Malcolm Turnbull - Minister for Communications, Australia HARDtalk

arrested since February. Now on BBC News it's time for

Hardtalk. Welcome to HARDtalk. Whoever told

Australia the lucky country was onto something `` dubbed. This vast

resource rich nation has outperformed other economies over

the last decade. Right now, Australia doesn't seem at ease with

itself or its Asian neighbours. Why? My guest is Malcolm Turnbull,

mutations minister in Tony Abbott's Australian government. ``

communications. Is Australia in danger of alienating friends and

partners? Malcolm Turnbull, welcome to

HARDtalk. White you are part of a government who came to power in

autumn. Within two months the polls suggested the move had turned and

the opposition was more popular than the government. It is called the

shortest honeymoon in political history. What is going on? We are

getting on with the job. After succeeding to office after six years

of very bad leadership by the Labour Party, running up massive deficits,

massive debt, really, a dysfunctional government at war with

itself. The civil war between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard was an

extraordinary phenomenon. It was a lot of hard work. We have got to

knuckle down and get it done. In a way, you have the Labour Party are

so unpopular in Australia and yet, within months of you and your lot

coming to power, the Australian public decided that we are back with

labour. The only poll that matters is the one on election day and that

won't be until sometime towards the end of 2016. The critical thing for

us to do, look, journalists and commentators can read the polls and

I am not suggesting politicians don't read them, but they are only a

snapshot in time, they are not predictive and the important thing

to do for all of us in government is focus on the task at hand. The

public will judge us at the due date late in 2016. It we will get to

policy issues in a moment. The politics of Australia are

fascinating for you, because he you are serving in a liberal led

government. You, six years ago, were the leader of the Liberal Party and

you were toppled by Tony Abbott, the man who you now serves as a cabinet

minister. Is that proving difficult for you? Not at all. We serve the

Australian people. It is not a dictatorship or a presidential

system. Tony Abbott is the leader, the PM. He is, in any Westminster

system, part of a collective leadership. He he is very socially

conservative. You seem a very different sort of social Liberal

Party member. The Liberal Party is a broad church and Tony and I agree on

a lot of things and we have very well`known differences of opinion on

some others. The differences are not... In politics and in public

debate, it is always the differences that are highlighted and people

overlook that there is actually, between people and indeed parties,

often a lot of commonality. Let's pick out some of these conservative

thoughts and opinions that Tony Abbott holes, because they have

gained traction. For example, on the issue of women. I can give you a

raft of controversial quotes. Abortion, he said, is the easy way

out. He said that quite a long time ago. Anyway. Still, Tony has got a

fairly... Tony is a... Look, generalising about Catholics is

ridiculous because it is the largest in the world. There is great

diversity. Tony is a conservative person in matters of what you might

call faith and morals. All of our views, all of us grow up and as we

grow up and get older, we learn more and our views change and Tony Abbott

is no exception. He is dead set against having a conscience vote on

gay marriage. That's not true. It seemed to be true when you suggested

it would be a good idea and you told the party they wouldn't be one. We

have said and he has said, and it is the party's position which we took

to the election, that whether we have a free vote on gay marriage in

this parliament will be decided by the party room, not by the leader

and not by the Cabinet. Lletget on the record. Do you believe the party

must have a vote of conscience, a free vote on this very important

social signal issue of gay marriage in Australia? I think we should have

a free vote and I have been public about that and if there is a free

vote, then I will vote subject to the detail of the legislation, to

support gay marriage `` let get on the record. If the party goes

against that, will you feel comfortable serving in the Abbott

government? It is a keen business. I would be disappointed if we didn't

have a free vote. I think we will. Whether there is a majority in the

Parliament to legislate for same`sex marriage remains to be seen. You

have to remember, there has been a complete seachange on this issue in

recent years. Same`sex marriage is lawful in all of the major English

speaking countries that we are closest to, the UK, Canada, South

Africa and one third of the US, and New Zealand. So, really, I have

never seen a social issue on which public opinion and legislation has

moved as quickly as it has on same`sex marriage. Interesting that

you are suggesting to me that Australia is evolving, Tony

Abbott's personal views are a evolving. On one really important

issue, there doesn't seem to be much evolution, and that is immigration.

