Press Conference with Angus Taylor, Parliament House
5 February 2025
ANGUS TAYLOR: Okay, well, the Living Cost Index Data is out today, and it tells us what we see wherever we go around Australia, which is hardworking Australian families are suffering under a Labor Government that's had the wrong priorities and made the wrong decisions. We see the Employee Living Cost Index. This is the index of the cost of living for hard working families across Australia is up 19.4% since Labor came to power. Let me say that again, a 19.4% increase in the living costs of hardworking Australian families. That is almost 50% higher than CPI over that same period and we know those hardworking families who have a mortgage or are trying to get the kids off to school at the beginning of the school year, who are trying to pay those grocery bills, pay for their insurance. They are the ones struggling with a cost of living that has gone up faster than any other group in Australia. These are the aspirational Australians. These are the hardworking Australians trying to get ahead. These are the Australians trying to pay off their mortgage. These are the Australians trying to give their kids an opportunity to get ahead and they are falling behind badly under a Labor Government that has allowed inflation to rage and our standard living to collapse more than any other time in our history. Indeed, we know that Australians’ living standards have fallen more than any of our peer countries over that same comparable period, and the pain is very real. We were out in Queanbeyan just earlier this week and we were there with Father Michael at a community centre providing meals for Australians who are doing it tough. More and more in places like that we are seeing hardworking Australians, aspirational Australians who have a job, who simply can't make ends meet anymore, and that's exactly what we saw in the data today. The data has a real story to it. In fact, it has millions of real stories right across this country, of people who simply can't make ends meet and worst of all, they are losing hope. This is a country that has always hope. It's a country that's always aspired. It's a country full of Australians who are trying to get ahead and have been able to get ahead across our history, and yet that is coming to a stop, coming to a halt under a Labor Government that simply has had its priorities wrong and made the wrong decisions.
I want to make a comment about the Treasurer and costings of our policies and some goings on over the last 24 hours. Yesterday morning, the Treasurer claimed that he had asked Treasury to cost one of our policies, our policies to support hardworking businesses in the hospitality sector, where we're seeing record levels of insolvencies right now. One in 11 businesses that have gone under in recent times. The Treasurer claimed that he had got Treasury to cost our policies. This would have been a clear breach of the APS code of conduct, the Public Service Code of Conduct. I wrote to the Treasury Secretary yesterday, and I got a swift reply, and he made clear that he had not costed the Coalition's policies. He had not costed the Coalition's policies. Four times yesterday morning, the Treasurer said that Treasury had costed our policy. Now they can't both be right, and if we accept that the Treasury Secretary is telling the truth, then four times yesterday morning, Jim Chalmers lied to the Australian people. It's not the first time. He told the Australian people that he wasn't going to touch their superannuation, and he has. He’s seeking to. He told the Australian people he wasn't going to touch franking credits and he is. He and the Prime Minister told the Australian people they were going to have cheaper mortgages, they were going to have a lower electricity prices, they were going to have a lower cost of living. He hasn't delivered any of that. This is a Treasurer who simply can't be trusted. He’s out of his depth. He's out of touch, and he simply cannot be trusted. I’ll hand over to Jane.
JANE HUME: Thanks Angus. 19.4%. That's how much working families have seen prices rise over the life of this government. Nearly twice as much as the inflation data will suggest. But this shouldn't come as a surprise. This is just putting statistics around what we know Australian families are already feeling. They’ve seen with those price rises, their standards of living collapse, collapse by around 8.7% in the last three years. The fasted and deepest collapse of living standards on record. We've seen a 66% increase in the number of people seeking assistance with their energy bills. We've seen an increase of around $50,000 needed to pay off an average mortgage in Australia. No wonder Australians are crying out for help in this Labor-driven cost of living crisis. It's not just [inaudible] They’re not just feeling poorer. They are poorer. Australians are poorer under Labor. Now in the meantime, we've seen Jim Chalmers, the Treasurer, is more obsessed with costing Coalition of policies, than finding policies of his own to solve the cost of living crisis that Australians are facing. He's more interested in what the Coalition is doing, what Peter Dutton has announced, than he is on helping ordinary Australians deal with the problems that his government has [inaudible] And in fact, Katy Gallagher, the Minister for the Public Service, should hang her head in shame. This egregious attempt at politicisation of the public service, she was the one that put her name to a media release with these nonsense numbers that have been conjured up out of nowhere, out of the Treasurer's imagination. So I will be writing to Gordon de Brouwer, who is the APS Commissioner, to ask him to issue guidance to all public service departments to remind them of the APS values and to remind them that they have a code of conduct that they need to abide to. This is a terrible indictment on a Labor Government that has run out of ideas, run out of excuses, and soon it will also run out of time. Happy to take questions.
JOURNALIST: Will the Coalition support the Omnibus Bill in the Senate that links the Instant Asset Write Off extension to the removal of deductibility of late [inaudible]?
ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, Michael, as always, with these omnibus bills, what Labor does is play politics. I mean, that's their game. They don't spend their time focusing on how they're going to bring down cost of living for Australians. They focus their time on how to play politics with what we like to call ‘wedgislation’ where there are pieces of this that we strongly support. Of course, we support accelerated depreciation for small businesses. That's long been Coalition policy, and of course, in the last Budget in Reply, we've committed to make that a permanent feature of our taxation system and it's all about making sure small businesses are encouraged and incented to invest, create jobs, create opportunities. This is where productivity comes from. It comes from making sure that we've got our businesses investing in better equipment, in better technology so they can create the prosperity, not just for themselves, but for all Australians. It's a very simple proposition. It's worked for a long while, and we strongly support that, and that's the part of that omnibus bill that we do support. There's all sorts of other bits of that omnibus bill we'll have more to say about as it comes through the Parliament and of course, there's pieces of that which involve increased taxation for small businesses. That's not something we want to see. We don't want to see more taxation for Australian businesses.
JOURNALIST: Senator, just on electoral reform, what are the outstanding issues for the Coalition that you need to see resolved before you can pass or support the legislation and do you see there being any possible [inaudible]?
JANE HUME: This is entirely in the government’s court. Discussions have been ongoing for a number of months now and we’ll wait to see where the government …
JOURNALIST: When you say in their court, what do you want from … where do they need to come to be able to …
JANE HUME: I’m not going to reveal … I’m not going to reveal the conversations the Coalition and the Opposition may have been having the government on this issue. We learned that the government have been having conversations right around the chamber. I'm not going to go into exactly what those private conversations would be, other than to say that this is now in the government’s court.
JOURNALIST: Angus, just on the business-related meal and entertainment expenses, have you sought a PBO costing on it and if so, why don’t you just release that if those numbers are [inaudible]?
ANGUS TAYLOR: Can I be clear, John. The government now, the Labor Party, released their costings two days before last election. Two days before the last election, and they seem to think there's one rule for the Labor Party and one rule for everybody else. That’s the politics that we see from this Treasurer who, at the end of the day, he’s politics first, and everything else second. Our focus is on policies that are encouraging small businesses to succeed in this country. Record levels of insolvencies we're seeing right now. One in 11 hospitality businesses going under and anyone who's out there talking to their local cafe or restaurant owner or club owner, you'll hear very quickly how tough it is for many of those businesses at a time like this. We want them to be in a position to invest, to create jobs, to take risks, and all of those things. We've been clear, as you know very well, about the sort of order of magnitude of the costings we will put out, and we'll put them out in advance of the next election, which is the convention. Labor seems to have forgotten that convention now that they’re in government.
JOURNALIST: Mr Taylor during the last election campaign, Labor did do its final costing three days before the election but they also put a price tag on many of their costings as they released them. You've not done that with this policy. You know the price. You've got the PBO modelling. Why won't you release it?
ANGUS TAYLOR: We've been very clear about the sort of numbers …
JOURNALIST: So you’re not going to release the pricing of any policy?
ANGUS TAYLOR: Let me tell you … let me tell you something …
JOURNALIST: Will you release the costings of any policy between now and the election?
ANGUS TAYLOR: Just … just … can I finish the answer? You asked me a question, I’d really like to be able to answer it. The Labor Party has decided that they’re going to use Treasury to do costings and this is a completely unacceptable attempt to politicise the public service.
JOURNALIST: It doesn’t go to the question though.
ANGUS TAYLOR: No. Can I finish? This is incredibly important. We have a Labor Party that wants to politicise everything. The one thing it doesn't want to do, is to address the collapse in standard of living that we've seen of Australians in this country. A collapse which is unprecedented and unparalleled. No other OECD country in the world and they will do anything but talk about that collapse and the impact that's having on hardworking, aspirational Australians, small businesses that are trying to get ahead and frankly, are going backwards fast. That's the Labor Party's priority. Play politics. Our priority is to focus on making sure that our small businesses in this country can get ahead and our hardworking Australians who are losing hope, losing hope right now, as we see in this data, are in a position to [inaudible].
JOURNALIST: I think we can take that as read. You haven't actually answered the question of when you will release costings for any of your policies.
ANGUS TAYLOR: I have already answered that question many, many times. You should come along to more of my press conferences.
JOURNALIST: Mr Taylor, on the argument about politicization, how does Labor’s approach of getting Treasury to cost your policies different to what the Coalition did in 2019 when the Coalition got Treasury to cost Labor's tax policy?
ANGUS TAYLOR: Let’s just go through the facts here. The fact is, yesterday, the Treasurer said four times that he had got Treasury to cost our policies. By yesterday evening, the Treasury Secretary had come out and said, we did no such thing. That's not what we did.
