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May 2, 2025
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SARAH FERGUSON:
In a final pitch for your vote, the campaign spokespeople for both major parties join me now, Finance Minister Katie Gallagher and Shadow Minister for Home Affairs James Paterson. Both of you, welcome to 7.30.
JAMES PATERSON:
Great to be with you both.
KATY GALLAGHER:
Thank you.
SARAH FERGUSON:
Katy Gallagher, if I may start with you. Have you done enough to convince voters to look past the hardships of this first term, in particular the very sharp drop in disposable income?
KATY GALLAGHER:
Well, I think we've gone through the campaign with a clear and positive plan for Australia's future. We've been very focused on the things that matter for Australians, so Medicare, tax cuts, cheaper medicines, student debt relief, all of those areas that we know will make a difference for people with cost of living pressures, but also looking to the future about how we build that better future for Australia by making things here, and supporting skills and education. We've been out, you know, talking to people all over the country. It's been, it feels like a long campaign sitting with you both here on Friday night. But, you know, people will make their decision tomorrow. But I think overall, we've run a very positive campaign. I think that's been in stark contrast to the Opposition, who have had quite a chaotic campaign.
SARAH FERGUSON:
Let me bring James Paterson in there. Would you like to respond to that?
JAMES PATERSON:
Well, a positive campaign would be one without lies, and this Prime Minister, as of today, has told more than 100 lies in this campaign. His latest lie is that the Opposition is proposing changes to the pension for people who travel overseas. There are no such changes. We are making no proposed changes to people on the age pension who travel overseas. It is a bald-faced lie, just like his lie that Peter Dutton is proposing a nuclear power facility in his electorate of Dickson. The Prime Minister wouldn't need to lie this much if he had a good record to run on, but I think the Labor Party knows deep down that Australians are rightly angry that their living standards have dropped more than at any other time in Australian history, that we've dropped worse than any other developed country in the world over the last three years, and that there's no reason to expect it would get any better if the Prime Minister is re-elected, particularly in minority parliament with his Teal and Green allies.
SARAH FERGUSON:
Can I just ask you, just for a moment, James Paterson, to stay with you. Do you believe, as Peter Dutton has said, that there are numbers of silent and angry Australians who come out to vote tomorrow and change what the polls are telling us?
JAMES PATERSON:
Well, there's about 10 million voters who are yet to vote, who'll cast their ballot tomorrow, Sarah. And most of the public opinion polls are suggesting that there's a significant soft vote among them, that a lot of voters do decide late, some as late as in the polling booth when they pick up the pencil, and they'll have to decide, do they want $14 off a tank every time they fill up their petrol or diesel? Do they want a $1,200 tax rebate next year? Do they want a strong economic plan under Peter Dutton, who can get cost of living under control and our country back on track?
SARAH FERGUSON:
It is correct to say, Katy Gallagher, that there is still, according to the pollsters, a very large soft vote out there. What do you think is going to appeal to them tomorrow from the policies that you've put forward?
KATY GALLAGHER:
Well, I think all of those policies I've outlined, so our investments in Medicare, our investments in housing, the tax cuts.
SARAH FERGUSON:
I beg your pardon, if I can just rephrase it, what do you think is cutting through? That's a long list. We've heard it over and over again, of course, from both sides, your lists. What do you thing is going to cut through and can reach those still soft voters?
KATY GALLAGHER:
Well, I mean, I think it is overall our campaign message. We've had a clear message. We've provided our costings. We've provided transparency. We've let people know how we want to help them. And I think what they saw yesterday afternoon with the release of the Liberal costings, no wonder in the dying days of the campaign, you know, bigger deficits, higher taxes, and savage cuts to pay for nuclear, and I think that certainly has been front and centre of people's minds. Like, what do you want for the future? Do you want seven nuclear reactors built around this country that you're going to pay for with your taxes? Or do you want a government that's doing the credible and hard work to build Australia's future with our investments in those important social services, but also in jobs and better wages for Australians? And that's our message to those voters that are still making up their minds.
SARAH FERGUSON:
James Paterson, has there been an issue with your campaign about complex policies being left too late in the campaign and also a disconnect or a failure in the relationship between the travelling party that is the leader, and HQ.
JAMES PATERSON:
We've certainly taken some very big and very ambitious ideas to this election because that's what we believe is in Australia's national interest. We believe that we're not going to complete this transition to net zero by 2050 without emissions-free nuclear power. And Katy is wrong, and she knows she's wrong, when she says that taxpayers will pay for it. A government business enterprise will take out loans to pay for it, it'll generate an economic return, and there'll be no cost to taxpayers on the budget. It's been independently costed by Frontier Economics and the CSIRO at a fraction of the cost of what Labor has said. And this is just another lie that they've told in this campaign. I don't want to do the post-mortem for the election tonight on your program with all due respect, Sarah, but I have to say that the stuff that's been written in the media is massively overstated. It has been a highly professional and competent campaign.
SARAH FERGUSON:
What number of seats would Peter Dutton need to win tomorrow to maintain his position as leader, James Paterson?
JAMES PATERSON:
I'm not going to nominate a figure tonight. You won't be surprised by that, Sarah. We'll wait until the votes are counted. We will wait until the votes have been cast before we make any decisions about the future. But I'm confident as Australians contemplate the future of another three years of Anthony Albanese and Labor, another hit to their living standards, another blowout in the cost of living, that they won't want to contemplate that.
