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August 27, 2025
CHRIS KENNY: Joining me now is the Shadow Finance Minister, James Paterson. Good to see you, James.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Good to be with you mate.
CHRIS KENNY: Just to get you on your portfolio to start with, there's been a lot of debate lately about possible new taxes, ideas raised at the productivity roundtable. Tell us where we're heading with this stuff. I mean, the idea of taxing people because they have empty bedrooms is outrageous. It's our property, not the government's.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: There are some pretty wacky ideas out there at the moment, and it is very telling that the Albanese government is not even willing to rule out the craziest ideas in the public debate at the moment, let alone somewhat more mainstream ones. The crux of this problem, Chris, is that Jim Chalmers has let spending get out of control. This financial year, it will be the highest level as a proportion of the economy since 1986, outside the pandemic. And his only way of fixing that problem is by raising taxes. So he's softening the ground, trying to prepare us for tax increases that Labor did not take to the election. In fact, they ruled out at the election and said it was a Liberal Party scare campaign to suggest they would raise taxes after the election. But that is where I fear we are headed, particularly with their coalition partners in the Greens, helping them to control the Senate.
CHRIS KENNY: It looks like the Productivity Roundtable was really an idea to build up and pretend there's a consensus for some of these ideas. Here's the Assistant Treasurer.
[CLIP START]
DANIEL MULINO MP: What I will say, Speaker, is that those opposite have reduced themselves, and when it comes to tax, to this rule-in, rule-out game, what I would say is our tax policies have not changed. It's to reduce taxes on taxpayers, and that's what I stick by.
[CLIP END]
CHRIS KENNY: Well, there you are, James. It's pretty clear there. They refuse to rule out any tax increases.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: If they weren't going to increase taxes, the easiest thing in the world would be to say, we're not going to increase taxes. And it is telling because the Prime Minister did start to rule this sort of stuff out about a week ago. He said, of course, we're not going to do anything in this term that we didn't take to the election, but he hasn't repeated that since. Jim Chalmers has never said it, and they're certainly not saying it in the Parliament, where they're bound to tell the truth.
CHRIS KENNY: Yeah, well, with spending at record levels and taxation at record levels, I think it's pretty obvious that the problem isn't the tax. We need to get spending down, but that's a pretty unpopular thing to do. I want to tap into your national security brain, even though it's not in your portfolio area at the moment. My concern about what we now know about Iran, firstly, that Albanese and Labor have been so slow to act. So many people, both within this country, within the Coalition, commentators at home and abroad, have been calling for action against Iran, and Labor has been so reluctant to act until now. Why?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, we welcome what the government has done, and it is the right response to this, but it shouldn't have taken an incident this serious for them to realise that the bilateral relationship with Iran is not in Australia's national interest. In the last parliament, when I was the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, I wrote to Clare O'Neil, the Minister for Home Affairs, not once, not twice, but three times, offering bipartisan support to change the law so that the IRGC could be listed as a terrorist organisation. And the government responded to me and my colleagues, like Claire Chandler, and Simon Birmingham and others and said not only this could not be done, but it should not be because it would damage our bilateral relationship with Iran. At the very same time that we were anxiously worrying about our bilateral relationships with Iran, they were setting synagogues on fire in our community. So obviously, the Iranians weren't too worried about the state of the bilateral relationship. I think that's the lesson here for the future. Never again put a greater weight on a bilateral relationship with a despotic regime than your own national interests and your own nation's security.
CHRIS KENNY: I want to ask the question that I think is the big question that most Australians outside the political bubble might be thinking about, and that is, has the Iranian terror on our shores actually worked? Has the antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment that they have helped to stir up on our streets and in our communities helped to push the Albanese government to recognise the non-existent state of Palestine, therefore actually achieving the aims Iran was setting out to achieve?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, Iran would have had a couple of objectives from what they did. The first would have been to terrorise the Jewish community, well, unfortunately, that has worked. The second was to divide our country; unfortunately, that has worked. And the third is to influence our foreign policy, and it appears that that has worked too. And I think it is particularly shameful on this government that they have bowed to that pressure, that they've bowed to that incitement, that they've bowed to that state-sponsored terror.
CHRIS KENNY: Thanks for joining us, James. Good to see you.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Thank you.
ENDS