2GB Ben Fordham
E&OE
BEN FORDHAM:
Minister good afternoon.
MINISTER MORRISON:
G’day Ben, how are you?
FORDHAM:
I’m good, good to talk to you. You guys have got some interesting figures to talk about today. More than 17,000 new jobs have been created over the last month, 11,500 full time, 6,000 part time, the unemployment rate has fallen point one of a per cent in August – it is now 6.2 per cent, last month 38,000 people on welfare became active job seekers, 5,000 people on Newstart and youth allowance found jobs and have got off welfare payments. Is this good news?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well it is good news Ben and there is lots of good news happening in the economy. That is not what you will hear from the Labor Party you will just hear a bunch of whinging from them. What we are seeing is confidence I believe with the participation rate of people out there having a go and wanting to be in the workforce and we have had this fall in the unemployment rate but more importantly we have had jobs that have been created. I mean compared to Labor’s last year we are growing jobs at ten times the rate that they were achieving, now that is good news. A job is the best form of welfare and that is what we want to see people in.
FORDHAM:
Why are people moving off welfare and in to other areas?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well those opportunities are being created, that is what a growing economy will do for you, that is how you achieve jobs growth is when you grow the economy and when you are creating the opportunities for people to step out of that welfare dependence. If you are on the dole that might replace some of the income you had in a job but it doesn’t replace a job, it never will. A job gives you a sense of purpose, it gives you a sense of independence, it helps you save and plan for your future and do all of the things that all of us want to do, particularly for young people. The idea of staying on welfare rather than getting on a job, it just doesn’t make any sense.
FORDHAM:
Well what do you say to young people or is it in fact young people you direct the comment to, but in some of those families where you have got generational unemployment. I have been into plenty of houses over the years particularly when I was working at A Current Affair and you would spend time meeting all sorts of people in different parts of Sydney and I was really shell shocked by the number of families where there is three generations in the one house and in many other homes two generations in the one house but in some cases three where everyone is unemployed. Now do you direct your message to the young person, is it to the parents, the grandparents because the message seems lost on some people who just don’t have that philosophy?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well you have got to break the cycle that is the challenge. I mean 19 per cent of Australian families have no job. There is no one working in that family as the parents.
FORDHAM:
Can you give that figure again?
MINISTER MORRISON:
19 per cent of Australian families there is no job. There are about 560,000 children under the age of 15 that are growing up in a family without a job.
FORDHAM:
Almost every five houses if you walked along the street you can come across one where no one is working?
MINISTER MORRISON:
There are what the statistics that come out in the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report, which I launched a few weeks ago. It is the most disturbing statistic that I confront, and you can imagine in the social services portfolio you see a lot of horrendous statistics about what is happening but I also see a lot of great stories too. I know the stories – I was up in Caboolture with Wyatt Roy last week and we were talking to this wonderful enterprise which has been developed up there which is getting young people into work, those who have been long term unemployed. They are a business that was created to try and wrap the job around the individual rather than trying to wrap the individual around the job – employers being more flexible – I mean it is a dynamic space to be in and it can be achieved. But to those who are growing up in a jobless family it is important for us as a community to say a job is what will get you out of that, a job is what will give you a hope and a vision and a future for yourself and that is sometimes very hard for those families and members of those families to break out of. But we have got to inspire them, mentor them, coach them. You would have a lot of people I know Ben who would listen to this programme who mentor young people in those situations – good on them, they are great Australians.
FORDHAM:
Labor and the Greens have teamed up to block a bill that would force under 25s to wait a month before they could access welfare. You want people to wait one month for the dole but that has been knocked back by the Senate. This is the second time that it has been knocked back so are you going to give it another shot?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Yeah, I keep going Ben. I think your listeners know that and you know that. I mean we put up six months the first time they said that was too tough. We listened, we came back with a new bill which said one month and we invested $330 million in the Budget to help young people to get into work. They still don’t like that – what the message is here they don’t want people to wait 30 mins before they can get on welfare in the Labor Party. We are only asking them to wait 31 days. Now this is an important change, an import reform that will send the right message to young people that you don’t walk out of the school gate and into the Centrelink front door – Labor believes they should. They can’t give out enough welfare in the Labor Party. I believe that welfare should be a good strong safety net, help people bounce back in and get new choices for themselves and get themselves back in the workforce. The Labor Party just wants to dole out money.
FORDHAM:
Few other things to ask you about.
[Traffic Break]
FORDHAM:
Minister Scott Morrison in our Canberra bureau. On to Syria for a moment Minister, the Prime Minister said yesterday the government would look to bring in vulnerable people, women, children, families and persecuted minorities regardless of their religion. You have said today that the new arrivals will be predominantly Middle Eastern Christians. Is that the same thing? Can you explain how that works?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well it is, what the Prime Minister said is we will be focusing our intake on persecuted minorities in that region. He said within that women and children and families was what we would seek to do. Persecuted minorities in the Middle East are predominately Christian, that is just a fact. The reason for that is that Christians in the Middle East, as I said this morning, have been run out of town in that region now for a very long period of time. While this conflict rages there will be some particularly who will find places of refuge in Europe who will be able to be there for a period of time and then return hopefully to their country of origin once that subsides. But for particularly the Christians in the Middle East that won’t be the case, they will never be able to go back and these people aren’t in refugee camps predominately, they can’t go there either because they are not safe for them either. So they are in Lebanon, they are in Turkey, they are in Jordan and we are already taking quite a number of people from those communities right now.
