STEPHEN JONES:
We don’t think Australians – companies, individuals – should be giving in to ransom threats. Threats of ransom should not be met. Australians shouldn’t be playing ‑ paying blackmail money, whether they’re a business or whether they’re a household. You start giving into these scumbags once and you’re on the hook forever. Number one protection is improving our cyber security. Number two is ensuring that if the stolen data leads to fraud attempts then we need to be able to act quickly. The reason why we have ‑ are establishing an anti‑fraud anti‑scam centre inside the ACCC to ensure that if data does get out there and it is leading to scams and frauds and threats of scams and frauds that the Australian Government and Australian business are able to respond quickly and ensure that we lock down those accounts and we are warning customers to ensure a data theft does not lead to money theft and broken lives. Happy to take questions.
JOURNALIST:
We saw comments by Treasury yesterday in terms of the gas markets sort of saying, yes, the government should intervene. It’s only a few days before Christmas. When are you going to make a decision? What are you going to do?
JONES:
Intense deliberations at the moment over the various policy options. What Steven Kennedy, the Secretary of Treasury, confirmed yesterday is that the gas market is broken. The war in Ukraine has changed everything. This is not a normal market and therefore things that would normally not be on the table are on the table. What we’re keen to ensure is that anything we do in the short term is not going to be something that we regret in the long term. So we’ve got a short‑term problem. Solutions that we are putting in place and actively considering about ensuring that manufacturing business stays open, that households can keep the lights and the fridge on over summer and that we can ensure that we get through this short‑term crisis while dealing with some of the longer term issues around the PRRT and other issues that are being thrown into the policy mix as well.
JOURNALIST:
Is this a case of tipping the scales back towards consumers as opposed to the gas company and gas exporters?
JONES:
Consumers, Australian businesses come first. Let’s be very clear. Australian consumers, Australian businesses come first. And if we can’t, with Australian gas, meet our Australian demand at a reasonable price you’ve got to ask questions about what we are doing in one of the most resource‑rich countries in the world.
JOURNALIST:
In the estimates yesterday there was sort of comments about redistributing super profits earned by these energy companies towards the poorer households. What does that exactly mean?
JONES:
Look, everything’s on the table at the moment. But we’re really adamant that we don’t want to put in place a short‑term solution that creates a longer‑term problem or expectations that what we do in the short term is going to be an ongoing government intervention. We've got a war in Ukraine which has changed everything. It has sent international energy prices through the roof. We hope that the war ends soon and we hope that international energy markets return to a level of normality soon. But until that happens we need to ensure that Australian households and businesses are protected with reasonable access – sorry, with certainty of access and reasonable prices. And prices that don’t send businesses to the wall and Australian workers out of jobs.
JOURNALIST:
How much would a super profits tax or upping the PRRT help the budget bottom line?
JONES:
Look, we’ve got to look at this. The PRRT was a tax designed in the 1980s for 1980s circumstances when the whole push was around incentivising and accelerating exploration and development of those fossil fuel resources. We’re in a different set of situations today. We want to ensure that the long‑term design of that tax is fit for purpose for this century. And it gets to that issue that we want to ensure that what we’re doing over the short term doesn’t cruel the pitch for where we need to be over the long term. And that’s what our deliberations are about. We want to as soon as we can provide certainty to households and businesses about the nature, form, duration of the intervention. But I’m sure Australians would agree they don’t want us to jump into a knee‑jerk reaction that creates more long‑term problems than the short‑term that affects them.
JOURNALIST:
Stephen, just on that PRRT issue, is it confined to the previous government’s consultation on a technical matter of integrated projects and transfer pricing within those projects, or can it become broader than that?
JONES:
Look, I don’t think it helps the present debate or the long‑term policy design if I start speculating now about things that are going to be on or off the table in any review of the PRRT. I think it’s suffice to say when it was designed Australia was a very different place. Our energy exploration and development was a very different place to the way it is today. And a lot of those tax incentives, if I can put it that way and offsets were designed for Australia back then, but really unsuited to Australia today.
JOURNALIST:
Jim Chalmers has been saying for a while that we need to have a difficult conversation about how we pay for all the essential services that Australians want. And yesterday Treasury basically put it in blunt terms – cut spending, increase taxes.
JONES:
Well, there’s no magic source of money. We’ve got intense pressures in the budget around defence, around aged care, around the NDIS, around health care. And we’ve got two options – or three. We can say to Australians you have to pay for more of that yourself and the government is going to have to step back. That’s traditionally been the response of Coalition governments in the area of health care. But I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting that we should have a privately funded Defence Force in Australia, for example. We’re facing increasingly uncertain global circumstances. We’ve got to ensure that that actual 2 per cent of GDP, that’s a floor, not a ceiling. And we know we’re going to have to spend more on defence into the future. We have to prepare Australians for those realities by talking about it now and being honest about it now and in health care and in aged care and in the National Disability Insurance Scheme. We’re not going to repeat, essentially, what the previous government did, and that is run around saying you can have all of this and we’re just going to sprinkle magic growth dust over the budget and everything’s going to be all right. Well, if you can’t project a budget surplus over a 10‑year period then you’ve got to ask yourself, is this a cyclical deficit or is it a structural deficit? We’re just being honest. And the Treasury Secretary yesterday was just brutally honest saying, yeah, we’ve got a structural deficit. We're going to either look at – we’ve got to look at all the options that are available to us to ensure that we can say to Australians this is the plan to bring the budget back into surplus. Thanks so much, everyone.