BENSON:
David Bradbury, the Government announced cuts to the Defence budget for the next four years of $4 or $5 billion. The Defence budget per annum is around $26 billion. That sounds like quite a lot of fat - a billion dollars a year.
BRADBURY:
Well, look, Marius as the Prime Minister made clear yesterday, Defence will be making an important contribution to the Government's fiscal objectives and I think it's important to acknowledge, and this will become clear to people as the Budget is handed down, we will be expecting all areas of Government expenditure to be making some contribution to the commitment to return the Budget to surplus. I think that's appropriate and that it's important that any efforts, the burden of those efforts, be shared more generally across Government expenditure.
BENSON:
In addition to the Defence cuts announced yesterday there are also some welfare cuts outlined in the newspapers this morning. One of those is that single unemployed parents, at the moment they get benefits, these jobless single parents, until the child is 16. That's going to be cut back to eight years, that's a saving of around $700 million a year.
BRADBURY:
Marius, I'm not going to go into any of the details of what may or may not be announced in the Budget next week.
BENSON:
But those details have already been given by the Government to newspapers this morning.
BRADBURY:
Well I've seen some reports, but what I can say Marius is that, and I'll address this with, I guess, some high level comments, and that is to say that the Government's perspective on this, I think, has been reasonably consistent and that is that we believe in the importance and dignity of work for all Australians.
I think that it is especially the case at a time when we have relative low unemployment and certainly, compared to the rest of the world, with a five in front of our unemployment rate we have relatively low unemployment. We also believe that it's important that Government assistance be assistance rather than become payments that people become permanently dependent upon as well. I think you'll find that when the specifics of what's handed down in the Budget are released you will see that we continue to make a commitment to that philosophy.
BENSON:
There's another specific Budget measure in the papers this morning, clearly from the Government which is that at the moment something like 26,000 people who are welfare beneficiaries travel overseas for more than six weeks a year - that's not the age pension, that's welfare benefits - and you're going to cut out those benefits after a six-week period for people who are essentially taking welfare holidays at the expense of the taxpayer.
BRADBURY:
This Government's always taken the view that Government assistance needs to be targeted and it needs to be well-targeted to those people that need that assistance the most. We hear Mr Hockey talk about the end of the age of entitlement but the reality is that this Government has been very much focussed on making sure that every dollar of expenditure is going to support people through family income payments and other welfare payments, supporting people that need assistance but not providing disincentives for them to get there and actually increase the amount of income that they're earning and increase their capacity to contribute to the workforce.
BENSON:
But you won't be hitting at the so-called grey nomads who are just relying on the age pension - they're okay for travel?
BRADBURY:
These are matters that will be covered in greater detail as all of those details come forward.
BENSON:
That detail is provided to the newspapers this morning from the Government.
BRADBURY:
It's recorded in a report, I acknowledge that, but I've seen that report -
BENSON:
Many reports.
BRADBURY:
- but what I would say Marius is that the effort involved in it for us in returning the Budget to surplus is a big exercise. I see already from Mr Hockey and his colleagues a determination to indicate that they will block some of these important savings measures. Can I just make this point, that for every dollar of a savings measure that is brought forward by this Government that the Opposition blocks, bearing in mind that they already have a $70 billion Budget crater, that means they will have to cut harder and deeper into other Government services, other payments, or other areas of Government expenditure, if they are to stop their fiscal alternative from becoming an absolute debacle. So we will be holding them to account, we'll be releasing all of the details of the Budget next week and obviously we will be holding them to account to actually front up and to support some of the important measures that we will be putting in place to return the Budget to surplus.
BENSON:
David Bradbury, thank you very much.
BRADBURY:
Great to talk to you Marius.