E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP
CANBERRA
WEDNESDAY, 17 APRIL 2019
 
SUBJECTS: PEFO; Liberals’ secret cuts to pay for tax cuts for top end of town; IPA’s to-do list for the Liberals; Liberals’ penalty rate cuts; Jetset George Christensen; Labor’s long-announced policy to close down superannuation loopholes; negative gearing; Tasmania
 
JIM CHALMERS, LABOR CAMPAIGN SPOKESPERSON: Today will be about all the choices which are central to this election campaign. A choice between better schools and hospitals or bigger tax loopholes for the top end of town. At 2pm today, the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook will be released. This is the Budget update prepared by the Treasury and the Finance Department to give the Australian people a sense of public finances leading into the election. What PEFO will show this afternoon is that it will lock in $40 billion of secret cuts to schools and hospitals under the Liberal Party. It will show that the surplus for next year - the forecast surplus - is propped up substantially by a $1.6 billion underspend on Australians with a disability, making them wait longer for the services that they were promised and it will lock in an $11,000 a year tax cut for an Australian earning over $200,000 a year. So the PEFO will show $40 billion in secret cuts, $1.6 billion less spent on Australians with a disability, and it will lock in substantial tax cuts for the top end of town, which are the defining feature of Scott Morrison's approach to the economy.
 
The Budget update today will also show that the economy is not working for ordinary working people. It will lock in slowing growth, stagnant wages, slowing consumption and it will show that debt has more than doubled under the six years of cuts and chaos under this Liberal Government. That's what we'll see today when the Budget update is released. Just so people have a sense of what these $40 billion in secret cuts which will be locked in today represent, to give you a sense of the magnitude of what the Government is not coming clean on: $40 billion represents all funding for schools and hospitals in a year; it represents cutting all childcare rebates for five years; cutting all aged care funding for two years; cutting all NDIS funding for more than two years; and it represents $4800 in cuts from every single Australian household.

Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg and Mathias Cormann need to come clean today on how they will get these $40 billion a year in cuts. Will they come from hospitals and schools? Or further cuts to the NDIS? Or from aged care? Or child care? Where in the Budget will these $40 billion in secret cuts, which will be confirmed today in the PEFO, come from? The Australian people deserve to know. This Liberal Government has spent the last six years cutting deeply into the services and health care and education that Australians rely on. Now they have plans to go even further if they win this election. That's what we'll see in the Budget update and the Government needs to come clean. 
 
One of the reasons why we've had such devastating cuts to services; one of the reasons why Scott Morrison's entire economic policy rests on cutting schools and hospitals and giving that money to multinationals and millionaires is because the Liberal Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the extreme right in this country, represented in part by the Institute of Public Affairs. The IPA has released today a document which calls on the Liberal Party to have further cuts to the ABC, to scrap the minimum wage, and to give bigger tax cuts to multinational corporations. When the IPA says jump, the Liberal Party says how high? This is not an IPA wish list, this is a Liberal Party to-do list. This is a glimpse of what the Liberal Party would look like if they win this election - more cuts to the ABC, bigger tax cuts for multinationals and millionaires, and more wage cuts for ordinary working Australians.

In that context we've learnt today that in April alone, Australians working public holidays and weekends stand to lose $80 million from their pay packets from Scott Morrison's cuts to penalty rates. If you're working this long weekend and you're no longer getting penalty rates, you have Scott Morrison to thank for that. Scott Morrison voted eight times in the Parliament against restoring cuts to penalty rates. Scott Morrison wants you to lose your penalty rates when you work on this Easter long weekend. If you're working and you're not getting the reward for your efforts that you used to get for working public holidays and weekends, you have Scott Morrison to thank for that.
 
