Interview with Charlie Pickering, ABC Melbourne Drive

27 June 2024

CHARLIE PICKERING: We've spoken a lot about Julian Assange this week, but do you think it's appropriate for our politician to give him a hero's welcome or a phone call welcoming him home, or is it outrageous to talk about that? And also maybe to ask about the inflation numbers that we got this week as well? I'm joined by Jane Hume, the Shadow Finance Minister and Liberal Senator for Victoria. Good evening Jane.

JANE HUME: Good evening Charlie.

CHARLIE PICKERING: Thanks for joining us. We'll get to talking inflation in a minute, which I know is a home ground advantage for you and something you'd love to talk about. But I want to talk about Julian Assange first. Is it a bit of a weird hill to die on this one for Simon Birmingham?

JANE HUME: I think it's actually more a strange response from the Prime Minister. It's not often that a prime minister welcomes home an Australian that has not just committed a crime, but has pleaded guilty to a crime in another country. We're all pleased to see this rather tawdry saga come to an end after 14 years. But it was in fact, the Gillard government that first said that we respect the US and the UK justice systems and that they were the ones that were dealing with the Assange issue. Every government of every hue has agreed since. Now we're very pleased to see this come to an end. But yes, this idea that we would roll out a red carpet and have a celebrity welcome for somebody that has just pleaded guilty to espionage charges, but that was a guilty plea arranged as a deal with the US government.

CHARLIE PICKERING: Barnaby Joyce was on this very radio programme earlier in the week saying that in his mind, there wasn't a crime committed. He wasn't on US soil, he wasn't subject to US law at the time. He wasn't the first to publish the material. All of this is what Barnaby Joyce said. And Barnaby Joyce was part of a, you know what was meant to be, a bipartisan approach to getting Julian Assange home. It does feel that the coalition's having a bit of an each way bet on this. They're happy to take credit for helping get him home, but at the same time, want to give the government a whack for being glad that Julian Assange actually made it.

JANE HUME: I think everybody's glad that Julian Assange is now in Australia, and that this whole episode is done and dusted,

CHARLIE PICKERING: But he should come in shame and hide his face, and no one should-

JANE HUME: Do you think that he should be welcomed as a hero, though? I mean, let's be really clear about what he did and he didn't do. He published around half a million documents that had been provided to him. You know, he's not a journalist. He didn't read them, he didn't edit them or curate them. He just dumped them onto the internet and there's serious consequences for doing that. He did that rather recklessly and put people's lives at risk. There were plenty of people that were part of that, you know, counter espionage programme. It wasn't just sources and methods of intelligence that he revealed. It was identity. It was the identity of-

CHARLIE PICKERING (interrupts): That was not the crime. That was not the crime that he that had nothing to do with what he pled guilty to. It had nothing to do with what the United States is angry about, which was the footage of what was, for all intents and purposes, a war crime that the world would not have known about, but for the publishing on WikiLeaks.

JANE HUME: Do you think, though, that we should be celebrating somebody that released the identities of Iraqis and Afghanis that helped coalition forces against totalitarian regimes? I mean, that’s what he did, he put their lives at risk.

CHARLIE PICKERING: I'm on record on The Weekly by saying that that was unacceptable, but also, if you're saying that the reason we should not welcome him home is that he's pled guilty to a crime, which is what you said earlier in the interview, I would argue that that crime had nothing to do with what you are taking an ethical issue with now.

JANE HUME: I think we're pleased to see him home, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should celebrate him with a red carpet and water cannons. This is somebody that has pled guilty to a crime, and that's the reason why he can come home, and he has behaved in a reckless and irresponsible way that has put people's lives at risk. So really, this is a very strange precedent for a prime minister to set.

CHARLIE PICKERING: Be curious to know what people think. 1300 222 774, do you agree with Jane that he should not get anything of a hero's welcome and quietly whisked into the country and never seen again? I'm putting words in your mouth, obviously there.

JANE HUME: You are.

CHARLIE PICKERING: But I'm just being a little bit poetic. Or do you think it's right to welcome him home? Or would we rather that he could just come home and not have politicians slag each other off over it? 1300 222 774, I'll move on, Jane. We can put that one down now, because we do want to talk about inflation. Obviously, this week, we had some it was yesterday, data came out that inflation was at 4%.

JANE HUME: That’s right, that's headline inflation. It's actually the core inflation is the one that the Reserve Bank looks at when it's making its decisions. The core inflation is the one that takes some of the more volatile and more seasonally adjusted data out of the basket of goods that measures inflation, and it rose to 4.4% that was actually more confronting. It exceeded the expectations of even the most pessimistic of economists. So this is actually pretty bad news for Australians that are holding out for the RBA to hopefully start decreasing rates, it has dramatically increased the chance of a rate rise, and for mortgage holders, that is not good news.

CHARLIE PICKERING: It is terrible news for mortgage holders and the the Coalition has put the blame squarely at the feet of the Prime Minister. I'm just curious, what is it that the Prime Minister has done that has pushed up inflation?

JANE HUME: Well, it's not just the Coalition that has identified the fiscal policy of this government, one of the drivers of inflation. It is numerous economists out there, dozens of economists. Hardly anybody out there now is not saying that fiscal policy, which is the responsibility of the government, as opposed to monetary policy, which is the responsibility of the RBA, isn't driving inflation up further, more and more spending, higher spending budgets, which obviously we've just had a very high spending budget, is in fact, causing aggregate demand to slow, to drop much slower. So it's a little bit like, you know, when the RBA puts up interest rates, it's like having its foot on the brake. But when the government spends more money, it's like having its foot on the accelerator. So that's why interest rates are staying higher for longer, because the RBA has to do all the heavy lifting to get inflation down.

