MIKE O’LOUGHLIN: Prime Minister Scott Morrison, good morning.
PRIME MINISTER: Thanks very much, Mike. Great to be with you.
O’LOUGHLIN: Now, the Morrison Government handed down its 22/23 federal Budget on Tuesday, as we know, and we spoke with Federal Finance Minister Simon Birmingham yesterday about how Tasmanians will benefit from the Budget. But according to the results of the survey conducted by Australian Community Media, more than 60 per cent of respondents declared they wanted an honest and trustworthy PM as well. Almost half, 49.2 too wanted the nation’s leader to be accountable and responsible. PM, is this you?
PRIME MINISTER: Yes, absolutely. I mean, because over the course of my time, we’ve been delivering what I said we would deliver. We’ve been cutting taxes, we’ve been supporting apprentices, we’ve been building the infrastructure, we’ve been getting people into their own homes. All of the things that we said to keep the economy strong so we can have a stronger future. That’s what we said to the people of Tasmania at the last election. And that’s what we’ve been delivering. And we’ve come through this pandemic stronger than almost any other advanced country in the world. And now we’ve got a strong plan to go forward. And with Susie Bower there in the seat of Lyons in particular, I know she’s been fighting hard for that Great Eastern Drive project, $100 million to support a Great Eastern Drive, which would be like the Great Ocean Road up there in Victoria. And with those investments halving fuel taxes to give people real cost of living relief. I know Pete Gutwein was raising this and I commend, I’m always listening and we’ve been listening hard to Australian families and businesses who are really struggling with those cost of living pressures. And because the Budget has turned around by over $100 billion and that comes from driving a strong economy, making the right financial decisions, Australians working hard. That means we can do that responsibly. It’s targeted and it’s helping people get through a difficult time as they’re getting to their feet after we come out strongly from this pandemic.
O’LOUGHLIN: Now PM, a lot of your Budget sales pitch certainly would have to be derailed by the scathing speech from Concetta Fierravanti-Wells in the Senate, where she labelled you unfit to be a PM, a bully with no moral compass, an autocrat. It’s pretty damning stuff. And of course, as we know, that’s just not not all of it.
PRIME MINISTER: Well, and it’s not true. And look, I really appreciate you know what John Howard had to say overnight and what Senator Hughes has had to say. And many of my colleagues look, you know, from time to time in politics, you have disagreements and there are disappointments. Connie went to a pre-selection, 500 members of the Liberal Party. I wasn’t one of them. They made a judgement about who should represent us going forward. And Senator Molan was selected. And of course, Senator Payne was selected, our Foreign Minister. So there are disappointments in politics from time to time. So I understand that. But, you know, I appreciate that very strong and kind, those strong, kind words from John. He has been a great mentor to me. He knows what this job is like. He knows that you’ve got to take decisions all the time. And you know, from time to time, people won’t like the decisions that you make. But as a Prime Minister, you’ve got to be prepared to make them.
O’LOUGHLIN: Trust in politics and integrity is at the heart of an unfulfilled 2019 Morrison Government election promise, you might remember, a Commonwealth Integrity Commission. You pledged to legislate a federal anti-corruption watchdog. When’s it going to happen, PM? Is a federal ICAC on your list of priorities?
PRIME MINISTER: Yeah, and we developed the legislation. I tabled it in the parliament. It was a comprehensive programme that was well worked up, and the Labor Party wouldn’t support it. So that’s where we are.
O’LOUGHLIN: Let’s look at Defence. I mean, three years ago, it was unthinkable that China would impose trade boycotts on Australia. Three years ago, it was unthinkable that Australia would be organising to get nuclear powered submarines. Three years ago, it was unthinkable that the Australian PM would threaten to impose trade boycotts on China. Well, how things changed in the blink of a war. There’s a quote I want to share with you. I like this quote from a US foreign policy scholar, “security is like oxygen. You tend not to notice it until you begin to lose it. But once that occurs, there’s nothing else that you will think about”. Is this Defence spending better late than never?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, it’s not late, and it’s certainly not never. And we have been building up our defence forces since we first came into government and when we came to government, our defence spending as a share of the economy, Labor had taken down to 1.56 per cent. That was the lowest level since 1938, before the Second World War. Now you don’t, you can’t just get your defence spending up to two per cent, which is what we’ve done and pledged to do, overnight. So we’ve been doing it year in, year out for all of these budgets and we’re continuing to go forward. We’ve got another 18,500 who will join our defence forces. That’s already begun now and that’s in this year’s Budget. On top of that, we’re building up the capability over a quarter of a billion invested going forward on capability. So no government has been more committed to defence spending and what that has meant, and that has required some hard calls, because you know where programmes aren’t going in the direction or things change and that particularly occurred with submarines, and that was one of the hardest calls we had to make as a government because the submarines that were being built, they were not going to do the job we needed them to do for the next 20, 30 years …
O’LOUGHLIN: And we were never going to get them.
