Topics: Bill Shorten, social services omnibus bill, Budget,

 

E&OE

 

ANDREW BOLT:

Joining me is a man who has been in the Prime Minister’s inner-circle Special Minister of State Scott Ryan. Scott thanks for joining me.

 

SENATOR SCOTT RYAN:

Good evening Andrew.

 

BOLT:

Can Malcolm Turnbull – who is a very rich man himself – get away with painting Bill as the real crony of the rich?

 

SENATOR RYAN:

Malcolm has always been honest about his good fortune. In fact, when Bill Shorten first raised this he admitted that he was a lucky man, as well as someone who had worked hard. I think most Australians actually respect someone who wants to give other people opportunities that he has been so lucky with. He was pointing out today that Bill Shorten wants to deny those opportunities to other Australians.

 

BOLT:

Is this part of a deliberate strategy to, what’s called the Trump factor? This was an extraordinary speech from Turnbull. I haven’t heard anything like that vitriol and really nailing Shorten, and Shorten has been a hypocrite on this issue. A reaction to this revolt against the elites.

 

SENATOR RYAN:

I haven’t spoken to the Prime Minister today. What I’ll say is, after I came out of our Senate Question Time and saw what had happened in the House of Representatives, what I saw was Bill Shorten again trying to play the politics of identity and class, and bridge them together to create a culture of envy and personal hatred because of who someone is, not what they’ve done. Maybe for the Prime Minister it was the last straw?

I think what we saw today was an important statement defending the role of opportunity in Australia, rather than what Bill Shorten is all about, which is sledging those who have been successful, but at the same time, admit they have been lucky. This is the lucky country after all. I think Australians respect someone who admits that luck played a role as well.

 

BOLT:

You’re saying he did a response to point out that Bill Shorten is standing in the way of other people getting rich. I presume you mean this is tied to your policy that you announced today of bringing back these welfare spending cuts and new social security bill watered down from the last version that’s going to save about $5.5 billion over the next four years. Is that what you mean?

 

SENATOR RYAN:

It’s also partly that Bill is the ultimate insider. Bill Shorten has been in professional politics or professional unions his entire life. As the Prime Minister pointed out, as my colleagues pointed out, he hasn’t run a business and employed people. He hasn’t given other people those opportunities, and as the Prime Minister so brutally pointed out today, Bill Shorten’s union took money from companies and then saw the penalties of low-paid workers reduced.

You mentioned the social security bill that came forward today, and we’ve had to make compromises to get it through the Senate, that’s yet another step in cleaning up Labor’s mess and doing the ultimate investment in our future, which is bringing the budget into balance. Every single saving matters in achieving that.

 

BOLT:

You’re cutting family tax benefit supplements, you’re making young people wait a month – or you want to make them wait a month – before going on the dole, a number of others, a whole forest of cuts. Most of them I’d say ‘big tick’, but it’s interesting that you’ve wrapped this all up as a bill – and that’s how you’re selling it – to increase spending. Do you think it’s a bit tricky not actually coming clean that it’s actually more about the savings than the spending on childcare?

 

SENATOR RYAN:

We tried to do them separately. We’ve had, for over a year, in fact about 18 months, a childcare package that we said we wanted to increase childcare support for lower income, mainly women, to allow them to get back to work. We know that when people are out of the workforce, if you have inter-generational unemployment, you limit kids’ opportunities. We want to help people get back into work and at the lower-income level, access to childcare is important. The extra support won’t go to people like me, I’ve got children. It will actually go to people who are on much, much lower incomes, as it should.

We couldn’t get it through separately, it’s been rolled together into what’s called an omnibus bill so we can make savings, direct some of those towards childcare, but at the same time, improve the budget.

 

BOLT:

Now doing it this way, is it going to be your insistence again that the Senate can’t pass extra spending on childcare unless it also accepts these $5.5 billion of spending cuts as well? You can’t have the goodies without actually going through the pain, are you going to insist on that?

