back in your own seat next time?
BRADBURY:
It's never been about chasing the Green vote in my electorate. At the last election they got less than five per cent of the primary vote. Out in the seat of Lindsay, primary vote's what has always mattered, and to be honest, if we want to be in Government then it's the Australian Labor Party that people have to be voting for, and you know, there's no question that at this stage of the political cycle we've got some work to do but in the end people elect Labor Governments or Liberal Governments they don't elect Governments to be run by the Australian Greens.
HOST:
You're a strong supporter of the Prime Minister Julia Gillard, I think that's fair to say, isn't it?
BRADBURY:
Yeah it is.
HOST:
Kevin Rudd, his wife in the Sydney Morning Herald over the weekend, I note that his backer, Bruce Hawker, has said tonight that what he thinks Therese Rein was saying is he wouldn't be coming back to take the reins just for the sake of doing it, there would have to be a very compelling argument and that argument would be in the national interest. Is this all part, again, of a comeback plan from Kevin Rudd? Are they coming back again for another challenge?
BRADBURY:
I haven't seen Bruce Hawker's comments but I thought the piece Therese Rein did was pretty uneventful to be honest, I think there was a lot of interest in it and people have sought to read into it what might suit their own particular agenda but as far as I'm concerned and I think as far as most people are concerned, we've just got to get on with the business of progressing the agenda and the reforms that we've got. Obviously this was always going to be a challenging period for us with the actual implementation of the carbon price and I think that people are focussed on getting on with the job.
HOST:
So you don't expect another challenge?
BRADBURY:
I wouldn't expect that.
HOST:
David thanks for your time.
BRADBURY:
Thanks very much Steve.