SARAH FERGUSON:
Now, Katy Gallagher, just on the issue of the costings this week, of course, Labor delivered its costings in opposition at exactly the same moment in the campaign last time, so that criticism seems ill-founded. But in the, if I may, just for a moment, in the Opposition's costings, they are showing a $14 billion saving over the four years of the forward estimates. Do you give them some credit for making an effort to start to bring back the debt and deficit?
KATY GALLAGHER:
Well, I think the release of the costings yesterday was a massive con job. I don't accept for a moment, I've had a look at their costings pretty thoroughly, I don't accept for a moment that they would actually with that plan deliver an improved bottom line. I think it's made on dodgy numbers about public service cuts, 41,000 jobs to go. And I think the big difference is when we released our costings last election as you point As we were going through the campaign we were releasing the costings as we announced policies and that's been a big difference and also we weren't going to the election with this massive $600 billion nuclear reactor scheme which hasn't been accounted for in their costings. Massive con-job, cuts, cuts to services, very clear in those costings, higher taxes, bigger deficits in the short term. And I don't accept any of those numbers, and I don't think most people who understand costings accept any of those numbers either.
SARAH FERGUSON:
At the same time, James Paterson referred earlier to a last-minute scare campaign that the government is running about age pensioners who will lose their benefits if they travel overseas. The Prime Minister said today that the government is serious. Is a scare campaign like that, the day before an election, serious?
KATY GALLAGHER:
Well, there are pensions, there are cuts to the pensions in their costings document.
JAMES PATERSON:
No, there aren't, Katy, you know that's not true, that is not true, Katy, and you know it.
KATY GALLAGHER:
I mean, James can clarify that for us if he'd like to, they're there in the costings documents.
JAMES PATERSON:
No, that's not true.
KATY GALLAGHER:
You can clarify what your policy is, but that's our understanding of your policy.
JAMES PATERSON:
Well, you are wrong, you are wrong, Katy.
KATY GALLAGHER:
But, perhaps if we had had more time than you throwing them out on Thursday afternoon and then not being there to explain them, or give people enough time to work through them, you would be able to explain that. But based on what we saw in your numbers, that is our understanding of what is happening.
SARAH FERGUSON:
James Paterson, I want to ask you about working from home. It was obviously one of the biggest moments of the campaign. It came early, it was very damaging to your prospects, to the Coalition's arguments that it was making. In your view, will that turn out to be the most decisive issue if you lose tomorrow?
JAMES PATERSON:
It's a nice try, Sarah, to get me to do the post-mortem in a different way. I'm not going to do that. But what I'm very happy to acknowledge is that that policy was a mistake. We've clearly owned up to that. We've taken responsibility for that. I think that's what responsible political leadership is. We're not perfect. We don't always get things right. And when we do get things wrong, as we did with that policy, we owned up to it and we changed, rather than sticking by it. I wish the Prime Minister had that strength of character. I wish he was able to do that. He's never able to admit fault. He's been asked many times in this campaign by journalists, is there anything he's done wrong? Is there anything that he would do differently? He's never able to acknowledge anything he does wrong. He can't even acknowledge when he falls off the stage. And I think that is a revealing character trait.
SARAH FERGUSON:
There's been a lot of discussion in the analysis of the campaign about the effect of Donald Trump, and particularly the effect it had on some of the values that the Coalition was expressing in the early days. Have you been very unlucky in your timing, James Paterson, to have this election campaign take place under the shadow of Donald Trump at his most chaotic?
JAMES PATERSON:
Maybe or maybe not, Sarah, we'll find out tomorrow night when the votes come in. Certainly, it has had a dramatic effect on the Canadian election. I think we can all observe the opposition leader there, who lost 20 points in the polls over the course of the last few months in the lead-up to their election. We'll know what the result is in our election, but I have to say two things. Donald Trump is not on the ballot in Australia. Peter Dutton is. Anthony Albanese is. But no-one can vote for Donald Trump in this country. And secondly, I do think it is irresponsible for the government to have weaponised this in a domestic political context. The US relationship is our most important security relationship. It should not be used as a political weapon in an election. That's exactly what this government has done and I hope if they are successful at this election, if they do win a second term, that they've got a plan to deal with an administration that they have used as political weapon in a political campaign.
KATY GALLAGHER:
Honestly, we've seen plenty of weaponising of international relationships through this campaign, plenty of it from your leader, including putting our defence relationship on the table with the U.S. and verbally the Indonesian President, all in the same week. I think that's pretty startling. But Sarah, there has been policies imported from overseas. I think Peter Dutton thought he could get away with working from home. He thought it would be a great culture war to play and he played the card and it didn't work and people in the suburbs that find parking, and you know, commuting, and juggling kids were shocked and horrified and the response to that was a real one, because we know that's how they, you know, modern families balance everything but I think they thought they'd get away with it and when they didn't they had to backflip.
SARAH FERGUSON:
All right, well, we're going to find out tomorrow what the judgement of the voters is. But in the meantime, Katy Gallagher, James Paterson, thank you very much indeed for joining us this evening.
JAMES PATERSON:
Thank you.
ENDS