Interview with Paul Murray, Sky News

14 May 2024

 

PAUL MURRAY: Jane Hume is the Shadow Finance Minister and she joins us now from Canberra. So you know what the line here is, ‘It's every household. It's every taxpayer’. What's your response to that premise and about the reality for the Australians? That as the Treasurer said today, the tax cut is worth less than a carton of beer a week and energy relief is $25 a month?

JANE HUME: Well, I think Albo was right on one thing that was that this Budget is a typical Labor budget through and through. It's big tax, big spend and quite frankly, it's a con job, because it's not going to tackle the number one issue being the cost of living because it cannot bring inflation down sustainably. It's throwing subsidies at the problem rather than dealing with the problem at the source. There's $315 billion in additional spending since Labor came to Government. That's an eye watering amount. In fact, it's the biggest amount of spending that we've seen in a Budget since the pandemic years, for about 40 years, since back in the Hawke and Keating days at the beginning of the 1980s. For every $1 of savings that they've made, they've actually spent $4. Now the RBA are no fools, as much as Jim Chalmers might like to replace the board with people that he's picked, I’m pretty sure that they know that any changes that they've made in this Budget aren't actually going to sustainably bring inflation down and because of that interest rates are gonna stay higher for longer and Australians, particularly mortgage holders are going to pay the price.

PAUL MURRAY: Earlier in the show when I was trying to go through the five things that I've noticed about the Budget. I make this point, that in this Budget, if the claim is electricity, and I don't believe it changes anything in that world. Just look at the inflation figures from last month, right? Everything from tobacco, petrol, bread, rent, all of it way up. Now, you've been chairing the Cost of Living Committee that goes around the country and the types of people who come to those committees or hear about how massive their concerns are. We're talking about people with jobs, who live in their car. This Budget does not change their life. Yet, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer are going to spend the next many months telling us that everyone benefits, despite the fact that the people who truly, truly, truly, truly need it are the working poor and I can’t see anything here.

JANE HUME: The cost of living crisis is clearly the number one issue. We are hearing the most horrendous stories of people coming to seek services from charities that have never been there before. People with two incomes, people with multiple jobs, people with mortgages are now lining up at FoodBank to help put food on the table. Les Twentlyman, the great Les Twentyman, may he rest in peace, did appear before the Committee, before the Cost of Living Committee, just before he died actually and told us the most sad story which was about a woman that had pawned her wedding ring to pay for her kids school uniforms. I reckon the announcements in tonight's Budget are going to be cold comfort to families like that. Yes, everyone's going to appreciate some energy bill relief, but in the long term that's not going to tackle the big issue. It's only a band-aid on a bullet hole. Unless you can bring inflation down sustainably, well, it's simply not going to make a dent in people's lives and the only way you're going to be able to do that with energy prices is to increase supply into the system. Not go on these ideological jaunts into whatever you think the Future Made in Australia might look like.

PAUL MURRAY: We know the noise the Labor Party made in the lead up to the last election and then we're not fighting the last election. The world is always looking forward and when I say we I mean collectively, Australia and what we're going to be debating, just in case the umpires are going to run off to somebody. The Karen's are gonna run off for the umpire. We've got this scenario where one trillion dollars debt, one trillion dollars debt is what I talked about before, by their own forecasts, if they have paid off 80, 90 billion, the Budget goes into such deep deficits over the next few years that we go back to a position of being even worse than when they took over. What does it say to you as a document about how the Federal Budget is put together, that at its heart apart from the sugar hits of excise taxes and resources that the joint is hundreds of billions of dollars in the wrong direction?

JANE HUME: You think what a waste the last couple of years have been because there have been some pretty serious windfall gains that have been presented in this document to Jim Chalmers - to use his former bosses or his former idols words - he has been hit in the arse by a rainbow, by those iron ore and coal company tax receipts. You know, the commodity prices have gone up so high that company tax receipts have gone through the roof and of course personal income tax receipts have gone up too, because of bracket creep. Inflation is bad for all Australians. You know, it's the thief in the night that eats away at your savings, that erodes your purchasing power and reduces your standard of living. But Governments love it because it pushes everybody up into that next higher tax bracket and of course, they get more income receipts, which have more revenue, which is fantastic for your budget bottom line, and that's what's returned the surpluses. But rather than actually using that surplus to pay down the debt, instead, they've continued to spend and they've spent on things that you know, quite frankly, we're not seeing the benefit from. One of them, the one that really gets up my wig, is 36,000 new public servants since Labor came to Government. Now just to put that into perspective, that's more than all of the people that work for Westpac. It's more than all of the people that work for Telstra, and they are now Canberra bureaucrats, just hired in the last two years alone. That is eye watering because I don't know about you Paul, but I don't feel like I'm getting 36,000 new public servants better off in terms of service that I'm receiving from the Government.

PAUL MURRAY: No, not at all. To me it feels like it's again, an extension of what we've seen with Daniel Andrews, Palaszczuk to a degree here, which is that Labor wants to build permanent majorities, electoral majorities, by you are either dependent on the Government for your job, or you are dependent on the Government in terms of the handout, or if you're a business, your biggest client is the Government, right? Hence, we saw how that has worked and in my view to the detriment of places like the great state of Victoria in Queensland. Jane, nice to talk to you. We'll talk again soon.

JANE HUME: Great to be with you Paul.