AGENDA 15 September 2007 - Helen Clark IV

AGENDA 15 September 2007 - Helen Clark IV

RAWDON By election time next year Helen Clark will be New Zealand's fifth longest serving Prime Minister, longer than Sir Robert Muldoon, longer than Jim Bolger, beaten over the last 50 years only by Sir Keith Holyoake, it's a formidable record but now in her eighth year in the Beehive she faces here biggest challenge. Polling now shows National would win the next election, so how does Helen Clark plan to revive her government and stay in power. The Prime Minister joins Guyon Espiner now.

GUYON Well Prime Minister staying in power looks a pretty big ask, you’ve got most of the polls showing at least a ten point trailing National, the poll in the Dominion Post yesterday said many of your own voters don’t expect you to win, why do you think people are so disillusioned with your government at the moment?

HELEN CLARK – Prime Minister
Well firstly this wouldn’t be the first bad winter I've had a Prime Minister, I think back to the socalled winter of discontent in the year 2000, 2004 was pretty bleak and 2005 wasn’t much better so there's something about the winter months where if things go wrong they sometimes go wrong for a while.

GUYON Surely it's not only the season though.

HELEN It's something about the political season, we usually start the year quite well and some years you start to go down and it takes a while before you come out the other side of that, but I believe we've got a very very strong agenda going forward contrary to some comment, this government actually gets on with some pretty big picture policy and this year has been no exception, and we'll be moving into election year with new policy, fresh people and a lot of momentum.

GUYON Well let's pick up on the new policy, when you look at the polls you see National having forged that lead without really releasing much policy at all and much of it that they have released is pretty similar to your own, so what are the points of difference going to be, how are you going to fight and win that election on policy?

HELEN Fundamentally I think it comes down to what kind of New Zealand do you want to live in, do you want to live in the society where the emphasis is on going ahead together, the social inclusiveness, the emphasis on the good health and education, looking after our families, that’s what counts, every election you come back to basics, you come back to education, you come back to health, you come back to our families' income, you come back to jobs.

GUYON Voters expect you just to be doing that as a matter of course as a government.

HELEN And I hope we are but National governments don’t do that as a matter of course, they cut, they cut, they cut.

GUYON What's going to be new from you though, you're attacking them and saying they're gonna cut what's gonna be new from you?

HELEN Well firstly we kept the momentum up in the social policy, Working for Families has been a huge success, so has basically cutting the cost of going to the doctor in half, Kiwi Saver is an innovative and very exciting policy for retirement income. So there's all those areas, we have new initiatives coming on affordable housing, dealing with supply side rather than just demand which it's too easy to do with housing.

GUYON I'd like to talk a bit about housing affordability a little bit later, but let's look at climate change, it's a big priority for the planet and for your government, you’ve compared it to perhaps being the iconic policy that the nuclear free policy was, but we're failing aren’t we, we're the 11th highest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

HELEN Well 12th last time I looked but then we have this big issue with the pastoral emissions which no other developed country is actually having to deal with and that makes our hill a little bit harder to climb than for some people, but there's a huge programme of action underway on this, everyone knows that there's been major policies out for consultation, we're only day away now from revealing the details of the design of am emissions trading scheme and I think that’s gonna be pretty exciting for people to look at.

GUYON How significant is that announcement going to be?

HELEN It is significant because it's an announcement about a scheme which is comprehensive over time, all sectors, all gases, so that’s going to have us up there alongside the European Union and other countries designing schemes. Australia by the way which hasn’t ratified Kyoto is still designing emissions trading, so is Japan so are others.

GUYON Okay I think you said that all sectors would be covered…

HELEN Over time.

GUYON So does that mean that agriculture gets a bit of a break perhaps for three or four years?

HELEN Oh I don’t want to reveal the sequence in here but clearly there's a different capacity to cope with the challenges, and agriculture's challenge is clearly the biggest because right now we don’t have the answer to how to drop pastoral greenhouse gas emissions. We do know how to deal with the nitrous oxide issue, I believe the research on that around nitrification inhibitors to go on the land is pretty exciting but the methane from the animals is a tougher challenge and it's going to need a lot of research to crack the answer.

GUYON The energy sector represents about 40% of our emissions, a little bit more, this will have to include energy and won't that mean that the price of fuel and energy goes up for the consumer?

HELEN That’s why it's so important that there is compensation for the low modest income consumer because they're not in a position necessarily to radically alter their pattern of use, but you then supplement that with what we're doing with the energy retrofits running at 12,000 a year for lower income older people, and also we are developing the scheme which I hope will be interest free for people to retrofit their homes.

