Topics: Major fuel price relief for Australians under a Coalition Government; Labor’s cruel hoax tax changes; Labor’s bloated bureaucracy   

 

E&OE   

 

SABRA LANE: Angus Taylor, good morning. Welcome to AM.

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Great to be with you, Sabra.

 

SABRA LANE: Now the Coalition described the government's tax cut of $5 a week as an election bribe. Slashing fuel excise for a year, is that a bribe on steroids?

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Absolutely not. This is temporary, targeted, but immediate relief for some of the hardest working Australians who are under the most pressure out in our community. People, often double income families, with two cars in the suburbs, in the regions, travelling long distances to get to work, to drop off the kids, to visit friends, and they are under the most pressure. I mean, many, most have got mortgages, and we've seen since Labor came to power, a typical Australian family with a mortgage paying an extra $50,000 they weren't expecting to pay. I see the pressure on these families everywhere I go, including at places like food banks.

 

SABRA LANE: How much does this equate to a week? Tax cuts that the government's just legislated $5 a week, roughly. Yours?

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, typically, over the course of a year, it'll be, if it's a tank, a family, it'd be $750. If it's two tanks, it's $1,500. So that’s a family.

 

SABRA LANE: So that’s roughly …

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: So that’s a family …

 

SABRA LANE: $14 a week or something?

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Yeah, something like that. $14 a week. $28 a week for a week for a two-tank family and I mean, that's a significant help at a time which is really troubling for those sorts of families and I say, this is the group who are also suffering the greatest mortgage stress, who have the least capacity to deal with the pressures that they're under, and any shock they might have on those pressures, whether there's a big health bill or something else like that coming along.

 

SABRA LANE: Does this mean you would, if you win, repeal the tax cuts that were passed yesterday to make this happen? Because otherwise …

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Yes. This will replace what Labor is doing which we think is inappropriate under the circumstances that we’ve laid out in recent … in the last 24 hours.

 

SABRA LANE: So the party of lower taxes won’t …

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well this is lower tax, let’s be clear. It’s a lower tax and it’s alongside other major tax initiatives we’ve already announced, like accelerated depreciation for small businesses, like making sure we don’t have taxes on unrealised capital gains and like reestablishing the tax to GPP cap to make sure that overtime taxes are contained for Australian families.

 

SABRA LANE: But to be clear, you would repeal it?

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: We absolutely would repeal it.

 

SABRA LANE: The public service cuts that you've talked about. Is it now 41,000?

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, there's 41,000 we read in the budget, additional public servants since Labor came to power. We think the public service was big enough back when we were in government at the end of the COVID era. It doesn't need to be larger than that and this is on the back of …

 

SABRA LANE: But it's not just statistics. These are people.

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well of course they are …

 

SABRA LANE: And 41,000. That’s almost the size of Goulburn, your home town,

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: But Sabra … But Sabra, there's another group of people to consider here, and that group of people is the hard working taxpayers of Australia who are struggling to put food on the table, struggling to pay their insurance bills, struggling to pay the rent, struggling to pay the mortgage and struggling to pay the petrol bill, and that group of people have to pay the taxes that are necessary to fund what we do in government. Now, the essential services that Australians need in health and other areas, we want to protect, we want to keep them strong.

 

SABRA LANE: Will they all be quarantined?

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: We want to protect them and keep them strong. And we look, we've been pretty clear on our position on this in recent weeks, on Medicare, for instance but we think that the public service was big enough to be able to deal with what government does when we were back in in government, and it's on the back of something I learned many years ago, Sabra and I think this is important. You don't have to have a bigger team to have a better team. And we've seen that in the numbers. Labor has added,  Labor has added 40% to the size of the Department of Health and bulk billing’s gone from 88% to 77% and frankly, that is indicative of a government that doesn't understand that you can have a good team without having a bigger team.

 

SABRA LANE: Under the last Coalition Government, the public service jobs were sent out to consultants. That ended up costing $20 billion in the last year of the Morrison Government and as Katy Gallagher pointed out the other day, the capacity of the public service was eroded to the point where the public service came up with robo debt, and, in her words, innocent Australians were hunted down for money they didn't owe.

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Honestly, Katy Gallagher has presented absolutely no evidence of this, and I'll tell you why …

 

SABRA LANE: No we had the Royal Commission.

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, I'm not talking about … whether that's to do with the size of the public service or not, it's a whole other issue. But Katy Gallagher has not established that growing the size of the public service somehow reduces the cost of running government because we've seen the cost of government going up at an astronomical rate under Labor. I mean, the aggregate outcomes here are stunning. I mean, we're seeing around $400 billion of extra spending since Labor came to power. We have government at a size that we haven't seen in modern history. I mean, so the idea from Katy Gallagher that somehow she has magically reduced spending by doing this kind of switch is just nonsense. Absolute nonsense.

 

SABRA LANE: We could be into an election tomorrow. Peter Dutton had to read the riot act to the party room earlier this week and told colleagues to stop pretty much white-anting you. How helpful is it that the leader’s had to do that to encourage your colleagues to stop undermining you in that way.

 

ANGUS TAYLOR:

Sabra, one of the wonderful things about our jobs, yours and mine, is we get lots of free advice. We only have to go onto Twitter to see that.

 

SABRA LANE: I don’t.

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Probably for our mental health we shouldn't do that. So look, it's ‘X’ now I think, isn't it? But the point is, that's part of what you have when you’re high profile, you’re working hard. 

 

SABRA LANE: That must be pretty dispiriting though to know that your colleagues are saying that.

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well I’ve got, as you as you would have seen, a very large number of colleagues who are massively supportive of what Peter and I are doing, because we are fighting hard against a bad Labor government that has left Australians poorer, and we can't afford another three years of that and let me tell you, my colleagues understand that. Peter has made that point on many occasions, and we will continue to fight hard for those hardworking Australians who deserve relief at the bowser, who are paying too much for everything right now and who can get a better deal.

 

SABRA LANE: Thanks for talking to AM this morning.

 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Good to be with you.

 

ENDS.