PETER STEFANOVIC:
Well, let’s send it back to Canberra now, and joining us live is the Assistant Treasurer and the Financial Services Minister, Stephen Jones. Stephen, good to see you. Thanks for your time. There’s a bit for us to get through here. We’ll start off with Medicare, the – Medibank, I should say. I always get that confused. Suspected hackers posting stolen Medibank data. What’s the government’s reaction to that this morning?
STEPHEN JONES:
They’re scumbags, they’re crooks, they’re criminals, and we shouldn’t be paying ransom. We shouldn’t be giving in these fraudsters and criminals. The moment we fold, it sends a green light to scumbags like them throughout the world that Australia is a soft target. We cannot give in. We won’t give in. All the more important that we lift our protection against cyber threats and lift our protection against scams and fraudsters. That’s why we made our announcement earlier in this week about following through on our election commitment to set up an anti‑scam centre. The best protection is ensuring that the data doesn’t get stolen in the first place. If that fails we want to ensure that consumers are protected. So establishing an anti‑scam centre inside the ACCC will provide consumers with the information and the protection they need and enable us to move quickly if some of these cyber breaches lead to frauds and theft and scams going on in our economy.
STEFANOVIC:
Are you concerned now that Australia in the eyes of hackers are easy pickings?
JONES:
It’s quite clear that over the last two to three years Australia has been seen as a target. A couple of reasons – we’re a relatively wealthy country by global standards and we’re all internet‑enabled, we all have a mobile phone, we all conduct our business online. And there’s a lot of data. And clearly we’ve got to do a much better job of protecting Australians’ data, but from an international perspective they’re looking at Australia and saying "that’s a good bet". Our objective as a government is to ensure that Australia becomes the least‑favoured nation for international fraud, data hacks and threats, which is why our policy, our whole‑of‑government policy, is so important that we get it up and running.
STEFANOVIC:
Okay, yeah, and a message for those folks at home today: if you fall victim to these individual ransoms – don’t pay up, send it to police. That’s the message, anyway. Moving on to gas, Stephen, Treasury said yesterday it backs intervention in the gas market to redistribute profits to poor households. That sounds to me like a windfall tax. Is that what you will pursue?
JONES:
There’s intense discussions and policy considerations going on. What Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy confirmed yesterday is that this isn’t a normal market and considerations that would normally be off the table are now on the table and intervention in the energy market is going to be necessary if we’re going to ensure that we maintain manufacturing in this country, jobs in this country and ensure that households are able to pay their bills. We’re committed to doing that. We want to ensure that whatever intervention we put in place – and we’re considering all of them at the moment – whatever intervention that we put in place is appropriately timed and appropriately calibrated to ensure that it does the job of bringing prices down without having downstream impacts that we’ll regret in a year or two’s time. So that’s why we’re intensely considering these options at the moment.
STEFANOVIC:
All right. There is already a windfall tax in the form of the resources rent tax. It currently taxes profits at 40 per cent. Would you support any increase in that towards the 78 per cent level that Norway has?
JONES:
Look, we’re looking at the PRRT. It was designed in a different – sorry, that is the resources rent tax for offshore petroleum and gas resources, I should say. It was designed in the 80s for a different set of circumstances. A job of work needs to be done on that. But we think that, you know, the pressure facing households and businesses and the extraordinary circumstances due to the war in Ukraine may warrant us looking at other things at the same time as we’re reviewing that tax.
STEFANOVIC:
Right. I mean, 40 per cent to 78 per cent, that’s nearly doubling it. Is that an option?
JONES:
Well, I just want to double down on the point, Pete, that we want to ensure that whatever we put in place as a solution for a short‑term crisis is something that we don’t regret in the long term.
STEFANOVIC:
Right.
JONES:
The PRRT is a tax that needs to be in place for the long‑term, and we want to ensure that that’s designed for long‑term circumstances. In the short‑term, we need some extraordinary interventions to deal with the extraordinary crisis we’re facing.
STEFANOVIC:
Okay. Just a final one here on super. There is a bit of attention around super wealthy. You want to crack down on tax concessions for folks with more than 5 million in super. I don’t know how many of those are about. Calls to bring that down to 2 million. I guess my question is here is: how much super is too much?
JONES:
Well, I think we’ve got to ensure that we put the horse first and the cart second. So we’re going to have a debate and hopefully a legislated solution to what the objective of super is. And this is a policy that’s been around for 30 years. No policy is set and forget. We need to ensure that we’re appropriately adjusting superannuation tax arrangements to meet the objective. But we can’t get all of those things right unless we have an agreed objective of super, which says this is what super’s about. From my point of view, it’s about retirement income. So any question about how much is enough has got to be based on, well, how much do we think we need and what’s a reasonable amount of headroom that we need for retirement income and how much should the budget through tax subsidies be assisting Australians to save for that purpose.
STEFANOVIC:
Okay.
JONES:
I think we’ll get to the right landing place. I don’t think we need to be spooked about it. I’ve said yesterday that super large balances of over $100 million are clearly not there for retirement income purposes and, therefore, we can be resting assured that those ones will be dealt with. But there’s a lot of difference between 2 and a hundred million dollars, and we’ll come to the right landing place over the course of this discussion.
STEFANOVIC:
Okay, Stephen Jones, appreciate it, we'll talk to you soon.