Malcolm Roberts’ review of Labor’s first budget

This budget will jack up power prices, keep inflation roaring to new heights and do nothing to help you from day to day. I joined Sky News the night it was delivered to talk about my initial reaction.

Transcript

Welcome back to our coverage of the budget. Tonight the Treasurer has laid out his economic plan, and while Labour has the numbers in the House of Reps, the Senate cross-bench will be critical for whether the government can pass its various measures. Here’s a reminder of the state of play: 39 votes are needed to pass bills into law. The government has 26, meaning it needs another 13 to get its agenda across the line. The Greens have 12 of those, with another five Senators representing minor parties, and one independent. Joining me live on the desk, is three of those crucial cross-benchers that could make or break the Labour budget. Senator Jacqui Lambie, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, and Greens Treasury spokesman, Nick McKim, great to see you all. Senator Lambie, let’s start with you. What did you think of Jim Chalmers’ first budget?

Oh, I have to say, they’ve played it very safe, haven’t they? It’s really is a mini budget. They’ve got five months up their sleeve, they’re buying time here. They’re gonna have to make some tough decisions by May. We’ve got a massive blowout in the NDIS. We’ve got the cost of living pressures out there, and I think we’ve just, I’ve just seen on the TV in the last five minutes, the gas prices are gonna go up 20% in two years. I tell you what, we are really under the pump in this country, and then we have a major deficit we’ve gotta payoff. That’s where we’re at, some tough decisions. They need to go back to the drawing board. It’s lovely, it’s all been touchy-feely. Let’s see what the May budget looks like, but they’re gonna have to make some cuts, and they’re gonna have to be tough.

Nick McKim, what’s your take on Jim Chalmers’ first effort?

Oh look, there’ll be a lot of disappointed people in the country, I reckon. I mean, this budget’s got more than a width of austerity about it. The government, and the Treasurer, have acknowledged the challenges, and Jacqui talked a little bit about those. I mean, they say they want wages to go up. Wages are gonna go down, then they’re gonna flat-line. They say they want employment to go up, but actually unemployment is going up. They say they want to be fair to people, but actually they’ve got stage-three tax cuts, which give a quarter of a trillion dollars in tax breaks, overwhelmingly benefiting the top end of town. And people who are really struggling to make ends meet, are not getting much assistance at all in this budget.

Malcolm Roberts, is it a budget for the times, as Jim Chalmers argues?

[Malcolm Roberts] It’s a budget for the continuation, and falling off a cliff I think, because workers have already gone backwards 10%. Anybody who earns a wage or salary is going back 10%, and will continue to go back because we’ve got rapid inflation. Wages won’t move anywhere nearly as quickly. We’ve got high cost of living pressures. We’ve got high energy prices. Prices are forecast to go up 50% next year Kieran, and 50% the year after. People can’t handle that. That’s a doubling of prices. 100% increase over two years, that’s a doubling. We’ve got a climate change, there’s very few specifics. The housing, we talk about a million houses.

[Jacqui] Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I can see you nodding your head Jacqui, a million houses, how? Where’s the provision?

Yeah.

[Malcolm Roberts] We can see 20, $25 billion on climate. Well, 20 of it is on poles and wires. It’s just gonna increase the cost of electricity from far-flung areas. We’ve already got the poles and wires we need from coal-fired power stations. This is absurd.

With that rewiring the nation, that project that Malcolm Roberts is alluding to there, it’s $20 billion. A lot of challenges in terms of workforce and supplies in getting that done. Does that mean that power prices rise at least in the short term until that’s all established?

Well, this budget makes it very clear that, retail electricity prices will go up 56% in the next two years. So there is no doubt that we are facing massive pressures on household bills. I wanna talk a little bit about the housing announcement.

[Kieran] There were those numbers there. So you have 20% this year, 30% next year-

[Nick] That’s right, they have compounded.

[Kieran] -for electricity and gas. Yeah, that’s 56. And then the gas 20 and 20.

