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PETA CREDLIN:
Welcome back to Credlin. Joining me on the show tonight is Social Services Minister Christian Porter. He’s been pushing for a simpler, fairer welfare system which reins in costs, but also cracks down on those taking advantage of the system. Right now, his welfare reforms are before the Senate, and Christian joins me live in Canberra on this very historic day of same-sex marriage.
Just before we get into your portfolio, Minister – good evening – just give the viewers a sense of the chamber. I mean, it’s an extraordinary moment. We’ve just seen the footage from the House of Representatives, and I know over the last few days, regardless of where you were on the debate, there’s been some pretty amazing displays of humanity in the speeches from our representatives.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Yeah, look, it was a really remarkable experience. I’ve not felt anything quite like it in a parliament, or elsewhere for that matter, but quite remarkable. I think your observation is right; once the success of the plebiscite was known and the vote was emphatic, and the turnout was remarkable, I think that really gave this incredibly strong foundation for everyone in Parliament to behave as parliamentarians, I guess, in the way that the system was originally designed to operate.
So, people spoke openly, frankly. I think the debate was dignified and respectful, and as you know, there’s an incredibly diverse range of very personally and often deeply-held views about the institution of marriage. They were all on display, they were all accommodated in the Parliament respectfully, and the outcome was a good one. I mean, for my view, the Bill probably could’ve been improved by some of the amendments to further strengthen and protect religious freedoms being passed, but in the ultimate result that wasn’t the case, and those issues no doubt will be revisited. But an historic night and Parliament at its best.
PETA CREDLIN:
I agree with you on that score. Look, you’re well-known to anyone from WA: you’re a former state treasurer, you’re a former attorney-general. You and I dealt with each other when I worked in Canberra, but to viewers there’s a lot talked about Christian Porter but they’re not so sure about your history or perhaps your motivation. Look, I’m interested in your background and why you came to Canberra, why you left what would’ve been a fast-track to be Premier of WA to take the ride to federal politics.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, everyone makes decisions about their own career and how they think they can best contribute, but before state politics I was a lawyer, essentially a Crown prosecutor. So, I spent many years cross-examining people and putting bad people in jail, which is a job I found enormously satisfying, I must say, thinking back on it. It taught me a thing or two about not merely the law, but human nature. I had a great time in Colin Barnett’s first government as a treasurer and attorney-general, but it just seemed to me that the type of economic issues that Australia needs sorting through – and welfare is indeed one of them – the place to do that was here in Federal Parliament. I guess, looking back, you don’t get to be a part of historic moments, such as changing the marriage law, or perhaps, less well-known and less historic, the Welfare Reform Bill that’s before the Senate at the moment, unless you’re over here in the Federal Parliament, and that seemed to me the place to be.
PETA CREDLIN:
I know when we’ve talked before, you and I, when I was a staffer about the issues of government; I mean, absolutely you’re right, so often people see the welfare portfolio as welfare, not as an economic portfolio, and certainly along with health it’s two-thirds of the Commonwealth outlays. It’s a significant budget in terms of its expenditure, but also I guess its reach into Australian homes, because you don’t need to be on income support to be involved or to interact with the system. As you know, families across the board are supported in this country, and I guess that gets to the point; if you want to reform the system, if you want to make it more efficient and fairer and support those who really are deserving of help and wind out where you shouldn’t be helping people or perhaps where the budget can’t afford it, it’s a really tough ask to start taking money away from people. People say they want welfare reform until it touches their hip pocket, so why do we need to reform in this area? Why is it critical that we have these reforms that you’re part of at the moment?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, I mean, as you note, it’s a critical economic portfolio because of the size of it. The reality is that Australia could never return to surplus unless we reined in what was excessive expenditure growth that occurred under the previous Labor government.
I mean, they had the major categories of welfare growing at nine per cent a year. It was just utterly unsustainable, and we’ve reduced that back down to two per cent a year, which means that we can have a strong foundation to return to surplus. But as well as that economic component, the system, the welfare system ultimately affects human beings in ways which are very profound, and if you can break a cycle of welfare dependency, it’s very often the case that you’re not only improving the individual life of the person that you are making independent of the welfare system, but you’re improving the lives of their kids and you’re producing an orderly life that has all of the structures that we all experienced growing up, where mums and dads get up and shower and go to work and lead structured, productive lives. And having children grow up in those types of structured, productive families makes for very productive and happy and employed children.
So we’ve seen some data recently that shows that the transmission of welfare from a parent who has had long stretches in the system to a child is sometimes as high as 80 per cent. So, what I see in the portfolio is not only the economic side, but it is about basic human values. The best way to restrain expenditure growth in the welfare system is to decrease the amount of dependency and decrease the need for welfare, and that’s about job generation, it’s about making sure that the system works properly so that you’re adequately requiring people to observe mutual obligations like the search for work, and you have a compliance system that’s adequate so that when people aren’t doing the right thing, there are stringent measures to make sure that they will do the things they need to do to get jobs, and we’re having enormous success in this respect.