The final issue I wanted to touch on are these new revelations that George Christensen has spent around $3000 of taxpayer money on private trips overseas. Jetset George has a lot of explaining to do today. Jetset George has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar again - $3000 of taxpayer funds going towards his private trips to the Philippines so that he can spend 300 days over a four year period outside of his electorate, overseas in the Philippines. And it's not just Jetset George that has a lot of explaining to do. The Prime Minister must weigh in on this issue now. It is long past time for Scott Morrison to express a view on this. Does Scott Morrison still have confidence in George Christensen? Has Scott Morrison taken any steps to get to the bottom of this? Does Scott Morrison know if this is the end of these revelations or there's more to come? Does Scott Morrison think that this is an appropriate use of taxpayer money to subsidise George Christensen's private trips to the Philippines? Scott Morrison must answer those questions today. He needs to tell the Australian people whether he thinks it's appropriate that Jetset George has been spending thousands of taxpayer dollars subsidising private trips. 
 
Is it any wonder the Australian people have concluded that this Government is spectacularly out of touch when this sort of caper is going on. This is part of the chaos of the last six years; the severe internal division and dysfunction in the Liberal and National parties and the LNP in Queensland. The election is about choices - more money for schools and hospitals or bigger tax loopholes for the top end of town. In Scott Morrison's Australia, a cancer sufferer will pay more so that a millionaire or a multinational can pay less. These are the choices at play in this election. These are the choices which will be laid out when the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook is released later today. Over to you.
 
JOURNALIST: Was Bill Shorten wrong when he said Labor doesn't have any plans to increase tax on superannuation?
 
CHALMERS: Bill Shorten said that, we don't have any plans to - when Bill Shorten said that we don't have plans, he was talking about we don't have any additional things to announce during the election campaign.
 
JOURNALIST: He didn't make that caveat.
 
CHALMERS: Well, I'm making it clear. Everybody knows that at the end of 2016, almost three years ago, Labor announced superannuation policies. He misheard or misunderstood the question. What he was saying is we will not have any additional policies to be announced during the course of this election campaign.
 
JOURNALIST: He was asked several times.
 
CHALMERS: Obviously the issues that we put on the table at the end of 2016 stand.
 
JOURNALIST: He was asked several times. It wasn't like the question was evasive. He was asked several times about whether you would tax super and he said no. So is he misleading the Australian public?
 
CHALMERS: He was asked about new taxes. And there's two points I would make about that. Firstly, we're not talking about instituting new taxes. We're talking about closing down some of the loopholes which overwhelmingly favour people with the biggest superannuation balances. That's the first point. The second point is that we have no new announcements on super. We have announced our superannuation policy. True to form, we announced it some time ago so that Australians could consider it before they go to the polls. We actually announced it at the end of 2016. We don't have any new announcements to make during the remaining four-and-a-half weeks of this election campaign. Our policies are there. We've also got a policy not just to close down some of the loopholes which are overwhelmingly accessed by people with the highest balances. We also have plans - a $400 million plan - to start to address the gender gap in super. We've got a series of superannuation policies on the table. We don't have any new or additional announcements to make during the course of the election campaign.
 
JOURNALIST: So is it clear in your policy how much will Australians' super be taxed?
 
CHALMERS: The announcement that we made in 2016 - the costing for that announcement, as you'd expect, that was almost three years ago, will be updated as part of the standard process of updating all of our costings. Chris Bowen and I will release all of those costings in the next few weeks. We're working as you'd expect with the Parliamentary Budget Office to update all of our figures. Not just on that policy, but all of our policies get updated. And we'll release that number when the time comes.
 
JOURNALIST: That costing was $18.9 billion over a decade. Do you expect it will go up?
 
CHALMERS: I'm not going to pre-empt the work of the Parliamentary Budget Office. The reason we have a very robust costings process involving the Parliamentary Budget Office, involving in our case a panel of eminent Australians who review our costing methodology, is we want to get it perfectly right. That means taking the process seriously. I'm not going to pre-empt or guess where that process might land. Well before election day, in the next few weeks, Chris Bowen and I will stand up, we'll release the costings for all of our policies. A lot of work goes into updating those costings. There is not much point pre-empting that process.
 
JOURNALIST: Are you reviewing the negative gearing costings?
 
CHALMERS: Every single costing for all of our tax policies, all of the policies we've put on the table get updated really for two reasons. The first reason is because the economic parameters change. When there's a new Budget, there's a whole bunch of new assumptions which get fed into our costings. That's entirely standard. That happens every time. And the second reason that we update our costings is because in cases like negative gearing, we've announced a start date, which is 1 January of next year.
 