[Nick] That’s right.

[Kieran] As Jacqui suggested.

[Nick] That’s right.

[Kieran] So, we’re talking a massive hit to-

We are talking massive hits on household budgets, and what the government could have done is walk away from the tax cuts for the top end, and put in place genuine cost of living measures. They could have put dental into Medicare, mental health support into Medicare, done more on childcare, built more affordable homes, wipe student debt. Like there’s plenty the government could do. And the money was there. A quarter of a trillion dollars, $250 billion over 10 years overwhelmingly favouring the top. We’re all gonna get a 9,000; Jacqui, Malcolm, and I will all get a $9,000 a year tax break, and there is nothing in that package for minimum income.

Do you think there should have been direct support on power prices? Because obviously there’s this challenge with the inflationary environment right now, that if they write checks,

Yeah, the challenges.

they could have a counterproductive effect.

The challenges with this country over the years of both major parties have sold us out. We no longer own things. This is the problem. So, we’re relying on other people to generate our power for us, and that cost us a lot more money instead of leaving it in the hands of what we should have been as private investors. That’s where we were at in 2021. And that’s been really unfortunate. I don’t know what you do about those power prices, ’cause quite frankly, we have no control over the companies that run them. They can pretty much run amok all they like, and that’s where we’re at.

Should there be price caps or something of that sort?

Something needs to be done, whether it’s price caps or, I think Daniel Andrews is buying his lot back. Isn’t he in Victoria? He’s worked out, it’s costing them a fortune. He’s got no control over it. He’s buying it off. We have control over ours in Tasmania. We’re very lucky the state government owns ours, and they could give us, they could relieve that pressure as well by giving us cuts. They don’t do that, that is their choice. We pay a little bit less than the rest of you, but I can tell you now, this is where the state government of Tasmania is really gonna feel it, because there’s no way Tasmanians can afford for our power prices to go up 5%, let alone 20.

We’re talking of massive impact. What do you think? Should there be price signal or price cuts?

[Malcolm Roberts] No, definitely not. If you look at childcare, it’s increasingly getting more and more subsidies. The prices go up, whenever you subsidise something, people charge more for it. I mean it’s that simple, this is basic economics. Manufacturing will get really decimated by this. First of all, the cost of electricity is now the number one cost category in any manufacturing, any manufacturing. It used to be labour, labor’s not anymore. It’s electricity. What we’re doing is, we’re subsidising the Chinese to instal these parasitic mal investments. They’re kamikaze investments, solar and wind, to raise the price of electricity, everywhere in the world, where they’ve increased solar and wind, they’ve increased the price of electricity, startlingly. Manufacturing will be driven out of the country yet more.

What’s your read on that? Because obviously in the short term, there are challenges with transmission. The poles and wires that we spoke about, they need to be done to accommodate.

Absolutely.

But Malcolm Robert’s argument there, that it’ll just simply continue to drive prices up, renewables.

Oh no, I mean you could legislate to put in place price caps. I mean there’s a very common thing to do around the world, and I don’t accept Malcolm’s argument there. I mean ultimately…

[Malcolm Roberts] It’s in the figures, empirical figures all around the world. Every country, Spain, Germany, any country that goes heavily into solar and wind, it increases their prices of electricity.

I know Malcolm doesn’t believe in climate change, but the sciences-

[Malcolm Roberts] I believe in climate variability Nick.

absolutely have to to rapidly reduce our emissions in this country. And the best way to provide the cheapest power is more investment in renewables, and less into propping up the dirty, old coal-fired clunkers because they are unreliable. They’re old infrastructure, building new fossil fuel plants, including gas, is more expensive than putting in place distributed generation of renewable energy close to the centres of demand, supported by battery store.

The challenge in the the short term obviously, workforce shortages, supply shortages, these are all bottlenecks,

[Nick] They are.

in terms of that process, aren’t they?

