2GB Miranda Devine
MIRANDA DEVINE:
Thanks for joining us Scott Morrison.
MINISTER MORRISON:
G’day Miranda, what a great Sydney day it has been today.
DEVINE:
How fantastic and that is a rather fetching picture of you in the paper today getting your feet wet at North Cronulla beach.
MINISTER MORRISON:
There are no greater places than the beaches in the Shire.
DEVINE:
Is that what you have been doing today?
MINISTER MORRISON:
A bit of that, bit down around the river today with the kids and everything like that so you know a great Sydney Sunday.
DEVINE:
Well thanks for joining us. Now just quick question on Philip Ruddock, I know he was helpful to you in formulating your border protection policy from his own experiences stopping the boats, how do you feel about his abrupt removal as Chief Whip?
MINISTER MORRISON:
I think Philip has made the appropriate comments on that, that is a matter for the leader and I am not privy to the discussions. I do know Philip was the best Immigration Minister this country ever had and he has been enormously helpful not just to me when I was minister and shadow minister but he has been a great support to all the members as you would expect the father of the House to be. He is a great bloke and he has I know the whole party and I think the Prime Minister’s utter and total respect.
DEVINE:
So what do you think went wrong with the government that you ended up on Monday with that near death experience as the Prime Minister said and you know almost repeating this Rudd/Gillard/Rudd chaos of Labor.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well I don’t really see it in those terms and look the party room had its say on Monday and they have said what they expect of the entire front bench not just the Prime Minister and that is what we are about doing and people are working very hard on that. In our first year and a bit of government we had some great successes and you have mentioned some of those, not just stopping the boats but getting children out of detention has been very important and a key motivator for why we wanted to do that, we were able to restore the integrity of our refugee and humanitarian programme so it wasn’t decided by people smugglers, but the carbon tax went, the mining tax went, in our first year too we were creating over 500 jobs a day that’s three times what Labor was doing in 2013. So they are all good achievements but obviously our own supporters in particular but the country want us to better manage a lot of the issues that are before us. The outcomes are good and we need more good outcomes and that is why we will continue to work hard.
DEVINE:
You mention the children in detention, the Human Rights Commission and Gillian Triggs released her report during the week which was as expected just criticises the government. But I mean you did more to get children out of detention than Labor did, Labor put them in there.
MINISTER MORRISON:
The results speak for themselves. When we lost government there were no children in detention and that is the ultimate outcome, that is what you want to see and I am very confident we will get to that. We have had a more than 90 per cent reduction; there are just a handful of children still in held detention facilities in Australia on the mainland. There are obviously still more in Nauru and they will be working through the processing of those children and we have already made a significant improvement there. The way you get children out of detention is you make sure they don’t come on boats and then you get them out into the community and that is why we were doing what we were doing. Labor hopelessly failed.
DEVINE:
You did a very good job at that and a lot of people me included think you should have been made Treasurer. I know that has been mooted, is that something you would have taken, would have been interested in?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well it is not up to me it is up to the Prime Minister and Joe Hockey is a great bloke who is doing a tremendous job in what is a very difficult task. We can’t forget that what Joe inherited was a complete and utter mess. What Wayne Swan inherited was the most successful set of figures I think we have ever seen. So it is tough when you haven’t got money raining in and you have got difficult choices to make and both the Prime Minister and Treasurer have made it very clear that we all bit off a bit more than we can chew in the first one and now we are working very hard on the second one and I have got an important role to play in that around families and particularly child care.
DEVINE:
That is right, your new portfolio Social Services accounts for about a third of the budget and we know it is going to be a difficult budget to put together and your portfolio is a spending one, a spending portfolio so how do you go about identifying where you can get savings in that portfolio?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well my first job is to make sure the $150 billion we are spending is doing the job we want it to. The taxpayers are very generous, they have said they want to see a system which helps people most in need and that is what we want the system to do, to help people who are most in need. I need to make sure the money we are spending now is doing that and is not being wasted and we haven’t got people rorting it and all of those sorts of things. Then you have got to look to where you think the challenges are going ahead and I think we have three really big ones, first one is we have got young men coming out of school, not getting into work. We have got particularly younger women 25-39 when they become mums who depend in that family on having two incomes not going back to level of work that we would like to see so they could continue to have two incomes so they can support their families and not be on welfare. The third area where we have had a lot of improvement but we just want to encourage people as they grow older to work longer, if they are healthy and they can and they have the opportunity to, it is good for them, it is good for the country and I suspect the grandkids will like it too at Christmas.
DEVINE:
So how are you going to save money though, have you found enough rorts there to actually save money or you know is there a problem with hurting the most needy by cutting?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well the rorts issue is important and it needs to be addressed for the integrity of the system but it would be a mistake to think that that is where there are tens of billions of dollars in savings, it just isn’t there. You should crack down on rorts because no one should take advantage of the welfare system and that is why we will do that. The structural savings have to be achieved over a long period of time. Going for quick saves in the welfare area over a couple of years, a lot of people depend on this and you have got to be able to provide a transition in these things and at the end of the day you have got to get through what you want get in the budget through the Senate. I think people have been disappointed with us not getting things through the Senate and I think we will be approaching it very differently this time.
DEVINE:
Have you already started talking to those cross bench Senators about trying to get their help and general approval for your general philosophy?
MINISTER MORRISON:
I have Miranda, and this is the deal not just for the cross bench Senators but for the Labor party, the same rules apply to them that apply to the government. If they think they have got a better way to cost effectively deal with the three problems I have outlined with young men, mums going back to work and getting people to work longer then by all means bring it forward. But you have got to come with the same discipline on spending that we have to approach the task. Bill Shorten is running around thinking unfunded empathy is some sort of substitute for him being a policy free zone. The guy is a policy free zone, he has got no answers to any of these questions, he just goes around empathising with everybody, never funds or commits to anything.
DEVINE:
Yeah, so what is your overall philosophy then, are you going to be cutting services? Is that your main thrust or are you trying to make the services more useful?
MINISTER MORRISON:
I am trying to make the services more effective and more useful and I am trying to find those areas where we are in a position to target more of the resources into the areas of greatest need. We all can’t afford to be leaning on the taxpayer. Where we can’t lean on the taxpayer or shouldn’t be leaning on the taxpayer then we have got to discourage that. We have all got to do as much as we possibly can Miranda, but it is not an easy task and there are not rivers of savings available in that system without considerable dislocation that would result from the heavy handed approach.
DEVINE:
So do you have any ideas about how you try and stop a growing number of Australians from becoming – from losing their self-reliance that we used to pride ourselves on?
MINISTER MORRISON:
I think that really does highlight the opportunity, it is a question of the growth in this expenditure going forward. I will give you an example, when John Howard reformed the disability support pension and they were good reforms and we have introduced some in this government as well, you have got to go to a government doctor to get onto a DSP. But when John Howard did this he grandfathered a lot of the people who were already on the DSP who could have worked up to almost 30 hours per week. Now they stayed on the DSP but what was changed was the people coming on to the DSP and we have got to address the growth in this expenditure. It is over 6 per cent a year in some areas. That is the highest level of growth in public spending except for health I think, off the top of my head. It is the growth and spending which will cripple the budget.
DEVINE:
Good luck with the portfolio and good luck with the budget coming up. Thanks always for coming on the show and being so available.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Good to be with you Miranda.