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E&OE
DAVID SPEERS:
With me now is one Cabinet minister, not responsible for the banks, but the Social Services Minister Christian Porter who gave a speech today at the National Press Club talking about where the Government has actually been able to make some savings in the welfare sector. Thank you very much for your time.
And I want to come to all of that but let me ask you: did Cabinet discuss a banking royal commission?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well you’ll be astonished to have me respond to say that I’m not discussing what Cabinet discusses.
DAVID SPEERS:
Would you see any argument though that better to take ownership of the whole thing and announce something, rather than having it forced on you by the Parliament and indeed some of your backbenchers?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, the position’s the position. And the position that we’ve had and maintained is that we’re not in favour of a banking royal commission. And the reasons for that have been noted previously but, as I noted today at the Press Club address, I don’t think that people, even those who have suffered at the hands of the bank, are going to get what they want out of a royal commission.
DAVID SPEERS:
Are you winning this argument though?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well I think that it is always a difficult argument to win with respect to banks which have a degree of unpopularity about them. But that doesn’t mean that the position is wrong. I think the position is quite right. But it is better, I think, to take the right decision on this than the easy or politically expedient position which is what I think the Opposition has done for political advantage.
DAVID SPEERS:
On Barnaby Joyce, I mean, what would you do if Gina Rinehart handed you a cheque for $40,000 for doing a great job as minister?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well mate, I’d be thinking what’s second prize like? That’s a pretty unusual thing to have happen and I can’t speak for Barnaby but I would imagine that any politician in those circumstances would have been wishing that it didn’t happen, frankly. I, you know …
DAVID SPEERS:
But would you, would you say on the stage thank you, but in reality, I can’t accept this?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
I think that you’d be as polite as you could but renounce the prize as soon as you possibly could, but I don’t think I would have done that necessarily on stage. But it’s a pretty weird sort of circumstances. I don’t think that Barnaby’s handled it in anything other than a fair and reasonable fashion. So he’s …
DAVID SPEERS:
He said he was already kind of contemplating how to spend it on his farm.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Yeah, well look, I saw the footage but you’re caught up there on stage, someone’s given you a prize, they’re very well meaning, they’re obviously a great supporter of the agricultural sector. You try and say and do the right things, but he’s declined to accept the prize.
DAVID SPEERS:
He has, he has. No, he did at lunchtime.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
I think that’s ultimately the end of the matter.
DAVID SPEERS:
Now, on your speech today and what you’re doing in the welfare system. You talked about how the growth, at least, has been reduced in outlays when it comes to the welfare sector. There’s one area though that you announced in the recent budget, the drug testing of welfare recipients, that the trials were meant to start in January. Will they?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, they won’t start in January if we can’t get legislation through the Senate in these sittings. It may well be that we have to delay a start date. We are still absolutely committed to drug testing trials for welfare recipients.
DAVID SPEERS:
You won’t be able to get it through this year though.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well it’s not, I must say I’ve not given up that level of hope. The complexion of the Senate’s changing all the time. And I’d just say to you frankly, David, that in speaking with the Nick Xenophon senators, I have the sense that Nick himself was more enthusiastic about it and Skye herself less enthusiastic about it.
DAVID SPEERS:
So her exit might help?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, you know, I feel very sorry for Skye but there’ll be new personnel, someone else sitting in her position. I tell you what, I’ll be speaking to them directly and early, because we’re very close to the numbers we need on drug testing, and drug testing’s only seven pages of a 200-page welfare reform bill. But I think it’s a very important initiative and what I’d …
DAVID SPEERS:
I’ll tell you what might help your chance of getting it done this year is if the House of Representatives actually sat next week.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, as the PM has noted, we’ll sit for as long as it takes on same-sex marriage.
DAVID SPEERS:
…on same-sex marriage.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Yes.
DAVID SPEERS:
But not on this.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, there’s, the point is for us at least, the welfare reform bill has gone through the House of Representatives, so it’s the Senate that is the issue for us with respect to welfare reform.
DAVID SPEERS:
Alright, but if they amended it next week, it could come back and you could get it done.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Absolutely. Well, I mean, if they …
DAVID SPEERS:
You won’t be sitting.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
No, but if they amended it at any point, they could send it back and we could get it done. You could get that done quite easily in the context …
DAVID SPEERS:
So you would be prepared to interrupt the same-sex marriage debate to do that?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, I think for something like that, you certainly would. I mean I’d be pitching to the Leader of the House that that’s something that we’d want to do if we came back.
DAVID SPEERS:
Okay so there’s more than just same-sex marriage to be debated.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, I mean, there are matters in the Senate which if we had an opportunity to pass, particularly something as important as welfare reform, I’m sure the Leader of the House would listen to my overtures to squeeze it in.
DAVID SPEERS:
Now, the number of really interesting figures that you referred to in the speech today, in particular about transitioning and this is, as you pointed out, the major aim with all the policies you’re doing to get people from welfare into work. Bottom line, are you actually doing that? Are more people transiting faster from Newstart into a job?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, two things are happening. We are having less people come into the system. So, jobs growth and a whole range of other welfare policies means that there are less people transitioning into the system, and we also believe that people are moving out of the system and that stock of people coming in isn’t being replaced.
So for instance, the figure that I gave today was that in the six years of the previous Labor Government, there were 250,000 more people under 65 who came into the welfare system and got primary income support. Since we’ve been elected to government, we’ve actually reduced that figure by 140,000. So under Labor, a city the size of Geelong, equivalently, went onto welfare and under us a city the size of Darwin has come off.
DAVID SPEERS:
….point though, and it’s been made many times. They had the Global Financial Crisis on their watch.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Not for six years they didn’t.
