Media
|
Transcripts
September 29, 2025
TOM CONNELL: Now, Sussan Ley has been one of the people to criticise this speech from Anthony Albanese. Joining me live now is Shadow Finance Minister James Paterson. Thanks for your time. Interested in your views? Anthony Albanese met with the Defence Minister. The UK is obviously an important country. He met with a Conservative leader as well. Isn't it fair enough for him to be meeting all those people as well as giving this speech at a conference?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Tom, we've been supportive of the Prime Minister's trip, including to New York and the United Kingdom. He has had legitimate meetings while he is there, but attending and speaking at a partisan political conference while on an international trip representing Australia is completely inappropriate in two respects. Number one, it's a misuse of Australian taxpayers' money. If he wants to fly to address a Labour Party conference, then Labour Party donors can pay for that, not Australian taxpayers. And number two, it's quite a transparent attempt to intervene in the domestic politics of the United Kingdom and to prop up his friend, Sir Keir Starmer, who is reported as struggling in the polls. And his personal endorsement is an intervention in UK politics in a way that is not in Australia's national interest, should there be a change of government in the UK in the future.
TOM CONNELL: Were you entirely comfortable when Scott Morrison was alongside Donald Trump at the Visy Factory? It was seen in the end as basically a campaign event leading up to the US election.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, Anthony Albanese, of course, was highly critical of that event at the time, as were Labor MPs, so he is guilty of gross hypocrisy on that. But actually, there's a pretty big difference between those two events. Scott Morrison was attending a joint event with a US president at an Australian company that was announcing an investment in jobs that would benefit both countries. He wasn't speaking at the Republican National Convention endorsing Donald Trump, nor was he at a similar event to the Progress Action Summit, like the CPAC Summit that's held in Washington, DC, which is a conservative international conference. They would be similar events, which you could legitimately criticise them for, but these are actually quite different. And in any case, the Prime Minister thought that was inappropriate.
TOM CONNELL: What do you make of Nigel Farage's popularity? Is there a lesson for the Liberal Party on the way he's managed to gain popularity and the way he's campaigned?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: There are, of course, lessons from other democracies for Australian politics, but we should be a bit cautious in interpreting them and directly translating them. The United Kingdom has a first-past-the-post voting system, and they also effectively have four major parties, in some cases, five major parties. So, political success in the UK is getting about a third of the vote. The low 30s can get you a comfortable majority government, and that's what the polls predict if an election were held tomorrow, that Nigel Farage and his party would achieve and could form majority government. In Australian political context, that's not the case. We need a primary vote much higher than the low 30s. In the Liberal Party's case, we aspire to be high 30s to low 40s, and of course, you have to win a two-party preferred vote as well. You have to be preferred by the majority of Australians. So I think we should be cautious in trying to directly translate anything from that political system to ours.
TOM CONNELL: So if your colleagues are like, hey, let's tack right, ramp up populism, that would be your caution on that, that yes, that might lock in a third of the electorate right behind you, but maybe not much more.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Australia also has compulsory political voting, which the UK does not, and so that's another factor. I mean, I'm someone who very much believes that your core supporters, your base, if you like it, is a very important political constituency that parties must first lock in so they're in a position of strength to go after swing voters. I'm not one of those people who says you can completely disregard and overlook your base, that they're irrelevant, that they have no other choices. I think that's a huge mistake. But of course, it is swing voters who determine the outcomes of elections.
TOM CONNELL: In other words, those in the political centre, the budget result $10 billion in deficit, an improved result compared to expectations and really compared to some of the other deficit years in the past 10 years, not too bad. Do you give any credit to Labor?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, Jim Chalmers has told this story that because of his brilliance and the hard decisions of their government, he delivered two budget surpluses. But if he was so brilliant, he should have been able to continue that to have a third budget surplus, and he hasn't. And of course, the reason why that's the case is he's the happy beneficiary of the largest revenue surge in Australian political history to the tune of $370 billion over the last four years. And that has propped up his budget. But now even that extraordinary revenue surge is not enough to keep up with the extraordinary spending spree that Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher, and the Albanese government have been on. But all they had to do to deliver a third surplus was just a little bit of fiscal discipline. In fact, the $22 billion of net spending decisions in the last financial year has taken this from what would have been a $12 billion surplus to a $10 billion deficit. So he owns this deficit, as well as every deficit forecast for the next 10 years.