JOURNALIST: So did you get the numbers wrong on negative gearing?
 
CHALMERS: Of course not.
 
JOURNALIST: Would the estimated savings be different then?
 
CHALMERS: When you update the costings for any policy, when you feed in new parameters from the Budget that the Government released only a fortnight ago in this building, inevitably some of those forecasts, some of those parameters, they change. And that has the capacity to change the costing. The other important thing, which I should have mentioned before, is that there's another year in the costings now. So when a new Budget comes on, then the forward estimates are a different period and the 10-year period obviously covers a different 10 years. So for all these reasons, it's entirely unsurprising, entirely normal, entirely standard, for the numbers to be updated because you've got another year, you've got different parameters, and in the case of negative gearing, we've got a start date of 1 January 2020.
 
JOURNALIST: One of the key parameters is the percentage of investors going into new homes, because of course they can still negatively gear under your policy. The seven per cent appeared on the Labor website on the policy. Was the seven per cent ever used for the policy itself to get the costing?
 
CHALMERS: No. The Parliamentary Budget Office used their own assumptions. They consulted with the Reserve Bank as I understand it, the Bureau of Stats, with the private banks; they came up with their own figures and their own calculations when they came to that costing, which they stand by. That in the standard way will now be updated post the 2019 Budget and the new parameters from the Government.
 
JOURNALIST: When you say you're reviewing the costings of the negative gearing policy, are you reviewing the policy in itself?
 
CHALMERS: I didn't use that language. We update the costings after every Budget. And we've got our policy on the table, and that's the policy we'll take to the election. We'll start on 1 January. It's the policy as we outlined it. The numbers will be released in the next few weeks.
 
JOURNALIST: Scott Morrison's campaigning in Tasmania today. Are you concerned about any Labor-held seats in Tasmania?
 
CHALMERS: We don't take any votes for granted in any corner of Australia. We know that this election will be tough, it will be hard fought. We are combating a big scare campaign from Scott Morrison and his cronies. And so we take every seat very seriously. We never think that we have any seat in the bag. We never take any vote for granted. We work our tails off around the clock. We have been doing that for years. And obviously in the election campaign as well. And we won't stop doing that until the election results are known.
 
JOURNALIST: Just back on superannuation, how many people would these changes affect? And should voters trust Bill Shorten with their superannuation if he didn't appear to be across the details yesterday?
 
CHALMERS: The number of Australians impacted will be updated in the usual way. The key measure in our superannuation policy won't affect 96 per cent of Australians, but again, that's one of the numbers that gets updated as we get population changes, economic parameter changes. But of course, Australians know that we will manage the superannuation system and the economy in the interests of ordinary Australians. We'll make sure that people can retire with dignity. We designed the superannuation system, it's one of Labor's proudest boasts, and we'll always do the right thing by it so that people can retire on good incomes. And we won't take lectures on retirement incomes from Scott Morrison, when he was the guy who wanted to jack up the retirement age to 70. He's the guy who voted to cut the pension. Retirement incomes are at play in this election and Labor has the better offering.
 
JOURNALIST: And on negative gearing, if you have that percentage - because Chris Bowen alluded to a percentage of investors going to new property going from 12 to 22 - you would assume that would affect the income that you're going to get from this, or the forgone revenue as it's termed. 
 
CHALMERS: Chris was referring to the Grattan Institute figures, which as I understand the PBO didn't rely on in coming up with their costing. So the Grattan Institute updated their numbers I think in February or March this year, and Chris went through this in some detail at the Press Club. They updated their costings, but the PBO stood by their costing on the basis that they had taken a range of soundings, not just one source. They stood by their costings, but as I've said in response to multiple questions this morning, all of our numbers get updated. Chris and I will jump up sometime in the next few weeks and we'll detail all of our updated costings after the last Budget.
 
JOURNALIST: Just on the methodology - so they'll be able to go out and find out according to them and their own sounding? You're not telling them, here's the percentage? They'll go out and say here's how many new investors there'll be, here's the updated policy?
 
CHALMERS: They make their own assumptions. Thanks very much.
 
ENDS