FITZY:
It is our Treasurer, Scotty Morrison!
WIPPA:
Scotty!
TREASURER:
Hey boys.
WIPPA:
Welcome to the show mate, it must be a relief to get this thing out! You’ve worked so hard on it, then you wake up this morning and there you are on the front page of the Daily Tele, dressed in white with fairies on your shoulder.
TREASURER:
Well, it sounds like a dream I must have had, you know, 10 years ago or something, coming back to revisit me. They got pretty excited down there at the art department of the Daily Telegraph last night, but not for the first time I suspect.
WIPPA:
It was, to be fair, a pretty conservative Budget.
TREASURER:
Well the Budget last night, it really tries to do one important thing, and that’s to reassure Australians about the services they rely on: Medicare, schools funding, hospitals, but also for disabled Australians, guys. I mean, we all know someone who’s afflicted by a disability, or carers who are looking after them, family members, friends, mates that we know, and Australians look after their mates. That’s what the National Disability Insurance Scheme is all about, and that’s why in two years’ time, when the real bills start coming in for this, that’s where we need to pay for it. There’s a big gap and we’ve got to be able to keep our promise to those Australians with disabilities that we can look after them, and that’s what this is. I think Australians have got a big heart for them.
FITZY:
Geez, you had a crack at a couple, you had a crack at ‘dole bludgers’ who are blazed. The other big one, you poked the bear with banks, you had a crack at the banks. And look, Scotty, we don’t mind that, but we’re a little bit worried now that they’re going to ramp up their fees for us.
TREASURER:
Well if they were doing that, they’d be lying to their customers and my advice would be, if your bank uses this as an excuse to change their prices, well you know who isn’t getting hit by it? Well it’s the regional banks, places like Bendigo Bank, Bank of Queensland, IMB, all of those, they don’t have this levied on them. It’s just on the big banks, and it’s 0.06 of a per cent. So it’s $1.5 billion a year and they’re making profits every year of $30 billion plus. So the ACCC, our competition regulator, will be keeping a close eye on them and if they go and change their prices on this, that will just be an excuse they’re using and I think customers have every right to look at them and say, ‘You’re not being fair dinkum with us’, and they’d just be reinforcing, I think, the negative perceptions that many Australians have about them.
FITZY:
Scotty, Scotty, can I ask you a personal question?
TREASURER:
With trepidation, I say yes.
FITZY:
Do you have a budget at home? What’s the pocket money that you get from Jenny every week?
TREASURER:
Mate, I tend to look after, I wash my own face and my expenses when I’m moving around! Yeah, Jen looks after things at home and my two beautiful girls, and another thing we did in the Budget was to make sure that future taxpayers aren’t going to get hit by what we’re doing tonight. I mean, we all know that you don’t put on your credit card, or you try not to, your everyday expenses and the Government can’t do that either, and just a year from now we won’t have to borrow money to pay for everyday expenses like our schools or our welfare payments and things like that, and that’s because we’re keeping expenditure under control and that’s really important for our kids.
WIPPA:
Yeah Scotty, I mean there’s a lot of official stuff we could go through, it’s all documented and…
TREASURER:
I know you’ve been reading it cover to cover, boys.
FITZY:
No, no, no.
TREASURER:
We’ll talk offline later and…
WIPPA:
There’s more important stuff we’ve got to talk about, Scotty, and it’s got nothing to do with the Budget.
FITZY:
We want to know where you’re at. Last time we spoke to you, this is what you had to say.
[excerpt]
TREASURER:
I’m the number one fan of the Tina Arena fan club. I’ve got to her last two concerts both in Melbourne and Sydney…
WIPPA:
Yeah.
FITZY:
Well, you’ve just locked yourself in for ‘Chains’ the next time you’re on the show, Scotty…
WIPPA:
I would strangle a dolphin to see you do a version of it! I’m still prepared to strangle a dolphin, Scotty!
FITZY:
Do you know what? We’ve got some good contacts. I mean would you be prepared to do Chains with Tina Arena herself?
TREASURER:
I met Tina for the first time at her concert in Sydney, Jenny and I got to meet her, and I was just a bit of a starry-eyed fan and she’s such a classy lady. We were down here last night and I gave someone a Tina Arena CD and I thought the appropriate one to give them was the ‘Reset’
CD from a few years ago which is one of my favourites because the Budget is resetting on a lot of things, and I gave that to Helliar actually who was here who was down here, and I thought that was an appropriate gift to so he could sing his way through the Budget lockup.
WIPPA:
Mate, well you know, you love her, she loves the Budget why wouldn’t weave the two together and we could get one of the great duets of all time?
TREASURER:
Mate, look if you can broker it, boys, if you can broker it.
WIPPA:
Alright, “Budget Chains”.
FITZY:
Well you’re out of chains now that the Budget has been announced. We’ll make that happen, Scotty, but well done last night and thank you very much for coming on the show.
TREASURER:
Always a pleasure, guys, all the best.