FORDHAM:
So when you say they will be predominately Middle Eastern Christians that is just – we are talking statistics there as opposed to any philosophy?
MINISTER MORRISON:
It is not based on what their religion is, it is based on what the need is. That is not to say there will not be others from other faiths that come because there will be others who will also be in a difficult situation who will have family members and contacts here in Australia and there will be the opportunity to assess their opportunities as well, so it is not exclusive. But you have got to set a priority when you have so many people who are affected. While 12,000 is a very generous response I think from Australia, even then you have to prioritise. To give you an idea, in the last two years we have resettled form Iraq and Syria over 7,000 people, over 7,000. In Syria in particularly we went from 95 under the Labor Party before we came in, I increased that to over 1,000 in our first year, then up to over 2,200 in the next year and obviously we are now moving into another phase as the violence escalates.
FORDHAM:
Scott Morrison, the Social Services Minister with us. A couple of quick ones before I let you go – once the refugees get to Australia they will have to be settled somewhere, there are several country towns that have put their hands up, including Wagga Wagga and Broken Hill. Now you are going to be playing a part in settling them in Australia I understand?
MINISTER MORRISON:
My department settles all refugees and humanitarian entrants who come to Australia. We settle over 13,000 of them every single year. Now they tend to settle and we try to settle them normally close to their family linkages and things like that because they can support their settlement. Now that means in our home town of Sydney Ben, particularly for the Syrians, around about 60 per cent have been settled in Sydney over the last couple of years. Now what we will need to do with such a large intake is ensure that we can spread that far further a field and we have had lots of these generous offers but we need to make sure that we can put the services in place to ensure that we can settle people in those other places and that is what we will work to do. The Prime Minister has said we have to be able to identify people, we then have to assess them – the health checks and all those things, their pre-departure support, then they would come here and we would need to settle them into the community. It is quite an exhaustive set of tasks that need to be done, they can’t be done overnight. Given we already started this process two years ago and we have already resettled so many – I mean next week, the week after, next month there will be Syrians and Iraqis coming already because we already moved on this two years ago.
FORDHAM:
There is a lot of little detail that most of us wouldn’t even think of but this is one of them, when refugees arrive in Australia they will be asked to read a document called ‘Life in Australia’ before being granted a visa. It will teach them things like Australians use tongs and salad servers to handle food, to say “yes please” if you would like a cup of tea, they are also told what it means to ‘bring a plate’, to be ‘feeling crook’, to ‘shout a round’ or to ‘go for your life.’ So are these some of the messages or some of the lessons that are passed on?
MINISTER MORRISON:
We need to help people adjust to life in Australia and they are some very basic things. They also get language training when they come, they get support for how they get their children into schools – look for some families, particularly those who may have been in camps, I mean that is a completely foreign situation to what they might encounter in Australia. We can’t assume that this happens easily and it actually doesn’t but we run the best refugee resettlement services in the world. The UNHCR, High Commissioner for Refugees, Ant?nio Guterres has commended Australia and that is not just our government, that has been the case for a long time. We are very good at this but people might be confused about the numbers Ben. We are taking 12,000 people and they might hear about 700,000 in Germany and things like this – the numbers aren’t comparable. We resettle people, we take them into Australia permanently, what is happening in those countries is they are hosting them for a period of time. We just don’t allow someone to come across the border and pitch a tent and give them a bottle of water and a sandwich. That is not how this works, this is a very sophisticated and integrated package that helps people have a go in this country and be a success and to integrate into our society.
FORDHAM:
Alright, the booklet also explains the meaning of things like ‘arvo, barbie, bloke, cuppa, ocker and BYO’. We might find a few more suggestions for you this afternoon in case there is anything that could be added. 131 873 if you have a suggestion.
MINISTER MORRISON:
There is no truth to the rumour that they have to barrack for the Sharks either.
FORDHAM:
No? I was wondering…
MINISTER MORRISON:
That won’t be going in there but I certainly will this weekend. Go the Sharks.
FORDHAM:
I was wondering why there was no mention considering that you are the Minister responsible. Quick one before I let you go, one of the Labor MPs you sit across from in the House of Representatives Anthony Albanese has revealed to Buzzfeed his hangover cure, because he has his own beer Albo. His hangover cure is Dare Ice Coffee; he says you need the milk to settle the stomach. Can you reveal yours Minister while politicians are revealing their hangover cures?
MINISTER MORRISON:
I go to the gym, that fixes me up pretty quickly and fortunately I don’t have to do that too often to overcome those nights.
FORDHAM:
Not the black doctor?
MINISTER MORRISON:
No I just get into the gym and sweat it out mate.
FORDHAM:
Alright thanks for your time.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Good on you Ben.