GUYON So there will be some sort of compensation?

HELEN Yes.

GUYON Can you tell me about that?

HELEN No, because there's things to be announced later this week.

GUYON But to compensate for the price of energy and fuel going up people will get some moneys to help them out to pay for that?

HELEN There needs to be compensation for our low and modest income households who are not in a position to radically change their pattern of use of energy quickly, but you supplement that with your retrofits and ensuring that our homes are better insulated and other measures.

GUYON Isn't one of the big problems with – as you’ve said it's agricultural emissions, I mean they're half of our greenhouse gas emissions, I mean isn't the problem with New Zealand trying to combat climate change is you can't really do that without tackling dairy and that’s hammering the economy if you do that?

HELEN I think Fonterra which represents the overwhelming number of our dairy farmers is absolutely on to this. They know that offshore in the affluent markets the consumers are looking at the greenhouse gas footprint of products, so Fonterra in our dairy farms I think we show a lot of leadership on these issues, they're backing the research, I think they're excited by the new developments with the nitrification inhibitors which will help do something about the nitrous oxide problem. They want to be seen to be sustainable, that’s the key to our dairying future.

GUYON Obviously climate change and the economy are quite interlinked, I just want to talk a bit more broadly about the economy. We saw interest rates remain unchanged on Thursday, we've seen a bit of a downturn in the housing market, do you think that that will bring houses back within reach of the average person or is housing affordability still going to be a major election issue for you?

HELEN Oh for sure it's an issue and that’s why we're looking at new tools around housing affordability so that’s our councils have more powers to require affordable housing in the mix, there's quite a lot of housing built in New Zealand but not a lot of it is affordable for the lower and modest income households, so we need to deal with that, but I think we also need to look at some of the other background issues here. We've had higher levels of home ownership than many western countries have had. We're also seeing a change in style of housing from the every growing spread out into the far reaches of suburbia into more intensive living in apartments, it may be that the starter home of the future will be an apartment rather than the house on the section as it conventionally was, so I think we're seeing changes in patterns as well.

GUYON Can I look at another economic issue which affects a lot of people and that is tax, is Labour going to reduce personal income tax before the next election?

HELEN Well what we've said is this issue will be addressed in next year's budget.

GUYON Why are you so coy about that though because you hit National about saying they won't give you the numbers but they’ll say we're going to cut taxes, why can't you just say whether you're going to cut taxes or not?

HELEN Well I'll be asking them where they're going to cut spending because their plans have always put social spending on the things people really care about like health and education at well below giving themselves a tax cut, but we'll be outlining our plans in due course.

GUYON Okay well what about the Finance Minister himself, will Michael Cullen be Finance Minister until the election?

HELEN That’s certainly my expectation.

GUYON Has he given you that assurance?

HELEN I know he loves the job and I know he would love to be Finance Minister at the time of the election.

GUYON What about more broadly in your reshuffle? I mean apart from reallocating David Benson-Pope's portfolios why are you doing a Cabinet reshuffle?

HELEN Well it was always my plan to do a Cabinet reshuffle in the lead up to election year, I haven’t announced what the timing will be I'm still doing consultations particularly with senior colleagues around the shape of the team, but of course it's important to be refreshing. Actually by the time of the next election people will see a lot of refreshing in the Labour team and it's well known that there are a number of MPs who won't be seeking re-election and a lot of good new talent lining up for the places.

GUYON How significant would you describe this reshuffle as?

HELEN I'm not going to put a label on it, what I'm determined to have is the right people for the jobs and that’s what we're working on.

GUYON Is Damien O'Connor going to remain in the Cabinet?

HELEN Well you'll just have to wait and see.

GUYON What's your thoughts at the moment on him?

HELEN Well I don’t reveal them here.

GUYON There's some speculation today that Margaret Wilson is going to step aside from the Speaker's position and that might be an elegant way to have Mark Burton transition across to that job.

HELEN I wish the Sunday paper that wrote that drivel had rung, they would have been told that Margaret Wilson has no desire to be the next High Commissioner in London and won't be going there.

GUYON Can I just ask you a final question before we come to our panel, why do you want a 4th term, I mean you could see that it that you’ve won the argument, National's adopted a lot of your policies, I mean why is it – is it more about your own legacy in wanting a 4th term, what is it left for you to achieve?

