The Bolt Report with Andrew Bolt
E&OE
ANDREW BOLT:
We’ve withdrawn our ambassador from Indonesia – temporarily – as a sign of protest. Indonesia did the same to us nearly two years ago when the ABC and Guardian revealed the Rudd government had spied on its president and his wife. Back then, Scott Morrison was the Immigration Minister, trying to get Indonesia’s cooperation to stop the boats. He’s now Social Services Minister, and joins me. Thanks for your time.
MINISTER MORRISON:
G’day, Andrew.
ANDREW BOLT:
Now, how hard is cooperation between the two countries in your experience, when one of us has pulled out their ambassador in protest?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well, there’s obviously the political connections that are affected by that, but the truth is, underneath that, the bureaucratic, the military diplomacy, all of these sorts of things, there’s very good relationships there over a long period of time between our officials and theirs, and under Operation Sovereign Borders with General Campbell and that whole operation, they continue to have very good links into the operational agencies of the Indonesian government. That has been maintained.
ANDREW BOLT:
You reckon the same will happen here, with all this storm and drung over the top – underneath, the minister-to-minister contact will still be good?
MINISTER MORRISON:
The minister-to-minister engagement – the Prime Minister’s made it clear there – that it’s not business as usual there for some time. But I believe that the operational engagement, which has always been there, will continue. And of course, there’s a people-to-people relationship between Australia and Indonesia. And no doubt, events of recent times will impact that too for a while. It won’t be business as usual for a while.
ANDREW BOLT:
Doesn’t that worry you a bit? Because you would know, from the, what you tried to do with cooperation on people-smugglers, this cooperation is actually very important, and more important to us than it is to them.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well, how important it is to them, we’ll see. But at the same time, we’re able to get on with the job in Operation Sovereign Borders. And we got the job done. So that’s what’s important. That’s what Australians expect. And it’s an important relationship at a number of levels, but it’s important that Australia just keeps doing the things it needs to do to pursue its interests in the region, and have no doubt that that’s what the Abbott government will do.
ANDREW BOLT:
Do you want to crank up the pressure on Indonesia, keep it where it is with these protests, or should the temperature be turned down?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well I think we need to move through this issue. It won’t be business as usual for some time and we understand how we all feel about this. But at the same time, we’ve got to look to the future, and we need to ensure that our interests – short, medium and long-term – are addressed here. And the Foreign Minister will do that, other ministers will do that. But the engagement under the surface which keeps the wheels turning in these relationships, I have no doubt is going to continue to turn.
ANDREW BOLT:
Just before his death, Andrew Chan exchanged tweets with the Daily Telegraph’s Phil Rothfield and I was struck by his background. His parents were from China, spoke almost no English. He never finished school, was addicted to heroin at 14, selling drugs at Kings Cross. He described his Housing Commission area like: “Getting Tongans, Aborigines, Lebanese, Chinese and Vietnamese together – it’s not a great mix. There ain’t no good come out of that.” He said many of his friends were dead or in jail. We’ve bungled immigration and we’re not picking up many of these migrant kids, Muslim kids, let alone Aboriginal kids, they seem to be spinning off on the edges, going into jihadism, drugs, gangs, now jihad. We’ve got a problem here.
MINISTER MORRISON:
We do. And that is a great risk, and working towards the budget, it will be a jobs budget, it will be a small business budget, it’ll be a families budget, a budget for middle Australia. But importantly, on the jobs side of things, it is about trying to focus on young people into jobs. And particularly, we’ve been working on measures that can deal with young people in vulnerable communities and that includes from migrant communities, from refugee backgrounds and things like that. Now, I saw that in my previous portfolio. I’ve seen it as a previous member of the National Security Committee, and the risks that there are in vulnerable communities. In my home city of Sydney, but other parts of the country. And it’s important that, yes, we do the strong national security issues to deal with those matters. But there are also some getting people in a job rather than let them go off on a completely different tack, which is bad for them, it’s bad for the community, it’s bad for the country. So, we do need to be proactive in social policy in those areas to not see those people who can go down two paths. And they can go down two paths – we’re seeing some of them end up on that path which takes them to Syria and Iraq, and that is a big concern. And we need to stop them from doing that, but a lot of stopping that actually starts a lot earlier by engaging them and getting them into a job and on a positive life path.
