24-January-2011
Portfolio Media Releases
Topics: Labor’s flood tax, funding the recovery
E&OE
STEVE PRICE:
We have not found one caller this morning on the program supporting a levy paying for Australia’s rebuild in flood-affected Queensland and in Victoria. Andrew Robb is the shadow finance spokesman. The opposition has made it pretty clear they’re against a levy. Good to talk to you again.
ANDREW ROBB:
Nice to speak to you Steve.
STEVE PRICE:
The government, what alternative do they have if they don’t have a levy, which it would appear they are going to announce this week?
ANDREW ROBB:
The fact is there is ample fat in the budget. They’ve got literally tens-of-billions. They still haven’t spent something of the order of $15 billion of the stimulus money, now that’s going to be competing if you like with the work that needs to go on in these areas.
We’ve got a skills shortage, yet you will have tradesmen in Melbourne and Sydney working on school halls when they could be and should be available for reconstruction work right throughout these flood-affected areas.
The government is just looking, I think, for an opportunistic excuse to fill the coffers and to take the pressure off them making the hard decisions at a time when people can least afford another new tax.
STEVE PRICE:
So this is more about them being able to honour their promise to put the budget back into surplus than it is about having to scramble to get the money for the reconstruction you think?
ANDREW ROBB:
Exactly and I do think that they’ve got every opportunity if the revenue pours in from China to still get close to a surplus at some stage.
The bottom line is they’ve spent and borrowed and taxed since they got into office three years ago and they’ve never shown any discipline in terms of their spending. They’ve wasted billions-and-billions-and-billions-of-dollars, it’s about time they took some hard decisions and not the cop-out of just putting another new tax on people at a time when electricity is very difficult to afford, water rates are difficult to afford, interest rates have gone up $6000 a year for the average mortgage. It’s not a time to bring in a new flood tax.
STEVE PRICE:
This is Bill Shorten, I don’t know if you heard him earlier, the Finance Minister, here’s what he said this morning to me: ‘Well the prime minister has said as late as the end of last week is that this disaster is gigantic, it’s of a scale we haven’t seen before. One of the options on the table is a flood levy. She’s also said, which hasn’t had the same degree of coverage and I can understand why the opposition don’t talk about this, because it doesn’t suit them, she said we are going to look at how we redirect existing government expenditure.’
So he says they are going to redirect existing government expenditure, what does that mean?
ANDREW ROBB:
Hopefully that means they are doing what they should do and that is having a look at the priorities on the spending of the money that they’ve already got.
What I’m saying and what we’ve been saying is that there is literally tens-of-billions-of-dollars in the budget, they’ve got this ‘Cash for Clunkers’, you’ve got Kevin Rudd intensifying his Security Council seat bid. How much money, how much aid money is he giving to African nations so that he can preen himself on the world stage with a Security Council seat?
All of this sort of unnecessary spending that is going on, they could sell Medibank Private, they could cut the consultants, they could freeze public service numbers for a year or two. They could divert-defer the NBN, they could defer any of the stimulus money, or stop the stimulus money. There is the money there, it is an excuse.
You don’t teach your kids to value money and to spend money wisely, by giving them as much as they want when they want it. And that’s what’s happened with this government. They’ve just borrowed and taxed and spent since they got here and it’s putting us, I think, in quite a perilous position.
STEVE PRICE:
I appreciate your time there as usual, Andrew Robb there the shadow finance spokesman.
Media Contact: Cameron Hill on 0408 239 521