HELEN Well I'm without ego in this by the way. I can think of very comfortable lifestyles other than this job, but I've always been driven in New Zealand politics by a passion for seeing our country proud and independent asserting its values on the world stage, having an inclusive community, making sure everyone's got equal opportunity to education and a fair chance in life, underwriting securities for our family and older people, having a strong economy that can pay for that and also my passions around the creative areas, clean and green environment, the outdoors, I've got a mission to make things better for New Zealand that’s why I keep on at the job.

RAWDON Guyon, Prime Minister thank you very much. Now the Prime Minister's agreed to stay and take questions from the panel, John Roughan.

JOHN ROUGHAN – NZ Herald
Prime Minister I think you said at the outset about what you could offer next year, you said new policy, new people and new money? Did I hear it correctly?

HELEN I'm not sure that one dropped in.

JOHN What was the third leg in the programme?

HELEN Well you were listening.

JOHN You're trying to defy history here and winning a 4th term hasn’t been done since Holyoake. You're going to need more than just we're going well, we can give you good health and education and we'll carry on doing that, you need something really new and fresh to offer don’t you and what do you think that single thing might be next year?

HELEN I don’t think there ever is a single thing John, I think the election's going to be about leadership, who's got the strength of leadership and vision to take New Zealand forward, I think it's going to be about policy delivered and we've got a very strong record on that, if you look across the economy, social policy and many other areas, and then it's going to be about new policy ideas. Now clearly there's a lot of new policy coming through on the sustainability issues, there will be new policy on affordable housing, we're expecting new initiatives around the Broadband digital society as well, those are all new areas, but don’t discount the importance of the basics. What Kiwis really look to government for fundamentally is a strong economy, plenty of jobs, education, health, living standards for older people and families and law and order, those are the basics of every election campaign I have been in.

RAWDON Prime Minister you say here strong leadership, policy, that’s the core to re-election, yet we see John Key and the National Party so far ahead in the polls at this stage yet they don’t seem to be delivering that necessarily, they're being very cagey on policy.

HELEN But at some point they have to show some don’t they, otherwise be exposed as completely vacuous.

RAWDON But they're not showing it at the moment, yet they seem to be the preferred party?

HELEN It's a new face and we're a government which has been there for eight years, but we're a government that keeps generating new policy, new ideas and has strong leadership. We've got a very strong record of delivery and people expect us to put fresh policy out of the paper out on the table and move forward, and I believe we can.

JENNI McMANUS – Sunday Star Times
I was going to ask you about the driving age Prime Minister, I mean parents want it raised, most motorists seem to want it raised, instead of getting Annette King to do yet another round of consultation of MPs why don’t you just go down to Wellington tomorrow and raise the driving age and save some lives?

HELEN Because every time we've looked at it Jenni there've been other issues raised.

JENNI Such as?

HELEN Firstly from our rural community which have argued very strongly for the current age of 15.

JENNI But they're all being killed.

HELEN Well they're not all being killed.

JENNI But there are lot of accidents aren’t there?

HELEN But the real issue I think is around new drivers the rate of accident for new drivers is higher than for others in the same age group, whether you're new in your 20s, your 60s or your 80s. Secondly having at our Cabinet table people who have teenage children or have relatively recently, a number of them have raised the argument that they feel a lot of parents prefer their children to be with a designated driver who is safe, a young driver, than to be hanging around at maybe railway sidings or bus stops in the inner city trying to get transport home late at night. Now we have to weigh all these things up.

JENNI Because it's been weighed up so many times before and there's been a huge increase it seems in the last few months in drivers who are 15, around the 15 age group, and of course a lot of them are disobeying the rules for the drivers who haven’t got full licenses yet. So it doesn’t seem to be working particularly well, what other issues are you going to take into consideration?

HELEN There are some awful stories of course there are terrible tragedies, whether there are more than there ever have been I don’t know. Sadly through most of my life I can remember the Monday morning headlines of the young people who smashed a care and caused death and injury to themselves and others. I don’t think it's a new problem, so I think that there are issues about responsible driving, there are issues about alcohol, and one of the things we have been looking at is whether there should be absolutely zero tolerance of any alcohol at all for people who are new license holders.

JENNI Well parents seem to want it, I mean my son is 16 and I know all his friends the parents of these people don’t want their kids at 15 having licenses but it's very difficult to stop them when the law says they can.

HELEN Well I think we need to listen to the wide range of parents and as I say the voices from the rural community have not been sending that message over time at all, as someone who comes from a rural community I well understand the issues there and as I say a lot of parents of teenagers are not so happy about their children sitting around in bus stops or train stops in the city waiting for transport at night.

