ABC News 24
LYNDAL CURTIS:
Kevin Andrews welcome to Capital Hill.
MINISTER:
Thank you.
LYNDAL CURTIS:
Do you accept that some of the measures announced last night, making people under 30 wait for payments and those, I think, under 24 getting lower payments will be very harsh?
MINISTER:
The aim of this is to ensure that we can get people into work. There are many young people who are working part-time, I know of young people who are working a couple of part-time jobs. It’s not fair to them when they’re putting in the effort to get the training and the education and get themselves through university or tafe, or whatever, for someone to simply be lying around on the couch at home and being subsidised.
LYNDAL CURTIS:
But not everyone is what you would categorise as a dole bludger. There are those who for a range of reasons fall through the cracks, particularly those who may have not had the education opportunities who might live in rural or regional areas where it’s much tougher to find a job.
MINISTER:
And there’s a range of exemptions for people, so if you can’t work for more than 30 hours a week, for example, then you’re exempted. If you are a principal carer, a parent, then you’re exempted. If you have some incapacity that puts you into strings three and four, then you’d be exempted. If you’re a disability support client then you’re exempted. So essentially what we’re trying to do is to say for those people who are capable of working, young people, then if you’re not working then you should be in training and…
LYNDAL CURTIS:
But can you guarantee that for those, particularly in rural and regional areas, that those opportunities to learn will be there?
MINISTER:
Well there’s Youth Allowance available for them, there’s changes…
LYNDAL CURTIS:
That provides a payment it doesn’t necessarily provide you with a….
MINISTER:
There are also the new arrangements in the Budget where you can effectively be supported like university students were if you’re doing a tafe course as well. So we’re assisting those people, but we’re not being apologetic in saying that if you’re young, if you’re capable of working you should be working, or if you’re not working then you should be training so that you can get a job in the future.
LYNDAL CURTIS:
You are asking some to take a lower benefit, moving them from Newstart to Youth Allowance, at the same time you’re asking them to pay more for petrol and pay more for the doctor?
MINISTER:
Well the petrol increase is probably about 40 cents I think in a tank of petrol…
LYNDAL CURTIS:
That’s in the first year, it does grow.
MINISTER:
We’re in a low inflationary environment at the present time, so it’s not a big impost. But let’s put this in the context, the context is that we continue the way we’re going we could end up with $670 billion worth of debt, which would be about $25,000 for every man, woman and child in Australia, or we can start to cautiously I think in this budget do something about it and make some structural changes.
LYNDAL CURTIS:
You say start to, there are more changes to offer ahead aren’t there?
MINISTER:
We have a welfare review underway at the present time and what that is aimed at is looking at the structure of welfare. The reality is if you drew a diagram of the welfare system in Australia it would look like a birds nest. There are about 50 payments, allowances and supplements; they all interact in different ways because of the ad hoc way this system has been built. Now what we’ve asked Patrick McClure and others to do is can we simplify that, could we for example have a structure with just four or five payments…
LYNDAL CURTIS:
Does simply mean cuts as well, are you looking for savings?
MINISTER:
No, this is about; well if you simplified the program it would actually be much less expensive to run. At the moment this is a hugely costly program just to run and process because people don’t necessarily know where they fit or what they get, if you make one change it has effects on other changes. So could we just have a system built on say four or five pillars around payments for age or ageing, a payment for disability, a payment for children and a payment in relation to work and education. If we could do that it would be much simpler.
LYNDAL CURTIS:
Are you happy with families, particularly those with stay at home mothers getting their payments squeezed and cut when the children turn six because life doesn’t necessarily get any easier when your children are at school and there are a limited number of jobs aren’t there that allow you only to work between 9-3.
MINISTER:
This is a balance and the context of this Budget is we’re on the cusp of the most significant demographic shift in Australia’s history since the end of the Second World War. The baby boom generation are starting to move into retirement and they will do so in increasingly large numbers over the next decade. That means that we’ve got older dependants hence measures in relation to older people, but we’ve also got this very significant contraction occurring in the workforce in the working aged numbers in Australia in terms of the growth…
LYNDAL CURTIS:
So the Coalition’s previous and strong commitment and support for stay at home mothers has to be jettisoned?
MINISTER:
No it’s not being jettisoned but what we’re saying is Australia needs two things in the future, we need children and that’s very important, but we also need workers. So how do we get the balance right between these two things and what we’ve decided in this Budget is to say we will give support for stay at home mothers until the child essentially, the youngest child is going to school, until they turn six. After that we’re lining that up with other provisions but that doesn’t mean that they won’t get other payments, you know if you need childcare you’ll still get the childcare rebate payments etc.
LYNDAL CURTIS:
Kevin Andrews thank you very much for your time.
MINISTER:
My pleasure. Ends