Interview with Peter Stefanovic, First Edition

3 February 2025

PETER STEFANOVIC: Well, parliamentarians are about to descend on Canberra for what could be the final sitting fortnight before the election. Joining us live is the Shadow Finance Minister, Jane Hume. Jane, good morning to you. So it all kicks off in earnest tomorrow. What's going to be the red meat for you over this two week period?

JANE HUME: Pete, it will come as no surprise to you that the concern about rising antisemitism is going to be a priority issue as Parliament returns. We've been very concerned to hear about more attacks over the weekend in Perth and again, in Melbourne. Some of these attacks have been really disturbing in nature, having Stars of David painted on fences of houses, just as they were during the Nazi occupation, during the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s. This is designed to intimidate, to threaten and to terrorise the Jewish community and to break up social cohesion in Australia and it doesn't matter whether it's the far, crazy, lunatic right or whether it's the extreme left that we've seen protesting on campuses, it's about time that the Albanese government took a leadership role and stamped out antisemitism in this country. So we'll be making sure that we hold them to account and that we push them towards stronger laws, stronger sanctions, stronger sentencing to make sure that those that are committing these terrible offenses are punished appropriately. 

PETER STEFANOVIC: Mandatory sentencing?

JANE HUME: Mandatory sentencing of six years for those that commit terror offenses. That's what the Coalition will be looking for. Or one year, for those that are displaying hate symbols, and, of course, ensuring that there are stronger laws, much stronger laws around those that are inciting violence around places of worship. There is more that can be done, this government has sat on its hands and allowed antisemitism to fester and propagate. It's time that Anthony Albanese stepped up, showed some leadership, showed some strength of character, and stamped out antisemitism in this country. There's no place for this behavior here.

PETER STEFANOVIC: Sure, yeah, well, just on Anthony Albanese, those questions remain over the breakdown in communication between the Prime Minister and the New South Wales Government over that caravan filled with explosives that was bound for Jewish targets. Now you've got this report that Minns was concerned, or his office was concerned, that the Prime Minister would leak it to the media. So was New South Wales right to do that?

JANE HUME: This is an extraordinary revelation, and the idea that the Prime Minister could be kept in the dark or not know for even up to 10 days about what could have been Australia's largest and most damaging terror plot is just inconceivable. I think that Chris Minns has some questions to answer here, but so does the Prime Minister. How is it that his own security agencies have kept him in the dark? Where is he on national security? This is the first and foremost responsibility of a Prime Minister, is to keep Australians safe.

PETER STEFANOVIC (INTERRUPTS): And this is Labor and Labor.

JANE HUME: If he is having information kept from him. If he's having information kept from him, he has failed in his first duty.

PETER STEFANOVIC: It's Labor and Labor, which is the point I was making there. Meanwhile, you've got Penny Wong, so this year referred to this in your first response. Penny Wong, she's moving to slap an online white supremacist network with Counter Terrorism sanctions. That's something you support, just to clarify that?

JANE HUME: That is something that we support. It's following the UK and the US who have already moved in this direction and yes, that's certainly something that we would support. But to be honest, it could have been done so much so much earlier. The problem here has been this equivocation, the prevarication, saying one thing to one group of people and doing something with another, you know, promising safety on our streets to those in Sydney or in the south east of Melbourne, but at the same time supporting positions in the UN that essentially have changed our foreign policy stance dramatically in this country. So we can't afford to have to be talking out of both sides of our mouth here. The safety of our own people depend on it, and the Jewish community in Australia deserve that comfort.

PETER STEFANOVIC: All right, just into your wheelhouse. No doubt there'll be questions on this. Cam Reddin just referred to this. The cuts to public sector jobs, 36,000 of them. That's a whole lot. Where are they going to be coming from?

JANE HUME: There's 36,000 new public servants that have been appointed under this government. That's a 20% rise in public servants and yet, at the same time, we've actually seen a withdrawal of services. So for instance, in the Services Australia, Services Australia have increased the number of public servants by 4000, yet wait times for the parenting and children’s line have blown out for more than an hour now. It takes five times as long to get a low income card, and the wait time to get a pension has blown out to 48 days, up from around 30 under the Coalition. So just because you've increased the number of public servants doesn't mean you've increased to a better service. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find an Australian that says that they're 20% better served by this blow out of a bloated bureaucracy that we've seen from this government, at a cost of around $6 billion a year. This is a real concern. It's something that the private sector has been saying for some time, that the public sector is bloating and it's actually inhibiting growth in the private sector rather than enhancing it.

PETER STEFANOVIC: Alright, I've gone over, but Jane Hume, good to have you with us. Thank you, chat again soon.