PETA CREDLIN:
Look, I just want to underscore for viewers that point you made about the trajectory. The growth trajectory of the welfare portfolio now is at two per cent; you inherited close to nine per cent. That just meant four times as much money was coming out of the welfare portfolio as was coming into the underlying budget, because the underlying budget is sort of anywhere between two and three per cent. So that demonstrates you can’t spend four times more money than the overall budget is bringing in if you want to return to surplus.
I want to ask you about the reforms that you’ve got in the Senate, Christian. As I understand it, the proposal to trial drug testing has been removed from that legislation. Why is that?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, we just made a determination that we couldn’t quite get the numbers amongst the crossbench to have that part of a very large Bill – and that was admittedly a small part of a very large Bill – through, and we didn’t want to jeopardise the other 197 pages of this 200-page Bill.
And what the Bill does is it collapses and consolidates seven working age payments into one, which we’ll call Jobseeker. It strengthens the mutual obligations across all age groups to search for work, and it completely redrafts the compliance regime and substitutes this unwieldly, unenforceable, complicated regime we’ve got at the moment with a really simple demerit point system, much like anyone’s licence out there, where if you reach a certain number of demerits and you get one, you’re out for a week; two strikes, you’re out for two weeks; three strikes, you’re out for a month.
And the view that we’ve taken is that if we can have that part of this Bill, the larger part of it passed, we will utter redraft the way in which the welfare system works in Australia for the better.
And Peta, you know, the results we’ve had so far, even without this Bill having passed, Labor over six years increased the number of people of working age in Australia who were dependent on welfare by 250,000; we’ve decreased the number of people of working age dependent on welfare by 140,000. So that is a city the size of Darwin who is now no longer dependent on the welfare system, but instead are out in employment leading independent lives, providing for themselves and breaking welfare cycles.
PETA CREDLIN:
So, you talked about the crossbenchers there, and I know there is popular support in poll after poll about drug testing, or at least the trial of drug testing of welfare recipients. You talked about the crossbench; where are Labor on these measures? Not just the drug testing measure obviously; they wouldn’t have supported it, or you would’ve got it through the Parliament; but on your broader reforms. Because let’s be very clear, this mess is a Labor mess that you inherited, sure, but Labor, if they were to win the next election, have got to be starting to think about what they might inherit in terms of a budget outcome, and aren’t they mugged by reality that they cannot make the welfare system as it stands work?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, the reason they shouldn’t win the next election is because they’d likely undo the excellent work that this Government has done to get 140,000 less people dependent on welfare. And what Labor has shown is they’re utterly unwilling to take any form of risk, usually on ideological grounds, and try new things. So, Alan Tudge has done an outstanding job over several years running trials for a cashless welfare card, and they’re independently evaluated and they work. And so, whereas we’ve spent Billions of dollars on trying to close gaps in Indigenous health and welfare, here we have a modest expenditure on a system that limits the amount of cash available for drugs, for alcohol, for gambling, and the independent evaluation shows that people are gambling less, drinking less, spending more on clothes, spending more on food. And when you visit places like Ceduna or the East Kimberley, the anecdotal evidence and the stories that you hear and you can see it with your own eyes; I mean, people tell you that children are in the streets wearing new clothes, that families are being better fed.
So what Labor has done now, in fact, is withdraw their support for a fourth trial site for the cashless welfare card. So here we are, taking a new approach, not simply doing more of the same, we are able to prove that it works, and yet it’s still not supported, and I think very much the same situation exists with drug testing for welfare recipients. We consider there’s at least enough evidence to show that it’s worth trying to use the welfare system as a method to compel people into treatment, but Labor are unwilling to even engage in that trial.
PETA CREDLIN:
And look, let’s be clear. There’s generosity from Australians to help Indigenous people who need a hand up, but they want to see their kids go to school and they want to see the law of the land and they want to see them look for work if there is work available. So, I think the community wants to be generous, even to people who have a drug affliction, but they don’t want to see their welfare dollars just go to the dealer without some sense that they’re going to look for treatment.
I’m interested on that score to look at the DSP, the Disability Support Payment. Now, if you look at the statistics you inherited, again that was one area where there was huge growth that sort of belied where modern medicine was; you couldn’t see that there would be that many Australians on a trajectory of needing disability support. It should be going down, if anything, not necessarily going up. You’ve tackled that, or you’ve started to tackle. How are you going on DSP?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Well, we’ve made certain changes to the Disability Support Pension system, and particularly the application process. Most notably, you’re now assessed by an independent Commonwealth-appointed doctor, a GP.
