Peter Martin · @1petermartin
29th Aug 2013 from TwitLonger
THERESE REIN WITH JOHN LAWS as requested by @CroweDM
29 AUGUST 2013
HOST: Hoping to keep her dream alive, I imagine, is the wife of the Prime Minister, Therese Rein, who happily for me is in the studio. Good morning, Therese, and welcome.
THERESE REIN: Good morning, John.
HOST: A lot of people say - why isn’t she Therese Rudd?
REIN: Really?
HOST: Yeah.
REIN: Well, why isn’t Kevin, Kevin Rein?
HOST: (Laughs). No, I can’t accept that. We’re talking about tradition. Why do you choose not to be Therese Rudd.
REIN: Kevin and I got married at the end - on the week that I finished doing my thesis, so I just completed my honours degree - my qualifications are in my name and I’m an independent person.
HOST: But it’s kind of a traditional thing. I don’t want to make a meal of it, but it’s sort of a traditional thing, isn’t it? In English speaking countries that you take your husband’s name.
REIN: Well, Kevin and I had a conversation about it - and it was about a minute long. It went- so will I change my name to yours? Therese Rudd - it doesn’t feel like me and will you change your name to mine? No. Will we hyphenate? No. So we will keep our own names.
HOST: Well, well done.
REIN: And we’ve been married now for nearly 32 years.
HOST: Have you really?
REIN: We have.
HOST: 32 years. A long time.
REIN: It’s a long time.
HOST: Never a cross word?
REIN: (Laughs). I don’t think anyone should say that or could say that.
HOST: I agree with you. Is he good fun to live with – that husband of yours?
REIN: Yeah, very playful, very playful.
HOST: I’ve heard that before - that he does have a good sense of humour.
REIN: Great sense of humour.
HOST: Sometimes people say that he doesn’t look like he has a sense of humour, but I’ve heard he does have. He likes pranks a bit too, I think.
REIN: He has a wicked sense of humour. He loves to play and you know, the kids growing up with him loved to rough house with him and he loves to play with Josephine now, our new granddaughter.
HOST: I’ll bet. I’ll bet. Were you helping to lobby members of the audience at the Rooty Hill RSL club, last night?
REIN: No, I just went and said hi. I went and said hi and I said “Hi, my name’s Therese, what’s yours?” Thanked a couple of them for their questions. I thought the questions last night were fantastic. I thought they were thoughtful; they were thought-provoking and I thought they resulted in a really good conversation - probably the best we’ve seen, out of the three debates.
HOST: I agree. I agree. Do you like Tony Abbott?
REIN: I’ve personally met Tony Abbott a couple of times, only and I’m sure his family love him.
HOST: I didn’t ask you that question. I said, do you like him?
REIN: I can say that I really love my husband.
HOST: You’ve been living with a politician too long, Therese.
REIN: I think I’m not really here to comment on what the Leader of the Opposition is like. I think the Australian people have seen Tony Abbott over a long period of time and they know, and they will draw their own conclusions about him. So, it’s not actually about what I think. It’s actually about what the Australian people decide to do here - that’s what elections are - and they’re actually meant to be more about a contest of ideas. They’re meant to be more about a vision of what Australia is and can become; what our opportunities are as a nation. And I think that reverting to kind of personality politics, which is what we’ve seen a lot of, we’ve seen a lot of character assassination, we’ve seen a lot of trivialisation of real issues and I think that does a disservice to our democracy, personally.
HOST: Well, it probably does, but just back to your opinion. You may think that your opinion is your opinion and not very important - I can assure you that, particularly the women of Australia would be fascinated by your opinion of other people and the situation generally.
REIN: Well, I can talk about the situation generally - what I think is that we have seen the trivialisation of the national debate. I think we’ve seen constant distractions by furphies, frankly, like I notice one of the papers today says that Kevin spoke for six minutes longer last night.
HOST: I saw that, it was a headline for god’s sake.
REIN: It was a headline for god’s sake.
HOST: Yeah.
