Interview with Peter Stefanovic, First Edition

23 September 2024

PETER STEFANOVIC: Australia has slightly reduced its debt by $17 billion, four months after the Budget. That will ultimately save Australians $80 billion in interest payments over the next 10 years. Joining us live now, Shadow Finance Minister Jane Hume. Jane, good to see you. So gross debt down, a bigger surplus now revealed by Treasury. Is this, as the government claims, down to spending restraint?

JANE HUME: Pete, this is obviously a very selective drop from the Government on its Final Budget Outcome, and I will be commenting more about the Final Budget Outcome when all of the data is revealed later this week. But what we can say is, how much more would the debt have been reduced by had the government not spent an additional $315 billion over the last three budgets, which is what we've seen. In fact, they've spent $4 for every $1 that they have saved. And we know that because the revenue that's come in has essentially been caused by two things, high commodity prices and that insidious bracket creep caused by high inflation. So it hasn't been the hard work of Jim Chalmers to get the budget under control, he hasn't cut his savings as households have done. In fact, it's been the hard work of Australians that have gone to pay for the two very small surpluses that he's delivered that clearly haven't all been translated into paying off the debt. That's a real shame, because it will cost Australians more over the long run.

PETER STEFANOVIC: Yeah, I guess higher immigration leads to a higher tax collect as well. Jim Chalmers, though he claims this gross debt now 10% lower than what Labor inherited from your old government. That's how they're explaining it away.

JANE HUME: Well, actually, when, just before Covid hit, we had a structurally balanced budget, which was a really important, you know, a really important milestone to make. That was what gave us the flexibility and the resilience during Covid, to be able to be so generous and to keep Australians businesses in business and employees in jobs. That was the real Covid legacy. Unfortunately, what we've seen since that period of time is a deterioration of economic conditions. We've now got stagnant economic growth. We've still got persistently high, homegrown, sticky inflation, and we've got productivity that's going backwards, so that does not augur well for the years ahead, and certainly that's being felt in people's hip pockets. We know that the cost of living is still the number one issue that Australians are feeling right now. I'm down here in the western districts of Victoria in the state of one and with Dan Tehan this week, and that's exactly what we're talking about, the cost of living, the cost of doing business, and also some of those insidious taxes that we've been talking about that are being inflicted on both businesses and farmers.

PETER STEFANOVIC: I thought that background looked familiar. Jane, now on to the Opposition Leader, your boss today, Peter Dutton, he's to unveil his nuclear plan. Will it include the costs and energy bill savings?

JANE HUME: Well, I'm not going to preempt Peter Dutton's, any of Peter Dutton's announcements, as you would probably understand. But the Coalition has been very clear from its very early on in this term of government that we need to find a new emissions free base load power source in order to fill the gap when coal, that we've relied on for decades leaves the system. Now, there needs to be transition fuel, and that's all about gas, and there's also renewables, are going to continue to play an important part in our energy mix, but it's about getting the energy mix right. And most importantly, when we talk about the costs of our energy system, we have to be able to compare apples with apples. Now the Government keep, you know, pointing to the fire and yelling, ‘fire, fire’. But then what they're not doing is actually delivering a cost on their entire energy mix. That's what we will be doing, rather than this renewables only or leaves in one basket approach, we'll be making sure that there is an energy mix that is going to deliver zero emissions, but at the same time that baseload power that we know is necessary to keep prices down.

PETER STEFANOVIC: Just a final one here on cost of living Jane. David Littleproud, he wants an overhaul on beer tax. Do you support an excise freeze?

JANE HUME: Look, the Coalition, the Liberal Party, is currently putting together its tax plan. As we mentioned before, we're going to deliver lower and simpler and fairer taxes. You've already seen some of that regarding the instant asset write off increase and making that a permanent feature of that tax system. We've already said that there will be no negative gearing under a Coalition government, that there will be no changes to capital gains tax, and that there will be no changes to the unrealised capital gains that Labor want to put on superannuation. But we will reveal all of our tax plan in the coming days. Peter Dutton and Angus Taylor are working very hard on it.

PETER STEFANOVIC: Beer tax though?

JANE HUME: Well, we know that beer tax has gone up largely because inflation has gone up. If inflation hadn't been kept under control, then this would not be the issue that it is.

PETER STEFANOVIC: You don't support a freeze.

JANE HUME: Well, I always like the idea of, you know, free beer, but unfortunately, that might not be the policy slogan that you'll be seeing us going into the election with. What I can say is that when we were in government, we concentrated on this pretty hard. We made sure that there was support for distillers, but it is a very complicated tax to manage that, you know, dealing with both wines like beer and spirits, we want to make sure it's a comprehensive approach.

PETER STEFANOVIC: Sounds like the Nats might be on their own there. Jane, we're out of time. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.