DAVID SPEERS:
That does skew that overall figure.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, they also had the biggest mining boom in Australia’s history. So of course, employment growth is a part of the success that we’re having. But in our last year, compared to the last year of Labor, which was five years after the GFC, we’ve increased the employment growth compared to them by 300 per cent. So I think on any comparable measure we’re doing well, but these figures speak for themselves.
DAVID SPEERS:
And look, great if fewer people are actually getting on Newstart, but what about getting them off Newstart and into a job? You doing any better than Labor?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
I believe that we are. And we’re doing, that’s looking at all of the figures. So in the last six months the number of people physically on Newstart has reduced by 29,000. So that’s a measure of less people coming in and more people going out. It’s as simple as that. And that is a very, very positive thing because, of course, it represents quite enormous savings for the taxpayer, but it represents much better outcomes for people who are self-reliant, self-dependent, earning their own money. So we think that this is a really big success story for the Government.
DAVID SPEERS:
The debate around the NDIS, of course, it seems every few weeks we see some sort of problem and I know you’ve referred to them as teething problems, but is it something more fundamental than that?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, I don’t believe so. I think that the Productivity Commission report probably supports our view that in a change as enormous as this, a reform at this scale, you will experience what you could describe as teething problems, but we are doing many things for the first time. We learn from errors; repair them very quickly.
But again the fundamentals of the rollout of the NDIS, we’ve moved from 30,000 to well over 100,000 in the last 12 months. The Productivity Commission has noted that the estimates that were originally provided by the Productivity Commission were, in their words, very, very ambitious, and the schedule was brought forward a year by Labor, and yet we’re still meeting about 84 per cent of those estimates. We’re meeting all of the rollout timetable set out in bilaterals. The last review that I had from the NDIA is that 84 per cent of participants report high levels of satisfaction with the NDIS.
So I think the scale will mean that there are going to be individual problems and they’ll be ongoing. But the key is identifying them, repairing them and toughening up your systems so that they don’t happen again.
DAVID SPEERS:
It’s obviously a big spending part of the Budget. It will increasingly be so over the coming years, the NDIS. It gets to this question about managing the Budget. What’s your view, Christian Porter, on whether the priority should be getting back to surplus, delivering more company tax cuts, or delivering a personal income tax cut?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, I think that when you put it in that sort of and/or fashion, it neglects to understand, I think, respectfully, that these things are all intertwined. There’s no question, and again, I go back to some of those figures I used today, that part of the success we’ve had in having far less people into the welfare system is that we’ve been able to generate jobs. And why have we been able to generate jobs? Because we’ve had successive budgets that have had measures that are meant to provide tax relief for small business, like the instant asset write-off, and, of course, very recently, we’ve had overarching changes to the tax system and tax relief for all businesses under $50 million. So having cuts, tax cuts for business, grows the economy and produces a certain situation where the growth can actually help you return to surplus. So I think you can simultaneously achieve these things. But as the Treasurer, the Prime Minister noted, this is about achievability.
DAVID SPEERS:
So cutting company taxes further and offering an income tax cut will speed up the return to surplus?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, obviously they cost money in terms of a budgetary sense, but they also grow the economy. So they have the great potential to grow revenue in a whole range of areas. And, of course, they have the great potential to make sure that we’re not paying out as much money as the Labor government did on welfare.
DAVID SPEERS:
Yeah, well potential is the key there. Labor was long criticised for spending money before it actually came in the door, blowing the budget, hoping that the mining tax, for example, will deliver revenue that it never did. Is there a danger here for the Coalition as well, that if your thinking is really cut all these taxes and then suddenly the revenue will come in; don’t spend it before you’ve got it?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well I don’t think there’s ever been any criticisms that our revenue projections in the Budget are anything other than fair and reasonable. So we’ve not entered into that type of twilight zone that Wayne Swan was in where he was estimating $9 billion from a mining tax and didn’t get any money virtually.
But again, and going back to those figures we used today, under Labor, the working age welfare bill was growing at 9 per cent a year, and under us, it’s 2 per cent a year. And that difference, cumulatively, out to 2020, is $83 billion. So that is $83 billion that we have not had to spend and that actually provides you with some room to both return to surplus and consider other things like tax cuts for middle income-earning Australians.
DAVID SPEERS:
Final one- another dual citizen bit the dust today. Skye Kakoschke-Moore as we mentioned. MPs are going through the process now of having to make sure they can prove what reasonable steps they’ve taken or what steps they’ve taken. Are you expecting more to go?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, I mean, it’s very, very hard to say. I’m not particularly, but every time I’m not expecting more to go, someone else seems to pop up. But you know, Skye’s situation’s unusual. The British Overseas Colonies, as they’re known cumulatively, are a pretty unusual bunch of places and the rules that pertain to them are quite different. But I think that the process that the Prime Minister has put in place is a fair and reasonable one and I think …
DAVID SPEERS:
It’s flushing people out.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
… well, I think it is actually very diligent and stringent. So I filled in my form today.
DAVID SPEERS:
All good?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Yeah well let’s hope so. No, it’s all good. But I think that when you go through the process that the Prime Minister’s put in place, it’s very, very stringent. Unfortunately, it’s the process that all parliamentarians should have put themselves through in the first place.
DAVID SPEERS:
Did it force you to make checks that you hadn’t previously?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well it certainly made me confirm things that I was absolutely certain of. And I was right. But yeah, I think there’s always extra checks you can belt and brace these things with, and people are doing that.
DAVID SPEERS:
Christian Porter, good to talk to you, thanks for joining us this afternoon.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Thank you