OLIVER PETERSON, HOST: The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, joins you and me on Drive from Parliament House in Canberra. Good afternoon.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Good afternoon, Ollie. Good to be with you.
PETERSON: Lots of headlines today, Prime Minister, about backflips and broken promises, particularly when it comes to capital gains and negative gearing. What do you say to people like Ash, who has messaged me and says that many people voted for Labor and stability? And he says, ‘well, that might sound boring. This is the biggest tax change since the GST, despite you campaigning on there being no changes’. What do you say to Ash?
PRIME MINISTER What I say to Ash is that this is an ambitious Budget. It's a Budget of reform. It's a Budget which builds resilience. It's a Budget which gives tax cuts, an additional tax cut. Now we've got five tax cuts in total that will benefit average workers by about $2,800 when they are fully implemented. And that it also is addressing one of the big challenges, and I'm sure you have had people on your program who've spoken about being locked out of the housing market, how they can't get access, either themselves or parents or grandparents who are worried about their kids ever getting access to the security that comes with your own roof over your head. Now, we are making sensible changes. We are grandfathering them so that people who have investment properties will continue those arrangements and be able to have negative gearing. But that for new purchasers, people who want to invest in the property market, it has to be new homes so that they're not only investing in their own future wealth, they're investing in the future wealth of the country. That's a sensible reform going forward that will benefit, mean that something like 75,000 people will get into first home ownership for the first time, and that's a good thing. We can't have a society where you have some people who either are in home ownership or will only get into home ownership if they're fortunate enough to inherit a home, but others are simply locked out, a whole generation and generations to come. So, that's why we're putting forward what is a change in our position. We're being upfront about that.
PETERSON: But why not wait till the next election, though? Why not put it to the Australian people, Prime Minister?
PRIME MINISTER: Because it can't wait. This has gone on for a long period of time. We do live, as you've said, in really turbulent times and they're volatile, the economy. We want to make a difference now. In our first year after the election, we said we would deliver on all of our commitments and we've gone through one by one. We've cut student debt by 20 per cent. We've got Urgent Care Clinics now in entrenched in Medicare and 137 of them open around the country. We've got Endo and Pelvic Pain Clinics open, including there in WA. We've got 1800MEDICARE operating, Free TAFE, 800,000 Australians. We've got our other housing measures in place. And our housing measures were designed, a $47 billion plan for homes for Australians, whether it was public housing with the Housing Australia Future Fund, the Build to Rent scheme, the shared equity scheme based upon Western Australia's, or the five per cent deposits that have been accessed by more than 200,000 Australians now. All of that has been good, but we needed to do more.
PETERSON: But that housing crisis, it hasn't happened overnight, Prime Minister. It's been decades in the making –
PRIME MINISTER: That’s right, and if you keep kicking the can down the road, you won't be able to address it.
PETERSON: But fundamentally, what's changed in the last 12 months since you promised no reform? How do you justify this kind of overhaul?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, we didn't promise no reform. We promised the five per cent deposits. We promised a range of reforms, but they haven't been enough. And we have changed our position. I'm being upfront about that. Just like we've changed our position on the halving of the fuel tax because that was something that was necessary to do. Governments need to be prepared to respond to circumstances and to make decisions in the national interest. I was very conscious that there would be some criticism for this decision. But the issue of substance, of course, when it comes to the policy is is this good policy? Is this the right thing to do? I firmly believe that it is and that it will make a positive difference.
PETERSON: If you can change your mind on that though, Prime Minister, how can your word be trusted?
PRIME MINISTER: Of course, are committed to making a difference and when it comes to housing policy, this is something that will make a difference. We changed our mind on Stage Three of the tax cuts. And you know what, when we did that, you might recall that the then Leader of the Opposition called for an election on it, Peter Dutton. They said they'd oppose it and they said they'd reverse it and then they voted for it, because it was the right thing to do to make sure rather than just people like me get a tax cut, low and middle income earners got the tax cut through the system.
PETERSON: If you've changed your mind on that is the right thing to do now to also look at further tax reform and why don't you want to break your word to gas companies when it comes to introducing a 25 per cent tax on gas exports?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, this is something that's just come from, you know, a social media campaign –
PETERSON:: The Australia Institute says it could raise $17 billion a year.
PRIME MINISTER: The Australia Institute have run this campaign. But they need to be fair dinkum about it as well. They need to be honest that gas companies paid $22 billion of tax last year, that they pay royalties, that they pay company tax as well as PRRT. And the PRRT we reformed in our first term. That's something that, you know, we didn't go to the election in 2022 saying we would do. We did it. It was the right thing to do. And that will mean that over a period of time revenue increases from that measure.