PRIME MINISTER: And they’re very difficult things to build. So what I did is I said, look, we need a better plan. We need a stronger plan. And we were able to secure the technology for nuclear powered submarines that no other country in the world is able to secure from the United States other than the British. And that happened in 1958. And I’m not the first Prime Minister that was out there seeking to achieve that. But I was the first one to get it done. And then the AUKUS arrangement with the United States and the United Kingdom then enveloped around that. That’s the biggest defence partnership agreement we have had since ANZUS 70 years ago.
So, you know, if we kept spending at the same level on Defence that Labor left us, then $55 billion would have been spent less on defence while we’ve been government and $10 billion less in this year alone. Can I just say, can I thank that great tech company, Elphinstone. They’re very involved in all of this. I was down there with the team the other day and seeing what they’re doing and how they’ve, you know, refit up and up in Burnie there, what they’re doing to be part of our defence industry. So part of that Defence support is being home made in Tasmania. And of course, one of my favourite defence contractors anywhere in the country are Penguin Composites. You know, a little company there up in Penguin, you know, they’re putting the bonnets on armoured vehicles, they used to make kayaks. Now they’re got cutting edge technology on composites to put the bonnets on our armoured vehicle.
O’LOUGHLIN: You’re certainly, you’re certainly doing your homework. How worried should we be about China and the Solomons?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, these are very, very serious issues, and they have changed a lot in just the last five years. We were talking about John Howard before, and John and I talk about this a lot. I mean, he was dealing with a very different China to the China that we’re dealing with today and the China we’re dealing with today to be honest, they’ve been coercing, they’ve been bullying, they’ve been intimidating in our region. And I’ve been prepared to stand up to them, and I have a lot of critics for doing that. I remember what I was doing it long before people understood the real, what was the risks were to Australia. This is why we stepped up. Our investment in the Pacific when I became Prime Minister was called the Pacific Step Up. More than $2 billion a year. We are investing in our relationship with our partners in the Pacific, including in Solomon Islands. And as a result, when the Solomon Islands were having their security problems before Christmas, first place they called: Australia. I sent our defence forces in, our federal police and our federal police are still there. So you can’t take this stuff too seriously. It is very serious. And if you don’t have a strong economy, you can’t defend the nation either. If you can’t manage money. I mean, this was my eighth budget. My first one I did as a member of the Expenditure Review Committee. I then did three as a Treasurer, and this is my fourth as a Prime Minister. And on Thursday night or tonight, Anthony Albanese has to give us his alternative budget. And, you know, I haven’t seen his plan. Australians haven’t seen his plan. You’ve got my plan. People know my plan. They know I’m not pretending to be anyone else.
O’LOUGHLIN: You’ve actually …
PRIME MINISTER: Whether people like me, that’s not the point …
O’LOUGHLIN: Speaking of actually …
PRIME MINISTER: It’s whether you can do the job.
O’LOUGHLIN: If I can PM, you actually said Labor thinks it can just sail into government that quote. What what do you mean by that?
PRIME MINISTER: What I meant by that is we’re very close to election and what do we know what their policies are? We don’t know anything. They say they’re going to do a Budget after the election. Well, they should tell us what’s going to be in it before the election. And if you don’t hear it from him tonight, well, frankly, it’s too late. I mean, he’s if he thinks he can just slide into government without having had any accountability. You were talking about the importance of accountability and trust.
O’LOUGHLIN: Absolutely.
PRIME MINISTER: And what are his policies? What’s his plan for the economy? The guy’s never done a Budget, and he was in government for six years. He’s been in the Parliament a long time, but what do we know of him?
O’LOUGHLIN: Can I ask, can I ask a question then? Because, it would be lovely to have Tasmania, you know, that little state down below, get an exclusive. How about telling me when the election is going to be. May 14?
PRIME MINISTER: It’ll be in the middle of May, which, you know, I’ve always been pretty upfront about this. I said …
O’LOUGHLIN: Well, how about being really upfront and letting me know a date.
PRIME MINISTER: When I go to see the Governor-General, everybody will know what that date is and it’s not too far away. But you know, I’ve always been upfront saying you get elected to do a three year term and the election last time was on the 18th of May. So we’re getting close to that three year period now. We’ve had three years to strengthen our economy, which we’ve done. You know, unemployment has fallen from 5.7 per cent to 4.4 per cent now. When Labor was last in government, it went from 4.2 per cent to 5.7 per cent. And I said this in the Parliament yesterday, and Anthony Albanese chipped across the table, “oh, yeah, but we had the global financial crisis.” And I said, well, where have you been for the last two years, mate? We’ve had the biggest global recession that anyone’s had to face since the Great Depression, and we got unemployment to come down. You know, Labor’s always got excuses when it comes to the economy. When they say, oh, we were terribly unlucky, that’s why it all went so bad. Well, if you want to get unlucky, vote Labor.