RAWDON Thanks Prime Minister, I'll just bring John Roughan in here.

JOHN Well I was interested before you came in we were talking about the fate of party accidents and deaths that we've had in the last couple of weeks, is your department doing any research on this, are you getting any advice on what's behind this, what we might do about it?

HELEN We have been looking at issues around the sale of alcohol and supply of alcohol to minors and that’s why I mention we're looking at whether with new license holders there should be absolute no tolerance, zero tolerance of any alcohol at all when driving, rather than the standard level that is used for other drivers.

JOHN What about parties though and policing of teenage gangs that are sort of on the loose in the evenings in cities like Auckland and they're looking for any party that they can find some fun at and trouble breaking out, what can be done about that?

HELEN I think we're dealing with new phenomena as you were discussing before I came on to the programme with text messaging, a party invitation of course can end up broadcast to very large numbers of people and when the hoons pile in you’ve got a problem even in the poshest of neighbourhoods around our own city as we've seen tragically in recent times, so it's going to come down to the Police trying to do their best at callouts, but also pre-emptively I think the kinds of strategies which we have had working with some success over the past couple of years in the Counties Manukau Otahuhu area with a lot of youth work going in to work alongside young people who otherwise were previously causing a lot of problem with these youth crews and gangs and violence.

GUYON Can I just jump in there because on the alcohol issue which seems to be a big part of this, when there was a refusal by parliament to raise the drinking age back up to 20 you also go to the review then didn’t you?

HELEN Yes we did?

GUYON What is the shape of that, what are we gonna see?

HELEN Well as I say we're looking at whether we should be zero tolerance for a new driver with alcohol, so that’s the first thing, secondly we can toughen up on the supply and sale of alcohol by people to young people who are going to be using it in public places, but I must say I'm drawing a line …

GUYON So will that be legislated for?

HELEN Yeah well we're looking at legislation but I do draw the line at Police invading people's private homes to see what parents are doing, I think we've gotta keep a little sense of perspective here.

JENNI That’s a different matter, it seems as if the older teenagers are getting the alcohol for the younger teenagers so maybe at that point of sale there's got to be a lot more policing of the older teenagers.

RAWDON That’s usually an age old issue as well isn't it, we have to bring it to a close there. Prime Minister thank you very much, Guyon thank you. Prime Minister we'll speak more in a moment.

CLOSE DOWN OF THE SERIOUS FRAUD OFFICE
Who will catch the white collar crooks now?

RAWDON Now to our next guest this morning. The topic is exposing white collar crime, the close down of the Serious Fraud Office and the concern of whether or not the Police are up to taking over this important work. Stephen Franks is a lawyer and former ACT MP, he's also been on the Securities Commission. Mr Franks joins me now in our Wellington studio, good morning Mr Franks. Is this a weird decision?

STEPHEN FRANKS – Lawyer
Well it's weird because it didn’t seem to be preceded by any kind of study, it's weird also that it's come out as – it's been labelled an attempt to crack down on gangs, international terrorism, money laundering, they're all terribly sexy current topics and you can throw words around like globalisation and so forth but fraud prosecution is just a lot of hard work by dedicated people, usually they have to be pretty experienced. The difference is it's never what do they do or whodunit, it's why did they do it, and that really requires quite specialist skills of people who know what they're looking for and reams of documents.

RAWDON So how slickly can you move from something entitled Serious Fraud to something entitled Organised Crime which the name of the unit?

STEPHEN Well exactly it might be a slightly political reaction, there's always been a left love of calling big business organised crime so that it has that sort of satisfying element to it, it might be that it was another bauble for Winston Peters, he's always hated the Serious Fraud Office. I sat on the Select Committee beside him when he used to try and make the head's life a misery, but in fact as these offices go around the world they’ve been pretty effective, I think they changed the commercial morality in New Zealand quite substantially after the 80s.

RAWDON Yeah cos you sat on the Securities Commission you dealt with this sort of thing as a lawyer so you're quite close to this. Can the Police possible be up to what's been asked of them here?

STEPHEN I think they could, it's always a problem that the priorities aren’t there. In an organisation you’ve gotta have some key things you're focusing on and the resources will flow to those. Now in the contest between chasing a murderer or a major drug dealer or a rapist, the chasing some white collar criminal who's basically the difference between what they did and ordinary business is a fine distinction, relatively low conviction rates for fraud, it'll just lose, I mean the Police want to be able to report high clearance rates for the least hours spent and fraud uses huge numbers of hours and you don’t get those big clearance rate figures, I just think that the experience has been Police could do it but don’t.