ANDREW BOLT:
We also saw another example of people on the fringes – like I say, there seems to be almost like a centrifugal force spitting people out on the edges, on the margins. The Chloe Valentine case, which really distressed me and a lot of other Australians – a mother, a drug addict and prostitute. She’s neglected and abused the daughter so badly that she died at just four. The coroner said last month, “Chloe was, for her mother, just a possession, so her income could be enhanced by obtaining support payments”. 20 warnings to child protection officers to get rid, you know, take the daughter away. The mother’s kept her to get the benefits. What are you doing about that?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well, we are going to be trialling, through the Healthy Welfare Card, when we have those arrangements in place, putting that into communities with those communities, not just indigenous communities, but non-indigenous communities as well, where there are some serious levels of dysfunction. And that case, in itself, is the definition of dysfunction when it comes to a mother and their child. In those sort of circumstances, we do need a more interventionist approach. And that’s why we’re going to trial these schemes, to the extent –
ANDREW BOLT:
How does that work? So…
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well, it can be up to 100%, but a very high level of your income support goes on a card, which can only be used for appropriate purposes, and you can’t get the cash, and it’s the cash that often drives the other issues. Drugs issues and…
ANDREW BOLT:
So a mother, drug addict and prostitute, comes around. What do you say?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Exactly, well you, you don’t have the cash to go and buy the drugs. That’s the whole point of running down through that system that came out of the Forrest report. We’re very serious about putting that into place. You’ve got to get it right and you’ve got to work with the financial service providers and others to ensure that the system will work. What I don’t want to do as Social Services Minister is go off on a whole range of frolics with wide mainstream application only to see them crash and burn. You’ve got to get the models right, you’ve got to get the community engagement right. Alan Tudge is driving that program, and we hope to be making announcements about where we can make that work for a number of communities, and then we’ll take it forward. It’s not like, you know, we’ve been trying to solve these problems for a long time, and I’m going to be patient about this, but we’re going to get it right, because if you rush to failure, if we’d done that on the boats, well, they’d still be coming.
ANDREW BOLT:
Alright. You, as a minister, are now spending $150-billion a year of our money on social services – pensions and programs.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Correct.
ANDREW BOLT:
Incredible. Even though Australians have never been so rich. Now, you’re even running out a trial program to pay for nannies for couples earning a quarter of a million dollars a year. I mean, this is just incredible. We’re paying for their nannies?
MINISTER MORRISON:
What the trial does – and it runs for two years – it’s the upper limit. If, if, if we see anybody on that…
ANDREW BOLT:
That’s a quarter of a million!
MINISTER MORRISON:
If we see anybody on that level of income getting access to this I’ll be surprised, Andrew, because the program, the program…
ANDREW BOLT:
Then if you’re surprised, why not make it 150?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Because there can be, there can be families who we’re trying to help here who have disabled kids, who live in regional areas, who don’t have access to services, and they could have multiple. So I’m not going to put a set of rules which is going to disadvantage a family which is genuinely disadvantaged…
ANDREW BOLT:
That’s the whole problem, isn’t it?
MINISTER MORRISON:
But Andrew, you’re focusing on one end of the spectrum.
ANDREW BOLT:
Yes,
MINISTER MORRISON:
Let me talk about the 99% of others who will be affected by this – they’re police officers, they’re emergency services workers, ambulance officers…
ANDREW BOLT:
What, on $250,000 a year?
MINISTER MORRISON:
It starts at naught, Andrew. It doesn’t… Not everybody’s on $250,000. But, this is a group of people – police officers, I said, nurses – who currently can’t get access to the childcare support that other families get because they’re working at night or they’re working irregular hours. That is who – that is who is going to benefit from those arrangements. And I think to focus on that end of it is, frankly, to beat it up.
ANDREW BOLT:
Well, then drop it and then we won’t beat it up.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Because the mainstream test is, “Can you get access to mainstream services?”
ANDREW BOLT:
Mmm.
MINISTER MORRISON:
And that is the test, and if you can’t, and we look at your issues of need, then that’s who we’ll focus on.
ANDREW BOLT:
Sounds like a lot of money for administration.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Every element of it is offset.
ANDREW BOLT:
Now the budget… Well, but we’re in debt, we’ve got to cut spending. Now the budget is dropping one more saving to index the pension to the CPI instead of weekly earnings, average weekly earnings. You’re dropping that. Your $150-billion-a-year budget is just going up and up.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well, first of all, we’ve not made any announcements on that other measure.
ANDREW BOLT:
It’s happening.
MINISTER MORRISON:
We’ll make announcements on those things as the budget comes about, so I’m not going to speculate on those things. But what we are doing is trying to constrain the growth in welfare expenditure, and an important part of that is moving away from an entitlements culture to a needs-based payment system. Welfare is for people who are in genuine need, not because they just have a sense of entitlement about it. And that’s what we’re focusing on, and that’s how we’ll deal with it over a long time. But it is a big cultural shift.
ANDREW BOLT:
It sure is.
MINISTER MORRISON:
I mean, entitlement culture on welfare in this country has been running for a long time. It’s not going to change overnight.
ANDREW BOLT:
Well, it’s got to change a bit faster
MINISTER MORRISON:
But it’s certainly something we’ll keep going on this budget, as we did in the last one.
ANDREW BOLT:
Scott Morrison, thank you so much for your time.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Thanks a lot, Andrew.