PETA CREDLIN:
So you can’t go to your old doctor and have them just sign off a form like you could previously?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Correct, and that system made no sense. I mean, for a start, that was a professional-client relationship, so for that person to be certifying you into what was a payment that, in effect, required you to do little, in fact nothing; you were not required to search for any form of employment based on the disability that had been certified. But we’ve had that system changed and it’s more rigorous, and Commonwealth independently-appointed doctors will certify people on.
But we’ve also used employment specialists to look into the number of people who are already on the DSP and make assessments, not merely medical, but as to the actual capacity to work. Because even if the capacity to work is limited, if someone is on the DSP and has some capacity to work, they are better exercising that capacity and being employed and being engaged in their communities and contributing to their communities in paid employment.
So we’ve, I think, largely turned around what was a quite remarkable if not astonishing growth in the number of people on the DSP, and the end result is again more Australians engaged in the workforce, breaking cycles of welfare dependency, and leading better and more productive and full lives.
PETA CREDLIN:
I’m just getting a message in my ear to say that the Prime Minister may speak soon, so if I have to interrupt you please excuse me. He’s your boss, I’m sure you don’t mind.
Look, I want to know, can you explain to me how the interaction between the new NDIS, which will come on stream, which I guess is permanent disability, people with permanent disability as opposed to the temporary nature of the DSP, is there any intention over time to wind out of the DSP; how will the two payments interact or the two systems interact?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Yeah, I mean they seek to, I guess, do different things, but there will be about 460,000, at best estimates, inside the NDIS by around about 2020, and the idea is each of those have an individual- those people have an individual package which recognises the nature of their disability and how their needs can be serviced. But also, inside that package, so someone who might have an average NDIS package of 40,000, will be monies allocated to try and increase the prospects of employment and training. So the idea is that we would want as many people who are benefiting from the NDIS as possible to also be using that as a lever to gain experience and training and skills to enter the workplace and again be productive and independent.
So the DSP itself really is meant to recognise a complete and permanent incapacity to work, but of course the difficulty was that the processes were so poor in the past that many people were going onto the DSP who had at least a reasonable capacity to work, and we’ve made sure that if they’ve got that capacity, that they’re out searching for work or in fact, working.
PETA CREDLIN:
Okay. Thank you for the portfolio advice and discussion we’ve just had.
Look, viewers of this program watched Alan and I interview a terrific man, Brian Egan. He and his wife, Nerida, started a charity called Aussie Helpers. I know you’re aware of it; you and I have had contact on it. And it raises money to basically go out west and north and sit down with drought-affected farmers, give them stock feed, support, counselling services, and practical help like food.
Now, they don’t have any Commonwealth funding, or indeed any state funding either. At the moment they rely on donations, and since we talked to Brian Egan a week or so ago and raised it here on the show, $160,000 has been raised by viewers, which I think is just a tremendous outcome. When I raised it with you, you said very quickly that you’d take a look at his case. Have you got an update for anyone at home that’s interested in how Aussie Helpers is going to fare?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Look, I’m going to have a meeting with Brian soon, so my office has been in contact with him, and it’s really a matter, Peta, of trying to understand exactly the nature of his work and how it might fit in with some of the programs that we’ve got going forward.
But I’m looking forward to meeting him and he clearly is a pretty remarkable bloke. So, no quick answers for you, but we’re going to have a good sit down with him and see how we might be able to assist.
PETA CREDLIN:
Thanks very much. I know. I understand you can’t make any commitments. I don’t even know whether there’s a program in the Commonwealth area that would fit for him, but I really appreciate you meeting with him, Christian.
One thing, Minister, before you go. Your seat of Pearce is a tough seat; 3.6 per cent-er. You are seen as a leading light, leadership potential, possible prime minister for a lot of Liberals – certainly for a lot of Conservatives.
If Julie Bishop was to retire, and I don’t know anything, I’m certainly not asking her to retire or suggesting she retires, but she’s in her sixties, she’s had ten years as deputy leader. Her seat’s far safer in Curtin, further in inner-city Perth. Would you move seats? Would you consider moving seats in order to stay in Parliament?
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
No. I mean, I live in Pearce. Pearce is my home. That’s my seat, and you may have noticed the latest Ipsos poll had WA basically the best performing state for the Coalition of any of them. So it’s a seat that …
PETA CREDLIN:
That gives me hope that you’ll still be there.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
It gives me hope too, but this is a seat that you hold through hard work, and look, if I have success in my portfolio, which we are having, moving people from welfare to work, there’s a lot of beneficiaries of that in my great electorate, and we’ll let that record stand for itself, but I’m out there on the weekends campaigning. If you want to visit Ellenbrook for the Christmas party, Peta, you’d be warmly invited.
PETA CREDLIN:
Thank you very much. Minister for Social Services Christian Porter, thanks for joining us tonight.
CHRISTIAN PORTER:
Thank you.