DAVID KOCH:
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg joins us now from Canberra. Treasurer, a big spending Budget, and the biggest recipients include aged care, infrastructure and the disability sector. You’re also extending the tax offset, increasing the childcare subsidy. You’re funding women’s safety and economic security, money to mental health, national security funding. The list goes on. Will all of this be enough to speed up the economy?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, it’s all going to be very important to secure our economic recovery because, Kochie, we’re still in the middle of the pandemic. You know that Europe has gone into a double-dip recession. We’ve seen more than 800,000 new COVID cases a day around the world, and only recently Western Australia went into a statewide lockdown. So our focus is on capitalising on the gains that we have made, consolidating those gains, which have seen half a million new jobs being created since the last budget in just October last year. But, again, it’s a very uncertain international environment, and we need to spend this money on infrastructure, on skills, on providing families with tax relief and supporting businesses to invest in order to see those jobs continue to be created
NATALIE BARR:
Yeah, there’s something for everyone, really, in the Budget, isn’t there? From families, to women, older Australians, new homebuyers, small business, farmers and more. So you’ve got till next May to hold the election. Does this mean, seeing as you’re trying to please everyone, that you’ll hold the election maybe September-October this year?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, Nat, this is a budget about seeing Australia through this crisis. Let’s not forget about the abyss that we were staring into last year. Treasury thought that the unemployment rate could reach as high as 15 per cent. That would be more than 2 million of our fellow Australians unemployed. As we talk this morning 5.6 per cent is our unemployment rate, and we’ve got now more people in work than before the pandemic. Australia has outperformed the rest of the world and our good fortune to date is not a result of luck; it’s Australia making its own luck. And we can’t take anything for granted, and that’s why this plan that I announced last night will help create more jobs across the economy, skills, infrastructure, tax relief.
NATALIE BARR:
I guess it’s a bit of luck, you know, in some points, because you’ve got the massive iron ore price and that’s given you a bit of a boost. So just that question again; are you more likely to have an earlier election?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, as the Prime Minister’s made clear, it’s his intention to hold the election next year. But this is a pandemic budget. This is a budget in the middle of the biggest economic crisis we’ve seen since the Great Depression. We’re not out of it yet. We’ve done very well as a country to this point, and last night’s budget was about securing that recovery.
DAVID KOCH:
It comes at a bit after cost, though. You’ve put it on the credit card. Government debt will double over the next couple of years. Interestingly, the interest bill will only rise 18 per cent, so you take the advantage of cheap money. What do you say to people that go, “Oh, we’re just putting it on the credit card for our kids to pay off in the future”?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, the best way to repair the budget, Kochie, is to repair the economy and to get more people into work, because when that happens your tax receipts go up and your welfare payments go down. And before the COVID crisis hit we’d actually achieved the first balanced budget in 11 years, and we did that by getting welfare dependency down to a 30-year low. And just as we’ve done it in the past, we’ll have to do it again. And we have seen a boost, Nat’s right, to our company tax receipts through the iron ore price being higher than we had forecast, but we’ve seen a bigger boost to the Budget bottom line from having more people in work. And that’s where our focus is, driving the unemployment rate even below 5 per cent. And the last time we saw unemployment below 5 per cent for a sustained period was between 2006 and 2008, and then you have to go back all the way to the 1970s to see that situation here in Australia.
NATALIE BARR:
But will training more people in this country get these industries like hospitality, like the building industry, get those workers? Don’t we need to somehow get people in from overseas to boost that?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, again, the borders will open when it’s safe to do so. We’ve put a priority on keeping people safe. We’ve followed the medical advice all along. We closed international borders early in the pandemic. We were criticised at the time by some, and that proved to be the right decision because Australia avoided the situation, for example, in the United Kingdom, which is also an island but saw the virus run rampant. From our perspective we are really focusing on skilling people up here in Australia, 450,000 places through the JobTrainer program, including 33,000 for those in the care workforce to provide more support for aged care and disability support. 10,000 places for those people to learn digital skills, because we know artificial intelligence, cyber crime, they’re all going to require more of a skilled workforce. And then, of course, tradies are getting a big boost with $2.7 billion for apprenticeships, 170,000 new apprentices, backing those tradies and other apprentices and the hospitality sector, as Nat referred to.
DAVID KOCH:
Okay, just quickly, this childcare initiative, it won’t start until July next year. The Prime Minister says it takes that long to get all the computers right and the systems. But, you know, you brought in JobKeeper really quickly. You made the changes for JobSeeker really quickly. Why does it take 14 or 15 months to get childcare done?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well, the first thing to say is that is the advice that we’ve had from the Department; that it will take some time to put in place those new technical systems. If we can do it earlier, we will. This is an important reform. This will support 250,000 families and save them more than $2000 a year, and we’ve really focused on those families that have more than one child in childcare where there’s no incentive for them to work that extra day.
DAVID KOCH:
Okay.
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
And this will boost the economy according to Treasury by about one and a half billion dollars a year.
DAVID KOCH:
Okay. All right. We’ll keep checking up on how those systems are going. All right, Josh Frydenberg, thanks for joining us.
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Thanks Kochie. Thanks Nat.