CHRIS KENNY:
Thanks for joining us, Michael.
MINISTER SUKKAR:
Good to be with you, Chris.
KENNY:
First up, I’ve got to ask about the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg. He had that horrible coughing fit delivering his statement today. After Question Time, he got medical advice, he has been set off into isolation and to have a coronavirus test – we’ll know the results tomorrow. What’s your advice on how he’s feeling and what do you think the chances are that he could have been infected?
SUKKAR:
Well, look I’m not a medico, Chris, but as the Treasurer has said out of an abundance of caution, he has got a test after he had a bad cough and a bit of a dry throat in the House. I have been working pretty closely with Josh over the last couple of months and there’s no one that has worked harder to try and steward this economy through this extraordinary difficult time. I’ve seen up close just the sort of days that Josh has been putting in, the commitment, the dedication – physical and mental – that he has been putting into the job in very, very long days. So, again I don’t have any medical background, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Josh is just a bit run down given how extraordinarily hard, he has worked for the Australian people over these last couple of months.
KENNY:
Well I know he wasn’t feeling well and obviously he wanted to press on and deliver that statement. Why was the statement so important?
SUKKAR:
Well we thought it was important – and the Treasurer very important – to outline to the Australian people where we’ve come, where we are now and the sort of philosophies that will guide the path out of this terribly difficult time. So whether it was levelling with the Australian people about the fact that unemployment in the June quarter we are expecting to double to ten per cent, whether it is that we expect that GDP will reduce by ten per cent, whether it was the increase to the budget deficit in the March quarter to about $22 billion, approximately $10 billion higher than what was expected, some of these markers just to level with the Australian people about where we find ourselves now. But more importantly, the fact that we have been able to get on top of the health issues, I think remarkably quickly and effectively, without being complacent mind you, but the fact that we have been able to get through that should give us great cause for optimism with obviously the other supports we have put in place, whether it’s the JobKeeper payment, JobSeeker, cash flow for small businesses, direct support for households. We’ve cushioned the blow, but there will be another side and we’re, I think, in almost as good a position as any other country around the world to take advantage of what will be inevitable opportunities on the other side of this extraordinarily difficult time for the global economy, let alone the Australian economy.
KENNY:
But isn’t Labor’s criticism fair enough when they say if you’re levelling with the Australian public, give us your best estimate now of what the deficit will be for this financial year. Tell us now, where you believe public net debt is going to peak, where unemployment will peak?
SUKKAR:
Well Chris, we won’t make the mistakes of Labor. I mean we’ve seen the Shadow Treasurer, who was Wayne Swan’s top advisor when he was Treasurer and the Labor Party could never get any estimate right, any forecast right, they were hopelessly wrong. They projected four surpluses…interrupted.
KENNY:
Hang on a second, you predicted a surplus this year. Today was the day when you were supposed to be delivering a surplus.
SUKKAR:
But let me finish, Chris…interrupted.
KENNY:
We have been hit by this pandemic and everyone understands that, but the question is whether or not you should give the public, today, the best estimates you have today from Treasury?
SUKKAR:
Well if you let me finish my answer, Chris, I was going to say that if you compare what we are in now, even compared to then, can you imagine six weeks effectively, six weeks into this extraordinary pandemic with a long way ahead of us, a long run way ahead of this pandemic, the unreliability of those sorts of forecasts? So, we’ve levelled with the Australian people as to where we’re at and where we think we’re going but, Chris, honestly there’s no point at this time in what is an extraordinarily unprecedented circumstance, to be trying to provide those sorts of hard and fast figures. The Treasurer did outline where we’d expect business investment or dwelling investment or household consumption to go, they’re, we think, fairly robust figures but we are not going to throw figures out, there like Labor did, that were plucked out of thin air. We will give prudent forecasts of where we think the economy is going. That’s what we’ve done to date, and that’s what we will do in the future and, Chris, I don’t think anyone would mark us down, quite frankly, for not predicting the coronavirus and the impact it’s had on the economy and the resulting impact it has had on the budget.
KENNY:
I’m asking you only about best estimates now and on that, given how well the country has suppressed the coronavirus pandemic, given we are ahead of where we hoped to be in terms of starting to reopen the economy, do you think you’ll be able to pare-back much of that budgeted spending? For instance, the $130 billion dollars budgeted for JobKeeper, could you be pulling back tens of billions of that by getting people back to work sooner?
SUKKAR:
Well no, we’ve put in place demand-driven programmes. So, the JobKeeper programme is a demand-driven programme. There was, again a Treasury estimate, that we expected about six million employees to access the scheme, I think that we’re at close to 5.6 million people thus far and that is still growing. These are estimates but, in the end, it’s a demand driven scheme, it’s there to meet the demands of the economy at the time. Now look, of course, Chris, with any government payment, we hope that the economy rebounds as quickly as possible but I think that we’ve got to be realistic about it. We’ve put the JobKeeper programme in place for six months with a three-month review, I think our expectation is that that’s going to be required for that entire time. All of the payments that we’ve put in place are short-term in nature, partly, Chris, because we can’t go on spending $20 billion a month, for example, on the JobKeeper scheme in perpetuity. But secondly, we want to make sure that the support is there, whether it’s support for households, support for small businesses, support for employees, support for people who can’t get access to JobKeeper with the JobSeeker payment, that it’s there for them when they need it but that the budget bounces back as the economy bounces back and that we don’t make the mistakes that Labor made, which was to bake-in long-term expenditure to deal with a short-term crisis.
KENNY:
Just on parliamentary sittings, you’ve got another couple of days there this week. Will you be detailing a sitting calendar beyond that so that Parliament returns as normal in say, late July or August?
SUKKAR:
Well I think the leader of the House, Christian Porter, outlined today in the House, that he expects to put forward a proposed parliamentary schedule but there’s nothing normal about this and I think that if you look at the Federal Parliament, we have met as often, if not more than some of the State Parliaments. But again, Labor always try and make this about themselves. Christian Porter, the leader of the House, the Government, we will have announcements on this. This is a pretty unprecedented time in every single way including on the times that we sit and the way that we sit but Labor trying to always make it about themselves, I think, is fairly unedifying. We are focussed on the Australian people, on households, on small businesses, on people who are worried about and thinking about whether they will have a job at the end of this and what their job looks like at the end of this. That’s our focus and as I said, I think that we have done the best that we possibly can to facilitate unusual parliamentary sittings and I think that you can compare how often and how regularly the Federal Parliament has met in comparison to every other jurisdiction around the country.
KENNY:
Michael Sukkar, thanks so much for joining us.
SUKKAR:
Good on you, Chris. Thanks.