Yeah, absolutely they are. And, now there was some welcome investment in the budget into TAFE and vocational education. I think that’s a good thing, but that does take obviously time to flow through.

Do you see Jacqui Lambie, I think you alluded to it earlier, but with this spending approach, Jim Chalmers says it’s 99% of the additional commodities, and tax revenue has been banked. Is this an attempt to say, “Okay, we’re not doing a Liz Truss budget, we’re gonna be responsible, and this is almost like a stepping stone to the May budget, where those broader changes might eventuate.”

Well, I think if you follow Liz’s Truss’s track, you’re not gonna last very long. That would be my my first point. But look, we’ve been really, really lucky with our commodities in this country. We’ve made a lot of money outta them. We don’t know if we’re gonna do that next year, the year after. We don’t know whether there’s gonna be a call for as much of those resources as around the rest of the world. I wouldn’t think there will be. We’ve had a really great year on that. That’s great. And we’ve all got a little bit GST extra outta that for our states, that’s a fabulous thing. We’ve seen that, I’m sure $360 million extra in Tasmania is gonna help us a lot. We’re only a small state, and that that will go to fixing things. But we cannot rely on this. We really need to look at those stage-three tax cuts. I believe that, those people in those lower incomes, certainly give them a tax cut, give them a bit of a break. It’s gonna be tough for them over the next few years. There’s no doubt about that. But people on the 120, a 100 or 1,000, where’s the cutoff to say, “You know what? We can’t afford to give you a tax cut at this point in time. Something needs to be done.” We can save billions of dollars there. There’s no doubt about that. I have to laugh about their TAFE, when they, they’re gonna chuck a billion dollars back into TAFE, Kieran, which is lovely. I’d remind the Labour Party, they cut $4 billion outta that education fund about three years ago alongside the Labour Party. So good on you for putting it back. Better late than ever. And I’ll be very grateful for that. But right now, we have a deficit and we cannot ignore that. And we have to start paying that back. We also have to pay up there for that NDIS, and something has to give here.

Malcolm Roberts, the Treasurer says that we need to have a conversation, a national conversation, and the tax needs to be part of that conversation. Where should we head in terms of the debate about the structural deficit? Because quite clearly, he’s identified the illness, not necessarily the entire cure this evening.

[Malcolm Roberts] Good question. First of all, we need the end, I’ll get into tax in a minute, but we need to end the black armband view of mining. Mining has pulled this country out of a mess for the last two years. And the coal prices were forecast in last budget are around about $60 a tonne. They’re $400 in actual fact, iron ore similarly, very much higher than they were forecast be. If it wasn’t for mining, we’d be well and truly deeper in the brown stuff. Now, tax, we need to make it simple. We need to make it, so that the multinationals automatically pay their tax. They’re not doing it at the moment. The Liberal Party in 1953 put in the Double Taxation Recognition Act, which basically made large foreign multinationals, not pay company tax, that’s absurd. The petroleum resources tax, that Bob Hawke’s Labour Party brought in the ’80s, made sure that the largest tax evader in the world, Chevron, pays not a cent, while they export billions of dollars worth of our natural gas. And we’re the largest gas, we’re the largest exporters of energy in the world. And we get bugger all for it here. We have the highest gas prices, we have the highest-

So do you think a profits tax, a super profits tax or something like that?

[Malcolm Roberts] I think you get back to basics, and you actually tax multinationals on the widgets they make. That’s an interim one. But we’ve gotta have a simpler tax system, bring it back to basics. We’ve got way outta kilter. It’s far too complex. The GST was supposed to-

New mines, new gas projects and so on. But this remains a lucrative transition fuel, does it not?

We have argued consistently for a corporate super profits tax. We have argued consistently for super profits taxes particularly targeted at fossil fuel companies. And I wanna make this point about taxation. In this budget, it was revealed tonight, that the petroleum resource rent tax is gonna bring in $450 million over the forward estimates, less than what we were told it would last year. We are in the middle of a so-called gas boom, and the big gas companies are gonna be paying $450 million bucks less tax along with the other companies. The petroleum resource rent tax targets less tax than what they were forecast to last year. It’s an absolute roar.

