Radio Interview – Fiveaa Breakfast with David Penberthy and Will Goodings
DAVID PENBERTHY, HOST: Good morning, Prime Minister. Thanks for joining us again on your old home here at 5AA.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Good morning, Penbo. Good to be back.
PENBERTHY: Good to have you here. So just in terms of the headline grabbing numbers with the Budget, all the papers reporting this morning, somewhat surprisingly, that Australia is going to be heading back into a surplus.
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I know they’re reporting that but they’ll have to wait until 7:30 for any confirmation of that. Certainly, the numbers much better than were predicted. There has been a very significant effort on behalf of the government to turn around to some of the figures that we inherited that were substantially worse than what you’ll see tonight. We inherited a Budget that was predicting last year, under the Coalition, predicted this year a $77.9 billion deficit. So I can assure you it’s much better than that.
WILL GOODING, HOST: Prime Minister, the the Reserve Bank has been at pains to hoover up money out of the economy to try and return inflation to the target band. You guys are going to be injecting nearly $15 billion dollars with a cost of leaving relief package. Why isn’t that spending inflationary?
PRIME MINISTER: Because it’s balanced with savings. It’s balanced in a way that won’t add to inflation in the economy. And one of the things that we’ve done is prioritise. For example, the biggest on-budget investment that you’ll see in the papers tonight is our childcare plan. That was something that I committed to before the election that comes in on July 1. And because it adds to productivity, it adds to workforce participation, it will actually not be inflationary and even the way that we designed the energy price relief plan, rather than sending people cash cheques that would add to inflation, what we’re doing is reducing power bills. That will actually be deflationary. So we’ve been very careful to design the Budget to take pressure off inflation whilst at the same time we are supporting vulnerable Australians through measures such as the single parent payment changes that I announced yesterday, that it will apply for a 14 year old rather than an eight year old.
GOODING: When you say it’s balanced against savings, is your contention then that that cost of living packages is effectively cost neutral?
PRIME MINISTER: No, we’re providing support where it’s needed. But if you look at the Budget overall, substantial savings will be there in the Budget. But we also had to fund some of the things where funding just goes off a cliff to zero. The former government in the Budget just a year ago, it seems like a lot happened but we hadn’t been in office for a year yet. Last year’s Budget from the Coalition had a whole range of injections of cash into the economy. There were a whole lot of measures that ran out, essentially, as soon as people had voted. So one of the things we had to provide for his billions of dollars of funding for community services funding for a range of cyber projects, even for the eSafety Commissioner. The idea that we just stop that program was absurd so we had to find space in the Budget for that as well.
PENBERTHY: Just in terms of cost of living, Prime Minister, the two things we hear the most about from our listeners are power bills and also the cost of housing. And by housing, I mean both renting and keeping up with your mortgage in terms of the 11 interest rate hikes we’ve had in barely a year, none of them forecast either. Is there anything that the Budget can actually do about housing? I mean, we know you’re addressing, and it does seem to be pretty tailored towards the lower end of Australia’s earners, you’re tackling the energy part of it. But what’s going on in the housing front? Is there any is there any role for the Federal Government here to make life easier in terms of both rent and the price of houses?
PRIME MINISTER: There is, but what there isn’t with housing is a decision that can be made on 9 May and then you have the solution just on 10 May, because the big issue with housing is supply. And there are a range of measures that are in tonight’s Budget, including tax investment incentives to encourage investment by the private sector in housing. Some of those have been announced before the Budget. In addition to that we have our Housing Australia Future Fund that’s there before the Senate at the moment that will provide for a $10 billion fund to invest in social and affordable housing. That’s investing in supply, building additional housing. The cost of housing is a product, in part, of supply and demand. If you have more houses then it will be cheaper, put simply, it’s economics 1A. So we need to get more supply. That fund is sitting there in the Senate and can be passed today if either the Coalition or the Greens Party removed their quite absurd objection to what’s a very practical plan going forward. But you’ll see some other measures relating to housing in the Budget this evening as well.
GOODING: The demand side of that equation, though, has been bolstered by your government’s decision to increase migration to record levels in the budget process?