CHARLIE PICKERING: We spoke to Stephen Koukoulas yesterday, Managing Director of Market Economics, and he offered this explanation of why inflation was going up

STEPHEN KOUKOULAS: When we look at what caused it, I think everybody would sort of understand that things like dwelling rent, petrol prices, insurance premiums, these are the sort of things that were really behind that increase in the annual rate of inflation. These are holiday travel too, by the way, so that might be the boomers jumping on cruises of international travel and the like. So they were the sort of things that were driving at home.

CHARLIE PICKERING: So was it the boomers going on holiday or I'm just curious to know, what about the fiscal policy of the government led to those factors that have put up inflation?

JANE HUME: Well, service price inflation is really what is pushing prices up now that includes things like that. Stephen mentioned there things like rents, electricity, gas, health. Health's up 11 and a half percent. Education's up by 10.9%

CHARLIE PICKERING: And what policies of the Government that have pushed up those costs of health and rent?

JANE HUME: Let's look at food prices, shall we? There's two new taxes that have been applied by this government, one on truckies and one on farmers. Now those two new taxes immediately get passed on to grocery prices. So you're paying for that when you go to the supermarket, when you have very high wage rises in a particular sector that have been pushed on by egged on by particular unions and encouraged by government. Well, they get passed on, whether it be health prices or education costs. And of course, energy prices interventions in the energy market are actually causing energy prices to stay higher rather than putting more supply into the system. There's all these government interventions. Things that are actually making the situation worse. So decisions that the government are making are making it harder for the RBA to keep inflation under control.

CHARLIE PICKERING: So what would the Coalition do differently had you been in government? How would you have kept inflation down? What policies would you have undertaken that perhaps weren't present in your more than a decade in government to keep that inflation down?

JANE HUME: Yeah, well, certainly some of the spending decisions that this government have made, we've said that we would not have done,

CHARLIE PICKERING: But you just highlighted the biggest cause there being increased tax, not increased spending.

JANE HUME: No, that's not what I said. I actually said that

CHARLIE PICKERING: You said increasing tax on suppliers and transport?

JANE HUME: I said that there are two taxes, one on truckies and one on farmers, and they are being passed on directly to grocery prices. So we've already said that,

CHARLIE PICKERING: What is the spending of the government that you would cut to keep the inflation down? If that's what we’re going to focus on.

JANE HUME: Well I very much doubt that we would have given a billion dollars of taxpayers money away to a Future Made in Australia program that's building solar panels in Australia that will never be competitive, and making the first customer for those solar panels the New South Wales State Government. So the New South Wales taxpayers pay twice for that one. We probably wouldn't have given a half a billion dollars to an American company for quantum computing. I think that that's unreasonable. We certainly wouldn't have hired an additional 36,000 new public servants. That's the equivalent of every single person in Australia that works for Telstra, more than that, now working for the public service. That's just in the last two years alone. That, of course, increases demand and makes it much harder to keep inflation under control. So there's lots of decisions that we would have not taken some of those big off balance sheet funds, things like the National Reconstruction Fund, the Housing Australia Future Fund, all of those are using borrowed money at taxpayers expense, that increases the the interest repayments. So these are all putting pressures on the budget. We wouldn't have done those things.

CHARLIE PICKERING: I'm speaking with Jane Hume, the Shadow Finance Minister and Liberal Senator for Victoria. I'll let you go in just a tick. But one quick final question. One of the factors of inflation is dwelling in rents, as we discussed there, and the coalition effectively voted against increasing rent stock in the Senate today. You are a senator. You teamed up with the greens to stop that. I've spoken with the Greens today, and they had a problem with the affordability in question of of the dwellings that would be to be built. Why did the Coalition block that bill?

JANE HUME: Well, this is the build to rent bill that you're talking about. Essentially, this is build to rent is kind of raising the white flag on on home ownership. The plan was to increase the tax incentive for build to rent developers from two and a half percent to 4% a year. Now the problem is with this policy is essentially you've prioritised corporates owning homes and renting them out over individuals owning homes. So more and more of our housing supply would be owned and rented out by foreign investors, by big companies, big trust, big super funds, and actually makes home ownership more difficult for ordinary individual Australians. That's our concern with this policy.

CHARLIE PICKERING: We're not talking about dwellings for for people that are even in the market anywhere near able to buy their own home. These are people who are desperate for somewhere they can afford to rent. Have they run up the white flag on owning a home? Or are they just acknowledging the realities of the property market in Australia?

JANE HUME: Well, I think that they have to acknowledge the reality of the property market in Australia because they have less chance of owning their own home, because that's not what this Government's focused on. In 2020, around 23% of well, sorry the first home buyers that entered the market, the proportion of first home buyers that entered the market was around 23%. That's declined to around 19%. So fewer and fewer people are actually entering that home market as first home buyers. That's a real shame, and that's because while the government committed to a 1.2 million additional homes. They're not getting anywhere near that target. They'll be lucky to get 800,000 by 2029 so it's a shortfall of around sort of 7000 or so a month. That's a real problem. Now the Coalition Government prioritised new home building, and in fact, delivered more than that in just the last five years of government alone. Labor want to have very, very different priorities, and home ownership isn't one of them.

CHARLIE PICKERING: Jane Hume, Shadow Finance Minister and Liberal Senator for Victoria. Thank you very much for your time this evening.

JANE HUME: Great to be with you Charlie.