PETERSON: If it's good enough for mum and dad investors in Capital Gains, why isn't it good enough though for the multi-billion dollar gas giants?
PRIME MINISTER: They're very separate questions. The point is that gas giants do pay and gas giants as well have invested in some cases up to $70 billion on projects –
PETERSON: Well, let me put it another way are gas companies’ Asian customers more important than ordinary Aussies?
PRIME MINISTER: No, not at all. I tell you what, people in Western Australia, had that investment not happened, people in Western Australia wouldn't have access to the gas today that they do. That's a direct result of the investment of tens of billions of dollars that's occurred. That investment has largely been foreign investment from Chevron and Impex and these companies. And that means with the gas reservation that's there in WA that will make a difference. The other thing that we've done, and we announced the details just a couple of weeks ago after we put out a discussion paper and raised the issue at the end of last year, is a Domestic Gas Reservation on the East Coast of 20 per cent of exports. That's something that is in the interests of Australians, just like the reservation in Western Australia has been in the interests of Western Australians, thanks to, I think it was the Carpenter Government, I might be wrong there, that introduced it through the State Government some years ago.
PETERSON: Part of the extra funds you raised through these reforms are going to go to that $250 tax break for more than 13 million workers from July 28. Now, plenty of people will say that's nice, but it's probably not going to buy you an extra cup of coffee per week, Prime Minister, doesn't it make more sense to use that money to pay down some debt?
PRIME MINISTER: What we've got in this Budget is $64 billion of savings. We have banked every single dollar of additional upgraded revenue in this Budget like we did in the last economic statement in December in MYEFO. That's the first time that any government since Federation has banked every dollar of revenue upgrades for two economic statements in a row. And that makes a substantial difference. Now, we have five lots of tax cuts. We had the first one, the changes to Stage Three that we made. We have a tax cut that comes in in July 1 this year, another tax cut next July. Then we have the thousand dollar automatic reduction and in addition to that we have our Working Australian Tax Offset that we announced last night together that amounts to $2,800 for an average worker. That's a substantial tax cut through five separate measures that we have put in place will always look towards people earning more and keeping more of what they earn. And importantly, it's connected with the revenue measures that we announced last night so that every single dollar we're giving back to working people to make sure that they can deal with the cost-of-living pressures that we understand are real and are there.
PETERSON: Gross government debt now forecast to hit $1.1 trillion next financial year, stay there for the duration of those forward estimates. So, if this Budget is truly about intergenerational fairness, Prime Minister, shouldn't there be more focus placed on paying that down and not leaving the debt burden though for the next generations?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, the Budget currently shows that we are now $173 billion better off. The debt is lower than we inherited. It shows already the work that we've done avoids more than $70 billion in interest costs over the decade. Gross debt as a percentage of GDP remains below what we inherited in every single year. And that makes an enormous difference. So, we have made sure we went through line by line. The Budget bottom line is better off, nearly $45 billion over the forwards, just compared with the Mid-Year Economic Forecasts that we handed down just back in December. And that's in spite of the pressure that's on the fact that we have had to halve the fuel excise, for example, and we've eliminate down to zero, of course, the Heavy Vehicle User Charge as well because of this global conflict overseas, which has put pressure on inflation, has put pressure on budgets and indeed on economies right around the world.
PETERSON: Alright, just one more before I let you go, because some of our listeners keep telling us they're feeling unfairly targeted in your Budget, particularly those who are going to be affected by the private health rebate and now they will either downgrade or give up their cover altogether. Have you pitted generations against each other?
PRIME MINISTER: No, we haven't. There's record funding for aged care in this Budget, whether it be residential, for the building and construction of new residential care facilities, or whether it be increased numbers of Home Care Packages. We're a government that values older Australians. We have turned around the pay, for example, of nurses and aged care workers, has had a difference to our Budget of over $20 billion. Because when we came to office, the Aged Care Royal Commission summarised the current the state then of aged care, as with one word, 'neglect'. We've put nurses back into nursing homes, 99 per cent of the time that's the case. We've increased wages substantially for people working in the aged care sector. The sector was on the verge of collapse before we came to office. We've addressed that, we've turned it around. There of course, is more to do.
PETERSON: Alright, but on the private health care rebates, could it not have been means tested, Prime Minister? Could it not have been kinder? Because not all of the over 65s are financially secure.
PRIME MINISTER: No, let's be clear. What we've done is to change it so that it's the same for if you're 64 or 65. That's what we've done here and that makes sense for that to occur.
PETERSON: Prime Minister, thanks for your time.
PRIME MINISTER: Thanks very much, Ollie.