PRESENTER:
Good morning Mr Hockey.
TREASURER:
Good morning Louise.
PRESENTER:
How is it credible to do a deal with the Greens after years of painstaking efforts to vilify them?
TREASURER:
We have certainly had our differences with the Labor Party as well but the Labor Party has made itself entirely irrelevant in economic policy. They have consigned themselves to the dustbin of economic history and they are making it even worse by opposing everything we are doing at the moment.
PRESENTER:
Why wouldn't you then label this as a Coalition-Greens Government as you referred to a Labor-Green Government?
TREASURER:
We are not married to the Greens. The Labor Party formed a coalition with the Greens. The reaction of the Labor Party is absolutely bizarre. It’s like a husband being upset that their ex-wife went off and had a cup of coffee with some other man. It's bizarre behaviour from Labor. They don't want to participate in the economic debate. The Labor Party today is not only opposing what we took to the last election - they are opposing what they took to the last election. I will give you a good example. They want us to keep their promise on Gonski funding, school education funding. But now they are opposing the savings that they announced to fund the Gonski education proposals. Labor is not only opposing what we took to the last election, they are opposing what they took to the last election. They are just making themselves irrelevant.
PRESENTER:
Do you expect, then, that you will have trouble getting this through? That Labor will try to stall this deal?
TREASURER:
I would say to the Labor Party the only way you can claim back any form of integrity in this matter is to help with the swift passage of this legislation through the Senate and then the House of Representatives because next week we reach the limit of $300 billion. And the Labor Party left us with debt of well over $400 billion.
PRESENTER:
Do you have a personal debt ceiling in mind, a figure that you don't want to exceed and what is it?
TREASURER:
I want little debt as possible. That is my goal. But I have got to deal with what I have inherited. What I have inherited is debt well above $400 billion and when we release the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook in the next few days you will see the true state of the Budget that we have inherited from Labor.
PRESENTER:
The Coalition campaigned against debt, pledged to pay it down. When will you deliver that? When will we see debt start to go down?
TREASURER:
As soon as we can get the Budget under control. What we have been doing over the last few weeks is methodically going through every area of public expenditure and we have found a massive amount of unfunded commitments from Labor. We have found a large number of government enterprises that have been running at a loss and Labor has buried those losses. And we have found a large number of areas where the Labor Party was meant to fund ongoing maintenance of government facilities and enterprises but they never allocated the money to it.
PRESENTER:
Will we see a figure for when debt will start to come down when we see the MYEFO in coming days?
TREASURER:
You will see the total state of the Budget. You will see what peak debt really is meant to be. It will all be the legacy of Labor. We are not going to let them off the hook on this.
PRESENTER:
Will there be a year on that though?
TREASURER:
We are hoping to get to a final year on that. Of course we are.
PRESENTER:
With access to debt now freed up once this goes through and an economy that you say is stuck in second gear - do you now look to borrow for infrastructure like a Sydney second airport?
TREASURER:
We will obviously lay that all out in the Budget. But let me just go back. The debt limit was artificial. The problem was under Labor it became a debt target not a debt limit. The fact is they introduced the debt limit, in 2008 at $75 billion and they blew that. Then they said, no, we won't go above $200 billion and they blew up that.
PRESENTER:
You have made those points.
TREASURER:
They are important points. I want to make them again so that your listeners make sure. I want your listeners to understand that every time Labor set a debt limit they blew it.
PRESENTER:
How much do you expect to use?
TREASURER:
I am now in a position where I am going through the Budget. We will have peak debt revealed in the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook and we will be doing everything we can to ensure that we never hit that level. But, it relies on the Labor Party supporting the savings that we make. And the Labor Party is blocking at the moment $18 billion of savings and a further $7 billion on top of that of debt reduction. They can't have it both ways. They can't on the one hand cry about debt and then on the other hand block everything we are doing to reduce it.
PRESENTER:
In last night's speech to the Business Council, the Prime Minister said he wanted to lead a reforming Government. How does blocking the GrainCorp takeover fit with that?
TREASURER:
People need to get over this. Let's be frank. CSL – the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories - was blocked in the United States from taking over a US entity because they were concerned that it could end up in CSL - an Australian company - having a monopoly in the United States. That is the biggest market in the world. I think we need to grow up with some of the commentary. We have the maturity to be able to say no where it is in the national interest but we also overwhelmingly say yes to a vast number of foreign investments that are in our national interests. Let's not consign ourselves to the backwater of international economic behaviour and say that we can only ever say no or we can only ever say yes.
PRESENTER:
Mr Hockey, thank you for your time.
TREASURER:
Thank you.