TOM ELLIOTT:
Tony Abbott joins us now. Mr Abbott, congratulations on your first Budget.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, you’re kind, Tom. It’s a tough Budget but it’s a fair one and I am absolutely confident that this is the Budget that Australia needs right now.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Ok. Look, you’ve taken a bit of a hit in the polls, that’s not unusual with a tough Budget, between 4 and 6 per cent. Do you think the pain that you’ve taken is worth the deficit reduction that’s likely to take place?
PRIME MINISTER:
Tom, I didn’t come into government to feather my own nest. I came into government to do the right thing by our country and this Budget is not about making life politically easier for the Government; it’s about building our economy so that all Australians can be better off in the long run.
You see, the challenge – that I’m afraid the former government squibbed – is the challenge of taking the long view; of not being dominated by the nightly news and the morning newspapers and trying to calculate everything in terms of how your media coverage is going to look. The challenge is to actually be a good government, and if the former government had more of a government strategy and less of a media strategy, it may well have been less of a failure.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Well speaking of the long view, I did notice in the Budget papers it could take four to five years for us to get back to surplus. Why so long?
PRIME MINISTER:
We don’t want to slash government spending in ways which damage economic activity. What we do want is to get government spending under control so that it’s sustainable for the long-term and at the same time we build a much stronger economy and while we have very significantly squeezed government spending, what we’ve really been doing is moving it from short-term consumption to long-term investment. That’s why even in this era of fiscal restraint, we’re putting many billions of dollars into a dedicated medical research fund because our researchers are brilliant and they deserve more support and that is really going to help our people and our health system in the medium-term.
We’ve also put an enormous amount of money into infrastructure. This is the biggest Commonwealth infrastructure spend ever and the beneficiaries of that right around Australia will include Melbournians through the completed East West Link.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Well just going back to the Medical Research Fund, I was quite surprised when I saw that in the Budget – that hadn’t been leaked prior to it – it could total $20 billion. Are you confident that the money will be well spent? And I only say this because government record in picking winners in private investment, be it in public transport ticketing systems like myki in Melbourne or be it in medical technology is not good, is it?
PRIME MINISTER:
No, it’s not, Tom, and you need to know and your listeners need to know that there’s not going to be some bureaucrat running around saying, “Aha, let’s give the money to expert Y or researcher Z”. We’ve got a body called the National Health and Medical Research Council, it’s existed for 60 or 70 years, it’s very well respected internationally, it’s very well respected in the Australian research community. It has a long and successful history when it comes to using government money to allocate it to research and this additional money would in the normal way be allocated at arm’s length from government by the independent, impartial and expert National Health and Medical Research Council.
TOM ELLIOTT:
I had the Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen on the programme about an hour ago and he said that the Labor Party will certainly oppose the $7 GP co-payment – the money from which is supposed to fund the medical research fund. Will you be able to get this through the Senate?
PRIME MINISTER:
It’s interesting, Tom, that the Labor Party has become a party of complaint rather than a party of solutions because, interestingly, back in 1991under Bob Hawke – who was actually a pretty good prime minister and I think a much truer exponent of the best Labor values than the current Labor frontbench – Bob Hawke did introduce a co-payment; it was only in place for a few months, it fell victim to the leadership struggle between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, but there was a co-payment then and it was Labor that introduced it. It was, relative to the size of the budget, a larger co-payment than what this Government is proposing and as you might know, the Shadow Assistant Treasurer, a former academic Andrew Leigh has written very enthusiastically in support of a co-payment and if it’s right to have a modest price signal when it comes to use of PBS drugs and the former Labor government certainly supported that, why shouldn’t we also have a modest co-payment for GP services, especially when the savings from this are going to be reinvested in medical research so they’re staying in our health system.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Ok, well just on the co-payment, one more question. We’re getting a lot of confusion as to whether it is capped at 10 visits per annum for everybody or whether it’s only capped for children and people with healthcare concession cards. Could you clarify this for us?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, I can and it is capped at 10 for people with a concession card or children under 16.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Ok, so for other people – someone like me for example, if I went 20 times I’d pay $140?
PRIME MINISTER:
If you currently go to a bulk-billing doctor and your doctor chooses to go down the path that we are recommending and you went 10 times you’d pay $70, if you went 20 times you’d pay $140. But there’s also the extended Medicare safety net and we are consolidating that with another Medicare safety net, so once your out-of-pockets reach a certain level, you would be helped by the Medicare safety net in addition to the standard rebate.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Ok, well at least that’s clarified. Now if I could just turn your attention to the temporary deficit reduction levy that will be applied on people whose incomes exceed $180,000.
PRIME MINISTER:
And that’s about three per cent of taxpayers.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Ok. Is it genuinely temporary?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well the legislation will say that it applies for three years, so when the legislation is passed – and we cannot collect the levy without the legislation being passed – when the legislation is passed, it will automatically terminate.
TOM ELLIOTT:
Alright and the petrol tax or the indexation of the petrol excise that took place until 2001 and was abandoned and is now being reimposed – are you going to devote all of the increase in petrol taxes to roads or will you put some of it towards debt reduction?
PRIME MINISTER:
No, all of the indexation money will go to roads. That will be mandated by legislation and just on the subject of excise indexation, the former government back in 2009 I think it was introduced a form of excise indexation on diesel for heavy transport. So, the righteous indignation that we’re getting, the huffing and the puffing that we had in the Parliament today from the Labor Party didn’t really have any base in moral consistency.
TOM ELLIOTT:
We better leave it there. Prime Minister Tony Abbott, thank you very much for your time.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thank you so much.
[ends]