It seems Tony Abbott come with his porky stamps, introducing the

military to respond to unauthorised immigration is playing the same

playbook that John Howard played in the last Conservative Australian

administration. He absolutely is playing the same book that John

Howard did and the reason he is doing it and the reason we support

it is because the one thing we want to stop is this appalling and

dangerous trade of people smuggling and the only way you can do that is

to deprive the people smugglers of a product to sell. There is an

interesting history to this. It played out when I was Leader of the

Opposition. Kevin Rudd came into government and he said he wanted to

change John Howard's laws on border protection. Kevin had the view that

the limiting factor on unlawful arrivals, on people smuggling, was

not Australia's domestic policies, but only the circumstances in the

Middle East, Africa, or wherever the refugees were coming from. He

recognised humanitarian need an international law. Let me finish. He

said it was only the push factors that accounted for the decline. What

we set at the time, and we have been proven correct, was that the push

factors go from being big two very big, but the limiting factor is

whether a people smuggler can say to somebody with confidence, give me

$5,000, get on my boat, and I will get you permanent residence in

Australia. If you prevent that, then you stop the trade and that is what

we have done. There have been no unlawful arrivals by boat since

December 19. Unlawful arrivals don't get to Australian waters because the

Australian Navy intercepts them and turns them back and in some cases

the unauthorised would`be immigrants and up in detention camps in

papillon New Guinea. That was the detention came in papillon new

Cannae which was established by Kevin Rudd when he recognised that

his previous policy had been a clique failure and he sought to

reinstate the Howard era policies `` Papua New Guinea. As we have seen

with Manus Island, without adequate planning or logistics and security.

There have been, as you know, a number of tragic incidents. I we are

talking about this year, one death, scores injured, clashes between

inmates and security clients. Amnesty International say that

Australia has spectacularly failed to respect and protect the rights of

some of the world 's most vulnerable people. It is a illegally

outsourcing responsibilities to ill`equipped third countries ``

Third World countries. You are a lawyer. Are you comfortable with

your `` with what York country is doing? I don't think any of us are

comfortable with any issue relating to order protection `` with what

your country is doing. Do you believe you we are in compliance

with international law. We have harsh measures. Some would say they

are cruel. What would you say? I would say they are harsh. I wouldn't

say cruel. Lets not argue about semantics. If you want to stop

people smuggling, you have to be very very tough. Kevin Rudd

conducted a massive social science experiment. He believed that his

approach wouldn't result in a resurgence of arrivals. He had

50,000, somewhere between five and 10% of those numbers, we don't

know, drowned at sea. It has been a catastrophe. You have just yourself

acknowledged that things aren't right in the Manus Island detention

camp run by Papua New Guinea. Would you have your government closed back

down? It is a matter for the Immigration Minister, Scott

Morrison, who is getting that state of affairs into order `` close that

down. Would you like to see it closed down? No he hasn't, but what

we want to see is it being properly run and we are taking the steps to

ensure that happens, well, Scott is taking those steps. You need to

remember this was set up by Kevin Rudd. I'm not trying to pass the

blame. He set it up in a screaming hurry to try and get the Labour

Party's immigration, border protection house in order before an

election at the truth is that the most effective policy that we have

at the moment a lot which is the one that John Howard used very

skilfully, is turning the boats back and that means you are not taking

people into custody or... There is something reputational at stake. You

sit here as the communications minister. I assume that part of your

job is to communicate Australia's case to the world. It seems you have

a problem when the one hand... Will you tell me the problem? I am about

to lay it out. At the UN Security Council, for example, Australia

co`authors resolutions deploring the humanitarian crisis in Syria,

demanding that the B addressed. At the same time, we see Syrians, on

leaking boats, desperately trying to get to Australia, being intercepted

by the Australian Navy, who turned them around and tow them towards

Indonesia, violating Indonesian territorial waters at the same time.

It looks like that is a fundamental hypocrisy coming from Australia. It

is absolutely not. We have a generous humanitarian programme, and

we take 20,000 humanitarian refugees each year. Aaron the point is, as

John Howerd said, we, on behalf of the Australian people, we want to

determine who comes to Australia, and the circumstances in which they

come. We recognise that the disaster in Syria is staggering, and there

will be a massive refugee problem, and it will get worse until the

situation is stabilised. Those unlucky enough to see in leaky boat

heading to your country will be very unlucky, it is they will get turned

down, and may well end up in Papua New Guinea. The boats are not full

of Syrians. The people smuggling business is a business, it is

essentially a travel business, and unlawful immigration business.