 

SENATOR RYAN:

Well the Government has held up the childcare package over the last 18 months precisely on that principle. I haven’t been privy to the negotiations about individual measures here, but we’ve made clear, we’re not going to be undertaking new spending without savings to pay for it.

 

BOLT:

This cuts just over a billion dollars a year from the social services budget, which is about $160 billion a year, and that’s when government gross debt is about to reach half a trillion dollars. Look, every little helps, this is great, but in the big picture, it’s a small cut and more cuts are needed, aren’t they?

 

SENATOR RYAN:

We do need to keep trimming the social services budget. You can’t actually balance the Commonwealth budget without looking – 40 per cent of the Commonwealth budget is a transfer payment of some sort. Now we have an aging population, which is adding pensioners to the pension rolls every single week, and at the same time, we want to take care of those who have fallen on hard times, but we want to help them get back in the workforce. I think we do need to explain to Australians that almost $4 in every $10 that is spent by the Commonwealth Government are transfer payments from one Australian to another, or critical services like the NDIS.

 

BOLT:

Given all that, Scott, and the debt reaching this amazing figure of half a trillion, can we actually afford to be talking about increasing spending on childcare?

 

SENATOR RYAN:

There are two aspects to this Andrew, the more people we get into work, the less spending we’ll have on transfer payments and income support payments, not just now, but as Christian Porter – in the research he commissioned last year – outlined so effectively, this can have a decades long effect on expenditure. We are still actually paying welfare support for people who might have fallen through the net a decade ago.

But the other reality of this is, Andrew, that we also need to get things through the Senate. We have tried on many occasions to get spending reductions through, or even, simply, reductions in the rate of growth in which spending increases. If you can’t get something through the Senate, it really isn’t going to change the budget, that’s what we need to accept. That compromise is the reality we face.

 

BOLT:

I accept that right, and you’re quite right, but the blame lies with the Labor Party, the Greens and those crossbenchers that are frustrating spending cuts, but boy, it’s a sad state when we can have all this fuss and all this argument about small cuts to a huge budget when we’ve got a massive debt. Doesn’t it scare you too that this is actually so small in the big scheme of things?

 

SENATOR RYAN:

Absolutely. I’ve been in Parliament for eight and a half years, when I started, we still had the savings of the Howard and Costello era in the bank. They were not only blown quickly during the Global Financial Crisis by Kevin Rudd, but then they legislated, as Mathias Cormann and Scott Morrison pointed out, there have been legislated increases in spending that have increased the deficit, even without our ability to control it.

Seventy-five per cent of the Commonwealth Budget is set in separate legislation so you actually need to get the numbers in the Senate to change the spending of three-quarters of the Commonwealth budget. Now we haven’t given up on that and we are constantly pursuing that case, but we have to convince the people and we have to convince 39 senators.

 

BOLT:

I think the country is in for a hell of shock down the track because I can’t see that happening, but listen, the Prime Minister, all right, I’ve written him off, said he is finished all that kind of stuff. You clearly don’t agree, tell me how he can turn the ship around? Was today part of a new strategy to be more the common man as far as he can?

 

SENATOR RYAN:

Well one of the things I learnt from the Howard era – and for people on my side of politics Andrew, that really is the gold standard, that’s the role model – is that you can be in a difficult spot between elections.

John Howard batted his way out – to use a cricket analogy – of some very, very difficult spots. You have to stay true to your values, you have to stay true to the promises you made to the people and you have to focus on delivering, in Barnaby Joyce’s words, real, tangible outcomes. Things that people can point to, things that people can relate to how their lives have improved.

We’ve got two and a half years to the next election and at that point, we are going to be judged on how we delivered the promises we made last time and how we’ve responded to the challenges in between. The Prime Minister has talked about energy prices, with Josh Frydenberg, in particular, and that is going to be, as well as energy security, and that is a critical agenda item for Australia this year.

 

BOLT:

Scott Ryan, thank you so much for your time.

 

[ENDS]