So obviously that’s your,

And it needs to be fixed.

that’s your thinking, in terms of where the Treasurer should start this conversation.

He could do that. He could walk away from the quarter of a trillion dollars, the $250 billion in stage-three tax cuts. That’s what they will cost over the next 10 years. Negative gearing, reform capital gains tax reform, which would stop these spiking house prices, which are pricing too many people out of a home. And meaning that at the moment, homes are like an investment class, rather than a human right. There’s so much we could do, and so many levers at Jim Chalmers’ disposal, and he’s basically pulled none of them.

[Malcolm Roberts] I think we might have found something that Nick, and I agree on, because the government is talking about, housing price is a simple matter of supply and demand, right Kieran?

Is is that a first by the way? I think it might be.

[Malcolm Roberts] Yeah, no, no. Nick and I have helped each other-

I’m worried, I’m worried.

[Malcolm Roberts] on quite a few things. Housing prices are a matter of supply and demand. The supply is up to the local governments, and some extent the state governments. Federal government’s got nothing to do with that. The demand, the federal government’s gonna shoot up by increasing immigration, 180,000 net, permanent.

No, now, just to be clear, we don’t agree on that. And I just wanna say about housing, the headline from the government is a million new homes. When you look at the fine print in the budget, it’s 10,000.

We’ve got two and a half minutes left, before we cross over to Paul Murray and his special tonight. Let’s get some final thoughts, overarching thoughts if we can, Jacqui Lambie to you as we wrap up this evening. What would you like to leave our viewers in terms of your assessment? Obviously, you believe that this is really a stepping-stone budget in many respects, and a lot of work to come over six months.

Yeah, I think it is a stepping-stone budget. They’re just dipping their toe in the water at the moment. They’ve got some big decisions to make over the next six months. And-

And is it largely around the NDIS? Is it your view that that’s the role?

I think it’s around everyone, everything. I am just gonna step forward here, and say that they’re giving the GST to the states, because they’re gonna expect those states to start giving some heavy lifting and they’re gonna say, “Hey, we gave you extra GST. You go fix that.” I reckon that’s exactly what they’re doing. It is not going to be enough. Our people are really hurting out there. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better, especially if we do go, we’re already heading into recession. If we hit a recession, we’ve got interest rates going up out there. Houses are losing their value. We’ve got many young kids that invested in them. We’re in dire straits going in, into the next 12 months, and they’re gonna have to make some really tough decisions for that May budget. And you know what, this is what we’re gonna say, “Is Labour made of the steel that it thinks it is?”

Malcolm Roberts, your final assessment as we wrap up?

[Malcolm Roberts] Yeah, they’ve completely missed the major points, A paper presented, I’ll read these figures. A paper presented to Cabinet, calculated the value difference in exporting bauxite, the ore, versus processed aluminium in ’19, $70. Just imagine what these figures would be today, exporting 1 million tonnes of bauxite, the raw material earned $5 million. Processed one step into alumina, earned $27 million, more than five times as much, processed again into aluminium, earned a $125 million, and processed finally into aluminium products, earned $600 million. If they’re fair thinking about manufacturing, they need to fix electricity prices and get on with the tax reform.

Malcolm thank you, and Nick McKim finally to you as we wrap up.

Yeah, sure. Look, I’ll be brief ’cause I know we’re nearly outta time, but in one word, disappointing. People voted for change at the Federal Election this year. They didn’t get much change in the budget tonight. It was pretty bland, pretty disappointing. It’s left an awful lot of people behind, but the top end of town are pretty happy with it.

Greens Treasury spokesman Nick McKim, Malcolm Roberts of One Nation and Jacqui Lambie, great to see you all. Thanks for joining.

Thank you.

Thank you Kieran.

Thank you for your company at home, here on our Sky News.