REIN: And I’m not taking the Lord’s name in vain - it was a headline. So instead of talking about the ideas that were covered, it was a trivialisation and it’s any time anyone starts to get into talking about policy - and policy matters because it changes people’s lives. That’s why politics matters, it can change people’s lives for the better - like the National Disability Insurance Scheme, for example, changes people’s lives for the better and that matters. You can hear I’m getting a bit het up here – that matters - and do we have fair education? Do we have fair health access? Do we have a National Broadband Network that’s going to enable business and innovative ways of delivering education and health to people in remote and rural Australia, that matters. What kind of engagement with Asia – that matters. What we do about our climate and about our environmental sustainability – that matters. You can hear the frustration in my voice - what I get very frustrated with is the trivialisation of the national debate and throwing furphies about people’s characters – this way, that way, every way, and I think it’s demeaning. I think it’s demeaning to our democracy. I think it’s demeaning to the participants and I think it creates so much noise that we can’t actually have what should be the exciting conversation in our democracy at the time of election where we are choosing alternatives. We can’t have that conversation because we’ve got the noise about oh, well, I don’t know – what people are wearing or what they look like or stuff, just nonsense and stuff.
I find it really frustrating and find it really disappointing and the reason for our family that we’re involved in this, is not for money. Kevin was earning more money before he ran for Parliament.
HOST: You’ve got a dollar too.
REIN: It’s not for money. The reason people become involved in politics is that they want to - they want to serve the country.
HOST: Well, one would hope that’d be the reason. I’m not sure it always is. I’m sure it is in relation to your husband.
REIN: I certainly know in our family it absolutely is, why we do this, because we actually think these things matter.
HOST: Ok, but wouldn’t you think that Tony Abbott would do it for exactly the same reason?
REIN: I’m sure that on both sides of politics, on both sides of the House and in the minority parties that people are giving up their time, their family time, to serve their communities and they’re participating in this great democracy because they think there needs to be a fair, open debate about which direction we go in and I think that is, I think that is across the board.
HOST: A lot has been made about the supposed anti-Labor coverage in papers like the Daily Telegraph and the Courier-Mail for that matter, do those headlines bother you?
REIN: I think it’s fair to say when we see someone we love being vilified that is, that is really difficult - that is really difficult - and I remember when Kevin was Prime Minister between 2007-2010, that there was some really vicious ads running that were being put out by the other side and it’s fair to say that that and some of the vilification and the distortions that have happened, that have been in some of the papers, that it’s difficult to see that.
What keeps us going is the purpose - why are we, as a family, and why is he as a person, putting his life energy and his effort into being involved in national political life? Because he believes in the country. He believes in the future of the country. He believes that we can be even greater than we are today.
HOST: Well, I hope we all believe that. We should. We should always believe that this is always room for improvement. You consider him the man to help to make those improvements and I imagine Tony Abbott believes he’s the man to make those improvements. It’s up to the public. It’s up to the people of Australia.
REIN: It really is.
HOST: They’re the ones who will ultimately decide. Do you think that your husband would have been rude to the make-up artist? I mean that was a headline too.
REIN: That was a headline, and I have been very worried about her well-being because I think she did something that makeup artists and other people who work with people in public life and actors don’t normally do, and that is she put her opinion out into the public on Facebook, but she probably didn’t think it was going as far as it was, so I have been concerned that she has personal support, and –
HOST: Do you think she needs personal support?
REIN: I think that she may have found herself in the centre of a storm that she probably didn’t anticipate. Do I think Kevin was rude to her? I don’t at all. I think, just as your probably like a little bit of quiet time before you’re preparing for a show and you want to be able to focus, I think she was looking after him two minutes before he was going on, or a few minutes before he was going on, and he was the opening speaker. There were no notes, so he was going on to speak, in a debate which is about the future of the country, so yes, he was probably really engaged. Did he ask her, you know, how she was, or, I don’t know, I think he was probably really just focussed and prepared. Was that rude? I don’t think that’s rude. Personally, I don’t think that’s rude. I know before I speak, and I speak quite often, I like to be able to get into the zone and focus and just prepare, because what I’m saying matters.
HOST: Yeah, well it certainly matters to you, and it certainly hopefully matters to the people who are listening. But a lot of people are always going to be critical, can’t win ‘em all can you?
REIN: No, I think that’s true.
HOST: Difficult question for me to ask – has he got a short fuse? Does he lose his temper?
REIN: I think – I think everybody from time to time loses their temper.
HOST: Not an answer, Therese, not an answer.
REIN: No, he doesn’t have a particularly short temper. He doesn’t have a particularly short temper, and I think when I look at people who worked with him in the Prime Minister’s Office before, who worked with him in the Foreign Minister’s Office when he was Foreign Minister, who have chosen to stay with him when he was a backbencher, who are continuing to work with him now - he has people who he has been working with for years, and years, and years, and years - and, he is a compassionate man; he is a passionate man; he cares about what he is doing, but he’s not particularly short tempered, no.