RAWDON Surely though the proposal is they move the staff from the SFO into the Organised Crime Units so the intellectual capability should remain?

STEPHEN Yes but some of them are refugees from the Police already, and they're people who saw that this was an area that needed a focus and they go across to the Serious Fraud Office because they want to get away from an organisation where they're not valued, others of them have probably never thought of themselves as "cops", they're often quite idealistic people who are experienced in the financial accounting or legal work and to put them in an area where they’ll be a low status group of "cops" I think that they’ll find it very hard to transfer that culture, there'll be some crooks who are pretty pleased about this.

RAWDON There is a criticism that the SFO is a very expensive organisation to run with possibly not a great delivery on results is that fair?

STEPHEN Well in international comparisons they’ve don’t pretty well. At the moment they're being sued by someone who says that they prosecuted when they shouldn’t, so that might tell you that they’ve taken some of the hard cases, but essentially you’ve gotta weigh that against what it costs when you live in a world where cheats prosper. If business people can't trust each other, if customers can't trust business, everyone takes a lot of precautions and that'll cost far more than any conceivable amount of saving by combining the head offices of these two organisations.

RAWDON So what sort of an impact does corporate crime have on the economy in a country like ours?

STEPHEN Well I think it's actually less than you'd expect. I'm a trustee of a business integrity trust, we've got half a million dollars that we want to spend on pursuing corporate dishonesty and it's surprising how few approaches we've had. There's quite a few come in and want us to pursue corporate carelessness or stupidity, but dishonesty I think it's actually a relatively – has been relatively successful, I fear that that can change quite quickly when people who break into cars know that the people who complain now if they call the cops they’ll be told look I'm sorry we're too busy, when that becomes the perception in the business world you'll get a whole lot of cheats sticking their heads up and their hands out again.

RAWDON I'll bring in the panel here, Jenni you’ve written possibly more than most on the SFO, do you agree with Stephen that it's a shame that it's a strange decision to make?

JENNI Oh I think it's an absolutely appalling decision, it's probably the first time in ten years I've actually agreed with Chas Sturt when he said it's an early Christmas for every fraudster in the country. It is true that corporate fraud is quite a different animal from organised crime and I mean the Securities Commission is not doing corporate fraud now neither is the Ministry, the Companies Office does a limited amount depending on resources. What I'd like to know is who now is going to investigate people like the Bridgecorp directors and Rod Petricevich and I don’t think there's any argument that the amount of money and the way it went missing they ought to be investigated, but when you look at the lineup that we've got now who do you think's going to do it?

STEPHEN I would imagine as the thing's transferred we'll see bailouts we'll see new people putting their hands up, they’ll get into it, but as people – as organisations have found around the world it's actually pretty hard to maintain the kind of culture to keep hard on the tail of corporate fraud, it's not very rewarding, I mean the differences that they're looking for are fine distinctions the cases are very long. I just worry that this is a reaction by sort of the old style left, well they're all crooks let's have the cops chase them all, it might be because they couldn’t find anyone of integrity making an application for the current boss's job. This might sound as just political whining but when you saw what happened to the head of Benson-Pope's department, when you saw the head of MAF having to lie to cover up for his bosses it must be pretty hard getting really qualified people to apply for these jobs at the moment where they're not necessarily gonna be backed up by their political masters if they get into PR strife.

JENNI Well I think there were plenty of people even internally in the SFO who would have put their hands up for that job, but I'm just wondering who is practically going to do the work because fraud isn't being properly investigated right now, I mean if you have say 200 grand and somebody pinches it or a business deal goes wrong what's actually happening at the moment is the Police haven’t since about 1999 done fraud and private investigators have been preparing the cases for these people as their clients, taking them to the Police and the Police have been saying well that’s all very nice you’ve produced a blueprint for a prosecution we probably won't get round to doing it, and what these PIs are saying to people, well look just settle with these people because there's able no point in taking a fraud case to court. Now my question is, what is this going to do to confidence in the market, people who want to know now where to put their money and they're clearly not going to do it in most finance companies, how are they going to know that somebody is going to get locked up if the money's pinched?

STEPHEN You know, this isn't answering the question, cos I couldn’t agree more with you on this, it's actually saying there are scores of people down here writing new rules, new rules for financial advisors, new rules for securities offerings, new rules for finance companies, if only a fraction of that effort was going into pursuing the crooks who are breaking existing rules you wouldn’t actually need these new rules.