O’LOUGHLIN: Well, you’re talking, you know, two years, you’re talking obviously, you’re throwing to COVID. Let’s talk health. Reportedly record investment here, what is the $7.3 billion increase in Medicare funding, $9.8 billion increase in hospital funding. But the Australian Medical Association has said this “it amounts to a little more than usual recurrent spending and planned growth, not the new injection of funds our health system desperately needs.” I mean, what’s your plan for health? This is the important issue for Tasmanians, especially considering our ageing population.
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I agree. And that’s why under our government, we’ve increased health funding by 60 per cent, 60 per cent over the course of the pandemic, right across the country and in Tasmania, especially. And we’ve invested over $40 billion bringing Australia through. Telehealth for mental health, mental health in particular, and we’ve extended our Head to Health centres and the and the particularly the the that the support for early youth psychosis and all of these issues into Tasmania expanding what was available in the mainline, particularly in the northern parts of Tasmania. And that’s something Pat McGorry and I have been working on for some time. So those health supports the things that the federal government particularly focuses on supporting GPs. The other one, cystic fibrosis, Trikafta we’ve just put on the PBS. I remember the last time before the last election I met a lovely young fella down there, up in Launny, and he was being supported then by the drugs that were supporting cystic fibrosis, [inaudible], I think it was called from memory. And so we’ve just listed another drug. Trifakta. Now what that does, if you’ve got cystic fibrosis, I met a young fellow up in Sydney, the other day. It means I can get on their bike and they can ride it with their friends and not get shortness of breath.
O’LOUGHLIN: Can I just …
PRIME MINISTER: These are the important things. Drugs, Medicare support, bulk billing is its highest level we’ve ever seen as a government and and so you know on when it comes to health record levels of investment in health that again is produced by a strong economy.
O’LOUGHLIN: Kind of getting the wind up at the moment, I’ve got a bit to get through.
PRIME MINISTER: Sure, you’re right.
O’LOUGHLIN: I’ll try and hurry. I need to get this through. I know President of the Tasmanian branch of the Pharmacy Guild of Tasmania, Helen O’Byrne, said quote “the inclusions amounted to a drop in the ocean in regard to the number of pharmaceutical benefits scheme announced in the Budget.” But I want to ask a question about …
PRIME MINISTER: Well, can I address that because that’s just simply unfair.
O’LOUGHLIN: Right.
PRIME MINISTER: This Government, my Government, we have listed 2,800 and more, new medicines and new listings on the PBS. And Greg Hunt has been an outstanding Health Minister. We gave a commitment that every single time the recommendation is made from the Expert Medical Panel on medicines to list something, we listed, and we’ve done that every single time. So everything- the Labor Party didn’t do that when they were in government. I remember their Budgets. They said, oh, we’d like to list this. It’s been recommended, but we can’t do it. You know why they couldn’t do it? Because they couldn’t pay for it. They couldn’t manage the economy. So, you know, you’ve got to ask yourself the question when you go to this election, who do you think can pay for the things that they’re saying they’re going to do? We’ve demonstrated we can as we know how to run a strong economy. Labor doesn’t.
O’LOUGHLIN: Got time for one more question.
PRIME MINISTER: Go for it.
O’LOUGHLIN: You’re copping a bit of flak for your comments about the lack of relief for renters in the federal budget, saying the best way to help struggling renters is to help them buy a house …
PRIME MINISTER: I didn’t say that, actually. I was asked about these issues. I talked about how we’re helping people buy their own home. We’ve got $5 billion a year we spend on supporting renters, cutting the fuel excise in half, the tax on petrol and half that supports renters, increasing the tax rebates that people are getting on the 1st of July. That ensures that people have more money in their pocket. $250 payment in this Budget immediately for pensioners and others to help them deal with rising costs of living, which includes rent, that helps renters. And for those who are looking to buy their home, we’ve got 300,000 people into their first home. That’s what I promised to do at the last election, I said we were going to help more people buy their own home. So I know how hard it is to buy a home, whether it’s in Tasmania or in Sydney or Melbourne or Perth or anywhere else. It’s really, really hard. But we have to help those who want to make that change to be able to do that. But for those who will rent, my grandparents rented their entire life, their entire lives, so I know what that’s about. I know what that’s about, and we provide lots of income support in other areas and the state government, of course, they’re the ones who run social housing and public housing in Tasmania, and we provide over $1 billion a year every year to the states to support that.
O’LOUGHLIN: Well I’m getting the wind up.
PRIME MINISTER: Yeah, we’re going to have to go.
O’LOUGHLIN: And look, I appreciate the extra time. Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Thank you very much for your time.
PRIME MINISTER: Okay, thanks a lot. Good to talk to you.