HOST: Do you think he has done something to offend Rupert Murdoch?
REIN: I don’t know what Mr Murdoch’s agenda is.
HOST: Do you get the impression that he’s certainly not on-side?
REIN: It would be difficult to imagine that he was on-side. I don’t know what Mr Murdoch’s commercial intentions are, or his objectives are. I don’t know what he wants to achieve with a change of Government. I don’t know what he wants to achieve with communications laws or cross-media ownership laws, or anything. I don’t know what he wants to achieve. But it would be difficult to say that he was on-side.
HOST: Drawing a long bow, I think. What will he do if he loses?
REIN: Well, we haven’t actually talked about that. I’m not particularly worried about that. We have about eight and a half days left before the Australian people decide. He’s very, very focussed on getting whatever he can of Labor’s message out there so that people can make a real decision on the substantial matters, and not on the trivial.
HOST: You’ve had a pretty close up look at the degree of dysfunction within the Labor Party over the last six years. It’s impossible to deny that there hasn’t been dysfunction there, it’s been a bit of a mess for a while. Why do they deserve another three years in office? Put Kevin aside, why does the Labor Party deserve another three years in office?
REIN: Labor values - which is why we’re members of the Labor Party - Labor values are about fairness, fundamentally.
And, we saw that with getting rid of WorkChoices. People felt - when I went around Australia in 2007 I spoke to lots and lots of people in shopping centres and all over the place, grandmas, grandpas, mums and dads would come up to me and would say I’m really worried about the working conditions of my grandkids or my kids. So, Labor values are fundamentally about fairness. And it doesn’t just go to workplace fairness and things like paid parental leave, which was a major innovation of this Government, but it also goes to fairness for aged pensioners where there’s been an historic, really, shift to indexing aged pensions that happened under Labor in the last six years. So that fairness extends also to education and great educational opportunities for all because education changes people’s lives, and it also extends to access in health and to dental care, and now, to disability care.
Labor at its heart is about fairness, and is about nation building, and that’s why I think Labor deserves another three years.
HOST: Why do we even have paid parental leave? If people can’t afford to have children they shouldn’t have them, should they?
REIN: Depends whether you want a shrinking population or not.
HOST: I don’t know, I bet your mum didn’t get paid parental leave. There might have been that silly thing called ‘child endowment’ which was about fourpence ha’penny a week or something.
REIN: It was about fourpence ha’penny and she did get child endowment.
HOST: That was it. I mean this paid parental leave now is pretty expensive for the country.
REIN: Well what I think is that Labor’s scheme on paid parental leave is fair, so everybody who is working full-time would get paid the same amount. It supports people to have children, and we want people to have children. In a lot of advanced, in a lot of Western economies, the employer pays – here the Government pays, because they didn’t want to put an impost onto employers and add to their costs. So, I know, in Sweden, where I lived way back in 1981-1983, they have a really long paid parental scheme – paid parental leave scheme both for the mother and for the father and what that enables is both parents to be involved in early childhood parenting.
HOST: So in other words, when somebody has a child, suddenly two people don’t go to work?
REIN: No, no. What happens is that both – it’s assumed in Sweden that both parents will be involved in parenting and they take turns. And it means that for the first couple of years of a child’s life they have one parent or the other with them. So, that’s another country and that’s a lot further than Australia has gone. Australia has provided, I think its 12 or 13 weeks at maybe the minimum wage, so that enables people to have babies, and have some income coming in. So I think that’s fair.
HOST: Yeah, when you put it that way I guess it is fair. Who’s going to win the election?
REIN: Whoever the Australian people decide, and I hope it’s Labor.
HOST: You’re not confident?
REIN: I hope it’s Labor.
HOST: You have lived too long with a politician.
REIN: Am I confident that the Australian people will make the right choice? I am confident that they will. I am very confident in our democracy. I think people see past furphies and distractions and the trivialisation and they care fundamentally, and we saw that in the great questions that were asked last night. They care fundamentally about real issues, and about real policy, and I’m very confident that they will make the right decision for this country.
HOST: Therese, thank you very much for coming to the, my humble abode here, and spending some time with us. Apart from anything, it’s nice to see you again and I hope it won’t be too long before we talk to each other again.
REIN: I look forward to that too, John. Thank you for having me.
HOST: It’s a pleasure, thank you very much.
ENDS