Interview with Ali Moore, ABC Melbourne Drive
10 April 2025
ALI MOORE:
This time of the week, we have a chat during the election campaign to a senior federal politician. Last week, it was Labor's Richard Marles, and today, Jane Hume the Shadow Minister for Finance. Liberal Senator for Victoria joins you in the studio. It has been quite the week for the Liberals. It started with a back down on a significant policy. That's the working from home policy. Senator, welcome back. Good to be with you, Ali. How do you sell a policy? And in your case, repeatedly, you told stories about turning up to government department meetings. You were there in person. Everyone else had dialled in And then you decide to dump the policy in an election campaign. How does that happen?
JANE HUME:
Well, let's be very clear. It wasn't me that had turned up to a department. It was stakeholders, people that had flown down from Sydney that had gone to a department, turned up there and then realised that they were the only people in the meeting room. That all of the public servants had dialled in. But are you talking about selling a policy generally or are you talking about selling a policy specifically?
ALI MOORE:
No, I’m talking about that. I'm trying to work out how, on the one hand, you have considered it to be an extremely important policy by giving us stories like that, telling us accounts like that, this is why you want to do it. You clearly think that it's a policy that you're committed to and then you're not.
JANE HUME:
Well, so this policy was, you're right, we are committed to a more effective and efficient public service. Our concern, of course, is that the public service has grown so dramatically in the last three years. It's grown by more than 20%. It's by 41,000 additional public servants.
ALI MOORE:
How is working from home connected to that?
JANE HUME:
But we're not necessarily being delivered a better service to the public for the size of the public service, for that growth in the public service. You'd be hard-pressed to find an Australian that feels that they are 20% better served by the public service now than they were three years ago. And that, of course, comes at an enormous cost too. It comes at a cost of around $7 billion a year.
ALI MOORE:
But that is totally irrelevant to the question I asked you which is…
JANE HUME:
No, it's absolutely not.
ALI MOORE:
Ok how is it connected?
JANE HUME:
Because delivering an effective and efficient public service should be the expectation of the taxpayer. Now, the fact that public servants have a very different policy to other Australians, whether it be in the private sector or in other parts of the public service, that they have the right to demand to work from home full time was a concern. That wasn't something that the department secretaries had discussed. That was something that was arranged between the CPSU, the relevant union, and the minister Katy Gallagher.
ALI MOORE:
So why dump the policy? You clearly think it’s a good one.
JANE HUME:
Because we had feedback on it that said that actually it won’t deliver a more effective and efficient public service.
ALI MOORE:
But before you got the policy, didn't you go and do those, have those consultations, talk to people and say, if we change this, is it going to make your department more efficient?
JANE HUME:
Well, there were some areas of the public service, particularly those outside of Canberra, that were going to be affected by this indirectly, and they were not going to be able to be more productive and more efficient. And look, we accept the feedback, we listen to it, and we say, yep, maybe we made a mistake there. So, I mean, I know that this is a great water cooler conversation, but let's look at this, you know, sort of with very clear eyes. There was also a massive campaign going on behind the scenes where Labor was going out to women generally, more broadly, saying Peter Dutton's going to make you, know, frogmarch you back to the office, even though they didn't work for the public service, even though they weren't based in Canberra, even though they were, it was completely irrelevant to them. It was an enormous scare campaign.
ALI MOORE:
But just because the government is basically running a scare campaign in your words, that shouldn't stop you selling a policy that you believe is absolutely right.
JANE HUME:
But if that's going on and then at the same time you're receiving feedback from areas of the public service that you know must continue, that you know you value, that you say, oh, well, that's not going to work there, well, then why not? If it's not going to make a financial difference, why not put this policy aside?
ALI MOORE:
So but it seems to me…
JANE HUME:
Don't get me wrong, Ali. There are other ways to make your public service far more efficient and far more effective. And we will pursue those measures.
ALI MOORE:
And if that's the case, though, I guess there's two things to this. One, you either really do believe it's the right policy and you've dumped it because it's politically unpalatable, or you didn't do your homework in the first place and shouldn't ever have had the policy.
JANE HUME:
Well, there was a lot of work done in the first place and there were plenty of circumstances where we'd seen some egregious abuses of work-from-home policy. And I remember talking to you about one of them. There was one public servant came to my office and told us that they couldn't get hold of somebody that they were working with that was apparently working from home full-time because they were travelling around Australia in a camper van with their family.
ALI MOORE:
So that goes back to you believing in the policy.
JANE HUME:
Again, these are egregious abuses of a system, but that can be managed internally. That can be managed from within. It can be managed by department secretaries and senior public servants within each department. And so it should be. And we would expect that it would be managed far better. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to reverse the policy. You need to actually have a stated policy. It just needs to be managed better.
ALI MOORE:
Any other policy that's not tracking well that you might rethink?
JANE HUME:
Well, certainly not in my remit. In fact, today we've announced a new policy.
ALI MOORE:
I'll get to that in just a tick, I promise. Nuclear though. I'm curious about this because nuclear is probably the biggest differential that the Liberal Party has right now on any policy area up against Labor. And yet it is barely mentioned.