JENNI But everyone seems to pass the files around, round and round and round, this person doesn’t want to do it, this office doesn’t want to do it because perhaps it's a politically unpopular file?

STEPHEN Well that’s a different issue, one of the risks of giving this to the Police is that if the Police are politically corrupt or if they're subject to too much political direction there are fraudulent things that just wouldn’t get investigated.

JOHN I can recall Geoffrey Palmer in parliament say once that fraud is the hardest of all crimes to prove I think he said, and Stephen you were saving that this seems to have come from nowhere and preceded by now report studies or anything, I think the one thing it might have sprung from is a Law Commission report shared by the self same Sir Geoffrey Palmer who has had second thoughts about the special powers that he gave the SFO back in the 90s, thinks it's no longer needed and now has somewhere in the report suggested just this kind of amalgamation.

STEPHEN Yes well he's tried to put all the search and seizure powers on to one basis, I think he's naïve if he thinks that those powers will be removed. When the roll these bodies together I don’t see politician – anyone putting their hand up and saying let's give them less power now that they're in the Police and my guess is that you'll find Nandor and a few others who worry about civil liberties suddenly wondering why they’ve supported this move because the Police will get powers to do things now that in most countries are regarded as outrageous. We've been content to see them limited to the Serious Fraud office because it was confined and because they were very hard crimes to prove but when they are rolled out generally I think they’ll lead the Police into the sort of actions that will lose public support as well you know, going on wild fishing expeditions. The SFO's the only body that can actually demand evidence from people completely unrelated to an offence, not even under suspicion.

RAWDON So under the umbrella of the Police do you think that these special powers may be abused in other areas outside specialist fraud investigations?

STEPHEN Yeah well fraud law has that sort of nature. In the United States the Racketeer Influenced And Corrupt Organisations Act they call it RICO, was designed to crack down on the Mafia and it's now almost never used on the Mafia it's used on protest groups, it's used on unpopular business organisations, unions, and I think that the rolling in of the SFO into the Police has actually got quite serious constitutional issues as well.

RAWDON Thank you very much Mr Franks.

FINAL THOUGHTS – GUEST COMMENTATORS

RAWDON What are the big issues we're going to probably look at this week, drink driving, or driving ages?

JOHN Yes, yes.

JENNI Driving ages will be there because of the review. My eye was taken by our lead story with one of the banks firing the first shot in the interest rate war, because there are about 30% of mortgage owners who are going to have to refix their mortgages by the end of the year and of course interest rates having gone up a lot of them will be thinking about can we afford this property.

RAWDON This is Kiwi Bank undercutting it's competitors by about half a percent I think, does that mean this week we're going to see the other banks following suit?

JOHN Probably but I'm intrigued as to why it's happened now when we've got the finance companies all falling over, well not all of them but a good many of them, money's seeking safer refuges and you'd think that the banks would be creaming it right now without needing to indulge in any sort of interest rate war, so it'll be interesting to see how that’s explained.

JENNI But they can't afford the property market to even waver let along collapse, and if you’ve got 30% of mortgage holders having to refix their mortgages that’s a lot of people who might make a decision to get rid of that mortgage.

RAWDON Let's touch on what the Prime Minister was talking about this alcohol review is going to come out this week what do you think we're gonna see?

JOHN Probably a move to put the age back up to 20.

RAWDON And will that be popular, do you think that’s a vote getter or do you think that’s just commonsense?

JENNI I think it's probably commonsense the same as putting the driving age up because she did say that 15 year olds, the rural kids have to be able to drive but for heavens sake between 15 and 16 they get a lot of maturity, they develop an awful lot better judgement and yet the first year of driving you're going to be a pretty awful driver probably, but if you're 20 you're going to have a hell of a lot more maturity than if you were 15, and I think it makes the difference. You understand cause and effect better and that’s what driving's about, cause and effect.

RAWDON The other thing to very quickly mention is the compensation for emissions trading which we're probably gonna hear more about this week as well.

JOHN That should be really interesting and the fact that she said all sectors all gases will be in so even though it'll be over time the farmers will have a long time to get used to the idea that the methane from their animals there's going to be a tax on them, or taxed in some way, or a cost on them, it's going to be an interesting issue right this week I think.

RAWDON And she really did emphasise the over time didn’t she? Right thank you very much to our panel John Roughan and Jenni McManus.

ENDS

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