PRIME MINISTER: No.
GOODING: Well, it is in the Budget.
PRIME MINISTER: Let’s be very clear about that. Immigration is less than it was predicted to be. The immigration numbers, the population is less than it was before the pandemic.
GOODING: You can’t ‘yada yada’ the pandemic it happened and change the economic settings in Australia.
PRIME MINISTER: You have. But when you shut the borders, for example, instead of 100,000 students coming in to bolster our economy, to provide income, to boost economic growth and to to provide for jobs. As a result of that, education is one of our largest exports. Instead of 100,000 coming in and then 100,000 who have completed their degrees or courses leaving, what you’ve had is people come in without people leaving because people haven’t been here going through those courses. Now, it’s a good thing that people come to Australia to undertake courses, they contribute to our economy. And that’s why you’re seeing this somewhat misleading figure, really, because you haven’t had those departures, you’ve just had arrivals. And that was always going to happen when the borders opened up.
GOODING: The reality is that they’ve arrived at a time when rental occupancy is about 99 per cent at the moment, there’s never been fewer places for people who rent to go and live in. The texts we get on this every single day would suggest there’s an absolute crisis there. But it doesn’t sound like there’s any way that you’re wanting to address the demand component of this.
PRIME MINISTER: No, we certainly are. But what we’re not going to do is to pretend that the numbers which are there reflect anything other than a temporary shift in in the numbers because of the closed borders that occurred previously, but recognise the fact that the numbers in terms of population are lower than they were anticipated to be. And the other thing we did was, last week Clare O’Neil at the National Press Club outlined a change a shift in our immigration policy, which she indicated very clearly that by getting the right migrants that we need for our economy, by having a better system rather than this reliance upon temporary migration, what will end up with is lower numbers if that is implemented rather than higher numbers. So we are giving consideration to that. But just at the moment, it is a fact that when you open up your borders after they’ve been closed in a country like Australia, you will see a spike temporarily in those numbers.
PENBERTHY: Just finally, Prime Minister, we’ve had divergent views on our show from our listeners about the Coronation on Saturday night ranging all the way from ‘elegant celebration of history and tradition’ to ‘laughable and expensive anachronism’. You were there. Did you enjoy it? And as a Republican, where are we at timing wise with that? Did we have our chance and blow it 99? Or do you think we’ll revisit the question one day?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I did. I did enjoy it. It was a moment in history and it was an incredible privilege to represent Australia. That doesn’t mean that I don’t support an Australian as Australia’s head of state. That would, of course, mean we could remain in the Commonwealth. There’s 57 countries in the Commonwealth, there are only 15 in the Realm, and the Realm means that King Charles is our head of state. He’s literally the King of Australia. And I think that an Australian should fill that role. But that doesn’t mean that as Australian Prime Minister, I can’t have respect for the institutions and show that, which is my responsibility now. At some stage I’m certain that people will have a reconsideration. But that will be up to the Australian people. I think that’s going to be driven from the bottom up rather than from from the top.
PENBERTHY: So you weren’t sitting there getting an itchy trigger finger watching all of this: ‘we’ve really got to move on this.’
PRIME MINISTER: Certainly the singing, I’ve got to say, was remarkable in the Abbey there. There’s something about the acoustics in a cathedral or an abbey. And as you know, I went to school at St. Mary’s Cathedral, I was an altar boy at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. So it brought back the memories of wonderful singing by the choirs that occurred. But it reminded me, when people talk about the Republic, that that vote was last century. It’s the last one that we held and we haven’t had one for more than two decades. And there were some people who said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll vote for the next one. I don’t like this model’, and it hasn’t come around soon. And in the last quarter of this year, people will have a chance to vote to recognise Aboriginal Australians in our Constitution. I say to people: don’t miss it. You don’t know when it’ll come around again, and it will be an opportunity to finally recognise the promise of our history and to advance reconciliation. And I hope that this time, unlike the last time there was a referendum, there is a majority for Yes.
PENBERTHY: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, good on you for joining us this morning. We’ll talk again soon. Thank you.
PRIME MINISTER: Thanks very much, guys.