THE HON. PETER COSTELLO
TREASURER OF AUSTRALIA

Mr Costello, thanks for your time.

Pleasure.

You’ve had a pretty good reaction to your first Budget this week.

Yes, overall not a bad response.

You must have been disappointed at the reaction from the newspapers.

Well, they’re not run by geniuses, are they? What newspaper editors know about economics could be written on the head of a pin with a pneumatic drill.

Yes.

A lot of them are only doing what they’re told by their proprietors anyway.

Don’t think for themselves?

Not capable of it in most cases, I don’t think.

What do you want me to ask you now?

Just go on to the next one.

This one?

No, we’ve probably covered that. Go to the next one.

Mr Costello, how do you account for the fact that the Budget has been torn apart by radio talkback hosts?

I don’t think it’s been torn apart.

Come on, Mr Costello. One of them said, hang on, I’ve got the exact quote here. One of them said, ‘What Mr Costello is doing here is getting stuck into the rich to help the ordinary people.’

Well, look. If someone doesn’t understand what we are trying to do, you can’t go around every radio station and say, ‘Listen, excuse me pal, but we’ve already had a word with the rich and she’ll be jake, you haven’t been following the bouncing ball.’

What do you say to those business people who have got stuck into you since Tuesday? That must have hurt.

No, it doesn’t hurt.

Well, you don’t enjoy it, do you?

I wouldn’t say I enjoy it, no, but you know, it’s a hard thing to sell, a federal Budget.

But they’ve just taken the long handle to you, haven’t they?

They shouldn’t have been surprised by the Budget. We leaked about ninety per cent of it to them, as John Howard and I have both indicated time and time again, the whole thrust of everything we do is aimed at helping business.

But I heard one of them saying there were still some government programs that had no direct benefit for business at all.

He hasn’t read it. He hasn’t read it at all.

Mr Costello, he was quoting from it.

Look, I can’t help it if a lot of these people are just dunderheads. We can’t make the money for them, we can only prevent anyone else from making it.

You could devalue anything except making money.

We’ve done that. Look at the arts. We left a theatre up somewhere and there’s some painter who went to school with Tony Staley, but we’ve gone through the ABC.

It’s still on the air, Mr Costello.

It is now, yes.

But they’re advertising shows as far away as next Wednesday and Thursday.

That’s a mistake.

But people believe it.

We’ll fix that.

Thanks.

That’s the least I can do. I hate them too.

I hate them more than you do.

I really hate them.

I loathe them.