TOM CONNELL: So, Finance, your portfolio is the one where you're saying no and bringing that discipline on spending, if you like. We know you agree with Labor on Reining in the NDIS. What other broad areas of spending need attention in the short term, in your view?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Obviously, Tom, we're at the start of this term. And so I can't be completely definitive about potential saves that the Coalition might take to the next election after a couple more budgets. But one example that I can give you is the government's incentive to take up electric vehicles. It was supposed to cost $50 million. [It’s blown out to $500 million]. An absolutely massive and extraordinary blowout on this government's watch.
TOM CONNELL: OK. And that's not a small amount of money. But given you're talking about Labor being so profligate and having been in power for a while now, you must have identified areas. Are we talking social services? Is it fair to say there'd be savings in that portfolio?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: No, Tom, I'm not talking about wider savings at this point of the political cycle. There's going to be multiple budgets between now and then. Hopefully, the government will rein in things like the EV tax, which we also learned today in the Financial Review is overwhelmingly benefiting high-income earners, that is, people earning $150,000 or more. About 50% of the benefit is going to them, whereas only about 8% of taxpayers are earning more than that. So it's an egregious example, particularly if your motivation is to reduce emissions, because the effective cost of abatement identified by the Productivity Commission from this policy is about $20,000 per ton, when you can buy a ton of carbon emissions abatements for far, far less than that.
TOM CONNELL: Okay, so again, you've identified that element, but once we lead up to the election, how specific will you be on here's how we'll improve the budget bottom line? The criticism from the Peter Dutton time was all the broad comments were made without specifics on detail.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: We'll be totally transparent about any savings measures that we take to the next election. We will be honest and upfront about that. It's unusual for the opposition to nominate a specific area of spending, as I just have, this early in the parliamentary term, Tom. It's much more common for it to be much closer to the election as part of the costing process. But that's one that I'm indicating now we're very sceptical about. We've made no formal policy decisions on anything like that. But you've identified the NDIS and other areas of spending that has been completely out of control on this government's watch, which they themselves say they are going to bring that in. Well, we'll see what happens over the next two and a half years. And once we know what they've achieved in spending areas like that, then we'll be able to say more about what we would do if we won the next election.
TOM CONNELL: Got some fresh vision incoming for our viewers on what's happened in and around Bourke Street. Four arrests have been carried out. So four teenagers have been arrested. So this is vision we've just had come in of these teens being arrested, this car stolen yesterday. Thankfully, even though it had echoes of that 2017 Bourke Street rampage it was described as in which six people were killed, one woman has been injured, but not described as life threatening. Do you sense crime is going to play a big role in the state election, James Paterson, and youth crime in particular?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I suspect it will, Tom, because youth crime is out of control in Victoria on Jacinta Allan's watch and Victorians feel unsafe in their own homes. We just had crime statistics out last week, and they show enormous increases in aggravated burglaries, including inside people's homes, as well as some of the worst figures of youth crime we've ever seen in the history of this state. And that has all happened on Victorian Labor's watch, and it is a direct result of the fact that they have weakened our laws to make it easier for people to get out on bail, even after they've been arrested, on serious, violent crimes. It is not uncommon in stories like these to learn subsequently that the people accused of committing these offences are out on bail for numerous other violent offences, and I think Victorians have just had enough and they want a strong leader and a strong government that can deal with that. And I think Brad Battin and the Victorian Liberals can deliver it.
TOM CONNELL: Just to note, obviously, very early in this, we don't know anything about the alleged offenders or their backgrounds. I'm not saying you were saying that, but I'm just clarifying that for our viewers. James Paterson, appreciate your time. Thank you.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Thank you.
ENDS