A senior Abbott government minister has warned against presenting all-or-nothing reform demands to the Senate, saying such a strategy simply invites crossbenchers to reject the bills outright.



The education minister, Christopher Pyne, who faces a fight to secure his higher education package in light of opposition from Labor, the Greens and the Palmer United party (PUP), said he subscribed to the maxim of John Howard “that 80% of something is better than 0% of nothing”.

“We are going to try and get as much as we can through the Senate … recognising that we don’t have a majority in the Senate. That doesn’t mean a retreat; it doesn’t mean a backdown. It is a simple realistic understanding that we don’t have the numbers in the Senate,” Pyne told Sky News on Sunday.

Pyne, who is also the leader of the House of Representatives, made the comment in the context of his higher education changes, but the advice has wider application for the government which is struggling with the new Senate.

“Any minister who goes to the Senate with a package and says ‘It’s either this or nothing’ is essentially daring the Senate to vote down their whole package. Now I don’t think that is a sensible negotiating position. I want to see the whole package passed, of course I do … but I’m also realistic enough to know there will need to be negotiations.”



In July the government objected to the Senate’s decision to make significant changes to its mining tax repeal and asset recycling bills, and faces a battle over contentious budget measures, including the proposed $7 Medicare co-payment and the stripping of welfare benefits from young people for months at a time.



The former Howard government treasurer, Peter Costello, said the government should abandon the $7 co-payment because it could not secure Senate approval.

“Let’s move on,” Costello told Ten’s Bolt Report on Sunday, suggesting the Coalition must “reboot” the argument by bringing forward the intergenerational report on long-term budget pressures.

The treasurer, Joe Hockey, who has been in a round of talks with crossbench senators to shore up support for his budget, reportedly complained at a conference in Canberra on Wednesday that “the ­business community is weaker than it has been over many years, as a voice”.

Costello said on Sunday it was the “the treasurer’s responsibility to get the budget through” and there was “no point blaming business”.

“He’s said he’s not popular; we know that,” Costello said. “That comes with the territory. Let me tell you it only gets worse as the years go by.”

The Democratic Labour party senator John Madigan said he appreciated Hockey’s willingness to meet with him for more than two hours on Thursday.

“He said that he’s one of the most disliked, hated people in the country with the budget he’s got to bring down,” Madigan told the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.

But he reaffirmed his concerns the budget would have the biggest impact on “those people in our society who’s got the least”.

Madigan said that he, as a higher-income earner, would pay about $200 a year on the temporary deficit levy which would expire after three years, but other groups of people faced savings that were not time-limited.

“I’m being asked to contribute for three years. They’re being asked to contribute indefinitely, and I don’t believe that’s fair,” he said.

“Ultimately, whatever we do it’s about people. If we attack those people with the least I believe we’re going to have more domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, vandalism, mental health problems. And what’s the cost of that going to be to mop that up?”

The government’s Senate difficulties were highlighted on Sunday when the PUP leader, Clive Palmer, and one of the PUP senators, Jacqui Lambie, reaffirmed that they would not support deregulation of university fees. Given Labor and the Greens are strongly opposed to the plan, the government cannot pass the changes if the three PUP senators hold firm.

Lambie told Fairfax Media on Sunday that fee deregulation would “not happen on PUP’s watch”.

“If the Nationals grew a set, they could also say no to the Liberals on key issues, like university deregulation, which, of course, will see campuses close in regional country areas and bush families greatly disadvantaged,” she said.

Pyne said the Coalition would consider any amendments the Senate made to the higher education bill and “if the government decides that enough of our reforms have been passed then we’ll give it the green light”.

Labor’s higher education spokesman, Kim Carr, said Palmer’s categorical statement indicated the government’s “unfair and short-sighted” package was doomed in the Senate and it must be “ditched sooner rather than later”.

In the interview with Australian Agenda on Sky News, Pyne acknowledged that “many people in the university sector” opposed the plan to increase the interest rate on student loans – an element he hinted last week was an obvious area for compromise.

On Sunday he reaffirmed the Coalition view that students should face the same rate at which the government borrowed to avoid a “hidden subsidy”, but said the government would have to consider whether this was a “vital part of our reforms or not”.

Pyne said he was texting, phoning, meeting and talking to the crossbenchers regularly, and suggested some of them might say different things when meeting one on one than in the “glare of the media spotlight”.

“Some crossbenchers are very open to these reforms and I think they will vote for them. Others want to talk more about what we’re proposing. Some are saying that they can see there is potential to pass them with a bit of fine-tuning; others are saying no. But we haven’t really opened the batting because the legislation hasn’t been introduced,” he said.

Pyne dismissed concerns that it was wrong to pursue fee deregulation at the same time as cutting the commonwealth contribution to each course by 20% on average, arguing these two elements went “hand in hand”.

“I think the universities have realised that reform is needed, that cuts will come because the taxpayer doesn’t have the necessary money to keep pouring into the university sector, and therefore to gain more revenue they need these reforms,” he said.

“The truth is the government needs to find savings across the four years and into the future in all of its aspects. The simple reality is if the universities are to reach their full potential they need more revenue. The government cannot squeeze more revenue out of the taxpayer and the taxpayer is not prepared to pay more. As we’ve seen, the taxpayer does not want to pay higher taxes. That is an axiom that is true in Australia all the time.”

Pyne said he believed he was winning the public debate on the university changes and Australians would agree that a 50-50 split for student contributions was fair.

In the same interview, Pyne backed Tony Abbott’s decision to abandon planned changes to the Racial Discrimination Act while pursuing a toughening of counter-terrorism laws.

Pyne said he believed most Australians would have opposed changes to section 18C, which made it unlawful to publicly offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person on the basis of race. The Coalition promised before the election to make changes in the interests of “free speech”.

“It became perfectly obvious to the government that there was very limited community support for changing section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act and a sensible government that indicates that it wants to listen to the people responds to the communication that it receives from them,” Pyne said.

“We should be getting a tick for listening rather than being criticised for changing our course.”

The conservative commentator Andrew Bolt, whose articles about light-skinned Indigenous people were found by the Federal Court in 2011 to have breached the law, told viewers of his Ten Network television program on Sunday: “We now give up our free speech because some ethnic or religious group might get upset.”