JOURNALIST: But how …
ANGUS TAYLOR: No, no. Hang on. Let me finish … we did no such thing. Now they can't both be telling the truth, and the reality is the Treasurer lied. He lied four times to the Australian people, and he needs to come clean. I mean, this guy is lying constantly. He's telling Australians that everything's all right, everything's rainbows and lollipops right now. Well, it's not. Australians are suffering. You see that in the data today, and that's our focus, right now. That's our focus right now. Is how we make sure that Australians can get ahead when we’ve seen a government that has completely lost the plot. It’s out of its depth. It’s out of touch with what we're really seeing on the ground for hardworking Australians.
JOURNALIST: Senator Hume just on the public service, so the Coalition wants to reduce waste in the public service, often referencing 36,000 ASL increase under Labor but that number is not just in Canberra. So are you committing to only cut jobs in Canberra if elected, or would you cut it from other areas as well?
JANE HUME: Australians expect and deserve an efficient and effective public service, but what they don't want is a bloated bureaucracy on taxpayer dollars. It does seem that this Labor government has forgotten that every single dollar that it spends is a dollar that somebody else earns. 36,000 ASL increase in the public service is the equivalent of a 20% increase, and yet we haven't seen a 20% increase in the standards of service. In fact, we've seen standards of service go backwards under Labor. It now takes 48 days to apply for an aged pension. It used to take around 30. It's now about five times the wait time to get a low income part pension in Australia. The wait time, if you're on the phone to the parents and families helpline, is around an hour. An hour. And times have blown out for the older Australians helpline as well. So you can see that standards have gone down, even though the number of people working in Services Australia has increased by around 4,000. The size of the Department of Energy and Environment has doubled. It's doubled, and yet approval times have increased and emissions have gone up. Standards have gone down under this government and at the same time have provided an 11% pay rise to all public servants. Not just the 36,000 new ones. Australians rightly expect quality services from their government and they don't need a bloated, overly expensive bureaucracy to deliver lower services.
JOURNALIST: Senator, those percentages you quoted there skew the fact that a lot of these jobs were being done in the previous government, by consultancy firms, by labour hire and so forth. Could you clarify how many public servants you would like to see cut, for instance from the Finance Department, from the Treasury Department. We've heard different numbers from …
JANE HUME: No I’m not going to do that.
JOURNALIST: But we've heard different numbers from David Littleproud for instance, last year he said all 36,000 will be cut in a 6PR interview. Jacinta Price on the weekend in the Australian suggested there will be no cuts and then later clarified and said that there would be some cuts or a hiring freeze. Could you clarify exactly what we're talking about here as well? Is it a hiring freeze? Is it firing workers? Is it asking people to take redundancies?
JANE HUME: One of the fantastic things about having Jacinta Price on board is that we now have a Shadow Minister purely on government efficiency. Not just where that waste is occurring, but where the services can also be improved. That's what Jacinta’s focus is going to be on. Now the 36,000 public servants coming in … we will contain the growth in the public service, and we will make sure that the public service is right-sized to deliver the services that Australians expect and deserve, and we will not be cutting essential services. Let me be very clear on that. We have no intention of cutting essential services. And if Labor tell you that we are, then that is a scare campaign. That is all it is. We want to make sure that Australians get the services that they deserve, that they expect, that it's done at a fair and appropriate price, and that our public service isn’t crowding out our private sector, which is going backwards. The public sector is supporting the economy and the private sector is retreating. We cannot have that [inaudible]
JOURNALIST: Is there a number by which you’d like to see that go down though? We've heard numbers from zero to 36,000. There must be some ball park figure.
JANE HUME: We’ve said 36,000 are the new public servants and that's no secret. That's in the budget papers. This is something that the government is crying about, not only is it crying about it but with that 11% pay rise, there is a $7 billion black hole in its own budgeting because Katy Gallagher has been saying that there is no cuts to public service under a Labor Government, and she's given them an 11% pay rise. But if you look at the MYEFO figures public sector wages have flatlined. Well, both cannot be true. There is an enormous black hole in Labor's budget on public service wages. That's up for them to respond.
JOURNALIST: After the stage three tax cuts were amended by Labor, the Coalition said they were going to revisit income tax [inaudible] before the federal election. Are you going to announce any plans to address bracket creep before the election?
ANGUS TAYLOR: Oh, well, bracket creep is hurting Australians. There's no question about that. We see the collapse in living standards has been contributed to by the sharp rises in prices, which we see today in the living cost indexes. The sharp increase in mortgage payments, which again, are in the employee living cost indexes and, of course, increases in personal income taxes are at record levels. We'll assess what the budget situation is as we go into the election campaign, and we'll make decisions on what's available. But I tell you what, what we do know is that as Labor spends every dollar, extra dollar that Australians are earning with these increases in personal income taxes being paid, we know that Australians are really suffering and you only have to look at the employee living cost index today to see just how much. But I also encourage you to talk to your local small businesses. Talk to those around those small businesses. That pain is deep, it’s real, this Treasurer and this government are not across it. They're out of their depth and they're out of touch. We can't afford another three years of Labor. Thank you very much.