BEN FORDHAM:
Good morning, Treasurer.
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Good morning, Ben, but my family is in lockdown in Melbourne, unfortunately. The kids are not at school. My wife is working from home, and they’re going through the experience that 6 million plus Victorians are right now.
BEN FORDHAM:
This is day three of the third lockdown. I get a sense that people are losing patience in Melbourne.
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Very challenging. Challenging for families. Challenging for businesses. I was just speaking to a restaurateur yesterday in Melbourne. He lost $50,000 in food that he had to throw out. He had 120 dozen oysters that he couldn’t donate. He had tens of thousands of bills run up with staff who’d been working all week preparing the food. Because it was a big weekend in Melbourne – you had the tennis, you had Valentine’s Day, you had Chinese New Year. Those restaurants were expecting bumper bookings and a bumper trade, which didn’t eventuate because of the lockdown.
BEN FORDHAM:
I’ve spoken to officials in Health in New South Wales over the weekend who are saying on background and I won’t quote anyone directly – that it was an overreaction to go back into lockdown in Melbourne.
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, there is a more infectious strain of the virus and you do need to get on top of these clusters early. You also need a proportional response. If you ask me who’s got the gold standard, it’s Gladys Berejiklian in New South Wales. Because you’ve had clusters, whether it’s the Northern Beaches or elsewhere but you haven’t had a state-wide lockdown that we’ve seen in other parts of the country. I think Gladys and her team and particularly those medical experts in New South Wales deserve our thanks.
BEN FORDHAM:
Well said. We’re joined by the Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg from Parliament House, Canberra. We’ve got 2 million people now off welfare and back to work. They came off JobKeeper. We’ve still got about one and a half million on JobKeeper. Are you going to pull out the rug completely at the end of March?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
JobKeeper needs to end in March. That is our intention. We’d originally legislated it for six months. We extended it for another six months. As you know, every dollar that we spend Ben, on this program is a borrowed dollar. It’s estimated to cost around $90 billion, and that is the single largest economic support program Australia has ever undertaken. Treasury did a review of JobKeeper last year and they found that if you leave it in place when the economy recovers, it actually has a number of adverse incentives. It makes people’s movement to other jobs much more difficult, and it might be propping up businesses that are not sustainable in the long term. So it needs to end. Today’s numbers are very encouraging, as you say, more than 2 million people and over 500,000 businesses have graduated off the program. We’ve seen more than 220,000 people come off in the retail sector. We’ve seen more than 200,000 in the construction sector. These are positive numbers, and it is a sign that our labour market across the country is strengthening.
BEN FORDHAM:
Okay. A few other things to get through. JobSeeker, it can’t snap back to $40 a day, can it?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, we’ll make an announcement and decision about that future rate of JobSeeker ahead of the change at the end of March. We had put JobSeeker at an elevated rate right through this pandemic, effectively doubling it. It then started to reduce over time. That elevated rate ends in March, and before then we will make an announcement.
BEN FORDHAM:
Okay. I can tell you, people in Sydney can’t live off $40 a day. Bank branches, the ANZ has closed 91 bank branches last year, another 18 are closing in 2021, and we know that they’re not alone because the Commonwealth Bank has shut 19 branches nationwide in the last year, Westpac 10, NAB 9. I know a lot of our banking has moved online, but do you recognise that a lot of Australians still like to use face-to-face banking when it comes to major transactions?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, certainly they do. But I think you put your finger on it when you said that people are moving online when it comes to banking. There is a big transition occurring in that sector, just like online retail sales have gone through the roof, particularly through the pandemic. So there needs to be a structural adjustment, but as far as the banks are concerned, their focus needs obviously to be on protecting their employees but also ensuring that the services are available to their customers. That should be their focus, and that’s my focus.
BEN FORDHAM:
Treasurer, there’s data from the Electoral Commission showing up to $50 million in political donations were made anonymously last financial year. This is all within the rules – you can donate up to $14,000 without declaring your name. But $50 million is a lot of money. Shouldn’t we know who it’s coming from?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, again, we’ve got rules in place. I think there is…
BEN FORDHAM:
Shouldn’t they be tightened?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well those rules have helped build that transparency in the system. You know who the big donors are to the political parties. I can tell you, the biggest donor to the Labor Party is the union movement. They clip the ticket of their members every time an election comes around, very hard for the Coalition to compete against that. Gone are the days where big business was supporting the Coalition and unions were supporting Labor. Big business now stays out of it, and it’s a very different thing when it comes to fundraising. We find it very hard to compete against the big unions and what they support and how they support Labor.
BEN FORDHAM:
You mentioned your family is still in Melbourne, so they’re in lockdown, you’re in Canberra.
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
That’s right.
BEN FORDHAM:
How were you able to recognise your wife, Amie, on Valentine’s Day?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
With a phone call. She sent me a very clear message – don’t overdo it from afar. You know, she wants the presence…
BEN FORDHAM:
But there’s a difference between overdoing it and underdoing it. You gave her a phone call?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, hang on. She wants the presence with the “c”, not the “t”. You know, she wants me to be there, not to be away. But she’s been also very understanding. Look, I was supposed to be in Melbourne through the weekend and we were going to do something special on the weekend. But that’s when we got the call…
BEN FORDHAM:
Gunna, gunna, gunna.
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
“Get out, get out of Melbourne quick.” So on Friday I jumped on a commercial flight to Canberra…
BEN FORDHAM:
You know they do flower deliveries, right? You know they do flower deliveries these days?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
There are other things that impress her, and it’s not flowers.
BEN FORDHAM:
Treasurer, I’ll leave that to the imagination. Thank you for your time.
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Thanks, Ben.