People are paying $5,000 to get on these boats, and you have got to ask

yourself, if you are going to have an humanitarian programme, do you

want to select who should come? The answer to that is clearly yes. If

you want to do that, you have to stop the people smuggling business,

because otherwise they end up selecting who you'll humanitarian

programme is made up of. Let me shift focus to another area where

Australia is under serious international scrutiny. That is

climate change. You say, I can't hold Tony Abbott's past words

against him for eternity, but he did once described climate change as

absolutely... It is a word I can't actually use on the BBC, it begins

with, and ends with macro to `` P. You were out of step with your

party, you still are. The emissions trading scheme was the Liberal

Party's policy under John Howard. The emissions trading scheme was

designed... We don't have so much time, and I appreciate this is

important... Tony Abbott challenged me over this issue, and the party

changed its policy. Until such time as I ceased to be leader, the

Liberal Party's policy under John Howard, and under Brendan Nelson,

was an emissions trading scheme. I accept that, but the reality today

is that you sit around the Cabinet table, with Tony Abbott. I believe

this summer it is going to happen, he is committed to the full repeal

of the carbon tax introduced by the Labour party, and I just wonder

whether that is a fundamental mistake, if you think it is a

fundamental mistake. We won an election with the repeal of the

carbon tax is one of our biggest and most prominent planks. We couldn't

possibly not repeal it. You could if you given Australia being pretty

much the most polluting, dirtiest country in the developed world, you

may laugh, but look at the OECD figures. You are the dirtiest nation

in the rich world. Isn't it actually a very strange priority for Tony

Abbott to pick to reveal the carbon tax, when those are the facts? Our

government is committed to the same emissions reduction target to which

the previous government was, they are bipartisan. We are trying to

achieve those cuts without putting a price on carbon, having a programme

that has been described as direct action, which essentially means

providing incentives to polluters to cut their emissions, and our policy

is that this is an alternative approach, and there are many

alternative approaches to cutting CO2 emissions. You can see them in

the US. The targets you have set yourself are more lenient, more

relaxed than those that had been set by Obama for the US, and certainly

weigh more lenient than those had been set by the European Union. When

is Australia going to set up to its responsibilities, given the amount

of emissions you are responsible for? I contest what you are saying.

The cut is a substantial one, cutting our emissions by 2020 by

5%. We have had a rapidly growing economy, unlike Europe, so the cut

on a business as usual basis is actually very large. Don't fall for

that idea that it is just a 5% cut, it is a very significant cut, and we

are confident that we can achieve it. The real question for the global

community, ears, is there going to be a global arrangement going

forward? We had the disaster at Copenhagen, and we all know that

without a global agreement we will not get effective abatement of

greenhouse gas emissions, it is if one country stops admitting a tonne

and another one in its an additional time, then they hate each other off.

I want to address some of the issues that are in your area as the

telecommunications minister. That is the way Australia has handled the

revelations that have come out of Edward Snowden and what he has told

us about the mass electronic surveillance, led by the US, of

internet traffic around the world. We have learned that Australia has

been very much part of that. Australia has an intelligence

alliance with the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand. Before you came to

power, you said that you thought all Australians should take very

seriously what Edward Snowden had revealed. Since then, you have

changed your tune, and said that you believe he has done enormous damage

to Australia. I don't think you have quite characterised he has done a

lot of damage, because he has revealed very current, a massive

amount of very current operational information about the work of the

intelligence services in Britain and America and Australia. I would have

thought that as a lawyer who represented Peter Wright in a long

battle with the British government about the freedom to speak openly

about what intelligence services do, you would have instinctively

supported Edward Snowden and the important revelations he has given

us. There is a huge difference between Peter Wright and Edward

Snowden. Peter Wright's information was firstly very old, and secondly,

it had all been published before, and thirdly, Peter Wright offered

his book to MI5 to blue pencil. Edward Snowden's stuff is absolutely

current operational staff, and he has never suggested that he would

submit it for vetting or anything like that. The two cases... Don't

Australians have a right to know that if they use Gmail or any other

big corporate internet provider, there is a strong possibility that

not just Australian intelligence, but US intelligence, there will be

able to access the information they are putting online? Australian

intelligence services operate within the law, as indeed it... And

international lawyer says there is real doubt about that. That

Australia has been sharing with the US without any warrant or formal

permission. Our intelligence services operate within the law,

that is the fact. You can tell me that, but there has been no

Parliamentary enquiry to make sure that is true in Australia, has there

was yellow there is an intelligence service that regulates it, and I'm

confident it operates within the law. The thing about Snowden was

that it was very current, and it has done a great deal of harm. There is

a very active debate right now that when the organisation and control of

the internet needs to change, and in the past it has been very much a US

dominated area. Has that got to change? Putin says that at the

moment it is a CIA project. Do things have to change because of

international perception? The US has had a fairly formal role in the

contracts relating to the administration... Federal

institutions have had a very important... It has been a formal

role, only. The best way I can describe it is the way the House of

Lords is described, it has done nothing in particular, but done it

very well. Is your opinion that it has to change? Has to be

internationalised and taken away from the US? The US have said they

don't want the department of commerce to be involved, even in a

titular sense. But what the Americans insist on, and we insist

on and support them in this, as you do in the UK, is that we do not want

to have the administration of the internet being overseen by

governments at large. By the UN force a multilateral body. It should

be run by the internet community, which is how it has been run. It is

not elegant, what we call it the multi` stakeholder approach. That is

how the body that administers all of these addresses and domain name

system is, that is how it has operated in the past, and that is

how it should operate in the future. It is critical that the internet

remains free. We believe there should be freedom of the internet

and freedom on the internet. We have run out of time. Malcolm Turnbull,

thank you for being on HARDtalk. Monday was the warmest day of the

holiday weekend, 20 degrees in Cambridge. We had more of a

southerly trees developing, blowing in some warmer air, ahead of this

weather front which has brought rain across many parts of the