JANE HUME:
Well, that's not true. In fact, it's mentioned all the time when we talk about our energy policy. And let's face it, energy is one of the biggest drivers of the cost of living crisis that we're facing today. Now, when we hear stories about people that are really suffering in the hip pocket, they're more often than not talking about paying their gas bills, paying their electricity bills. There's more people on financial hardship programmes now with energy retailers than ever before. So we have been talking about this. We've said that our energy policy will be an all options on the table approach. We want to make sure that there's renewables in the system, certainly, but that they are supported by an injection of gas, new supply of gas into the system to bring down prices in the short term and in the medium term. And then as those cold fire power stations retire, which will happen in the 2030s, they will be replaced by clean emissions, emissions, nuclear energy generators. And we've identified seven sites around the country. This is a policy we've been talking about for three years now. It's something that we're not just proud of. We think this is a really important, game-changing, transformative policy for our country. Why is it that we are the only country of the top 20 nations that doesn't use nuclear energy? now, and yet we have greater uranium resources than any other nation. So this is something that we're very proud of. If you don't feel that we're talking about it, perhaps it's because it's already set in to the mindset of Australians. In fact, wherever we go, people talk about it as if it's kind of a done deal.
ALI MOORE:
Interesting. Just, I mean, on the whole energy conversation, and this is tied to your announcement today around a new future fund for the regions, because this future fund, you're going to take seed funding for it, $5 billion from the Rewiring the Nation programme And I'm curious about that, because Rewiring the Nation is all about putting in the infrastructure, including the transmission lines that you need for renewable energy. And yes, Labor's policy is for more than 80% renewable energy by 2030. But by 2050, you're going to have a lot of renewable energy in your mix as well, 54%. So you're going to need some of those new transmission lines. So which bits won't get built if you take all this money out of rewiring the nation?
JANE HUME:
Well, there certainly won't be 28,000 kilometres of new transmission lines needed. And that's the equivalent of going right around the circumference of Australia twice.
ALI MOORE:
So have you worked out what you can build and what you can't?
JANE HUME:
It's an enormous investment in transmission lines, which let's remember, they use an inordinate amount of concrete. They are environmentally quite damaging. They're aesthetically ugly. And they are necessary to reach Labor's renewables-only approach.
ALI MOORE:
But some of it's necessary to get to yours as well, 54%. Some of it is. So do you know which bits are and which bits aren't? That was really my question.
JANE HUME:
I don’t want to get into the details of that because to be honest that is in an entirely different portfolio to mine. But what I will say is that we don’t need the entire transition fund to be able to pay for that. Which is why this new future fund is so important. Now I want to be really clear, the new future fund that we are establishing, that we’ve announced today…
ALI MOORE:
It’s for regional areas yeah?
JANE HUME:
It’s not just for regional areas. There are in fact two. So, at the moment we have, each Budget, there tends to be a windfall gain. Now that’s because, at the end of the day, there has been a conservative estimate of what tax revenues will be, particularly because there is a very conservative estimate of commodity prices around iron ore and coal.
ALI MOORE:
Traditionally they have tended to underestimate what the commodity...
JANE HUME:
They do and they do that for a very good reason. You want to have a conservative estimate in your budget so that you don’t promise more than you can deliver. But then when the final number comes in, there is this windfall gain. Now we want to make sure that that windfall gain isn’t used for either recurrent spending or frittered away, which is what we’ve seen in the last three years. We want to make sure, we want to quarantine that money, put it into a future fund and use that future fund for future generations. So it will be to do things like, it will act as a handbrake on spending. So this is, essentially, it means that you cannot, you have to manage your budget far better. You can't rely on windfall gains in order to manage your budget. So it is a structural change. More importantly, it becomes an asset of the Commonwealth. So it reduces your net debt.
ALI MOORE:
Sure. But how do you stop it…
JANE HUME:
And then the earnings from it…
ALI MOORE (interrupts):
Can be used.
JANE HUME:
…can be paid down. They can be paid down either to pay down debt, to pay down gross debt, or it could be used for economic reform, or it can be used for productive infrastructure.
ALI MOORE:
But there's lots of things that the Nationals have been talking about today is doing things like daycare centres, fixing potholes.
JANE HUME:
Sorry, that's the Future Generations Fund. So that's one fund.
ALI MOORE:
That's the Future Generations Fund. And then you've got the regional.
JANE HUME:
And the reason why we have the Future Generations Fund is because that there is a whole generation of Australians now that don't feel like that they're getting ahead, that they have sort of, there's an intergenerational equity issue, that they're not getting advantages from Australia's resources and particularly our resources sector.
ALI MOORE:
But that Regional Future Fund, if we can just switch to that. How do you stop that? becoming a pork-barrelling exercise?
JANE HUME:
Well, it has integrity guardrails around how it's used, but it is really important to acknowledge that windfall is coming out of the regions and it should be, to some extent, reinvested back into it to make sure that our regions are prosperous. There are over a million Australians that can't access childcare at all right now, so why wouldn't you want to reinvest that money back into the regions? There are problems with health care, with educational outcomes, with infrastructure and community facilities in the regions. We want thriving regions because they are the ones that are creating that windfall gain in the first place.
ALI MOORE:
Senator Hume, we are almost out of time. I just have to ask you, have you, and I accept that you quite possibly haven't because I know that you move around a lot and you've been very busy. Have you seen the new ad that the Liberals have got? It sort of has been around today in the media. The claim is it's the first purely AI political ad. It's got a bloke filling up his car with fuel. It's got a fighter jet, a rocket, an alien I'm not quite sure. I don't get the whole thing. Do you get it?
JANE HUME:
I haven't seen it. So I absolutely don't see it. You're right. I haven't seen our own advertising.
ALI MOORE:
I’m not quite sure who it’s aimed at.
JANE HUME:
But can I tell you, there are much wiser heads than mine that put together these ads. And I think, as Benita was telling you earlier, it's amazing how many hits this stuff gets on social media. It does appeal to particular audiences. And, you know, we have to go to where the voters are and communicate with them in the way that they want to be communicated with.
ALI MOORE:
Too true. Jane Hume thanks for coming in.
JANE HUME:
Great to be with you, Ali.
ALI MOORE:
Jane Hume there, Shadow Minister for Finance, Liberal Senator for Victoria.