SENATOR THE HON KATY GALLAGHER
MINISTER FINANCE
MINISTER FOR WOMEN
MINISTER FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TV INTERVIEW
ABC NEWS BREAKFAST
TUESDAY, 14 JANUARY 2025
SUBJECTS: National Autism Strategy; more high-speed NBN for Australians.
AMELIA MOSELEY, HOST: Let’s get more on our top story this morning, Australia’s first-ever National Autism Strategy. We have Finance Minister Katy Gallagher joining us now from Hobart. Minister, I know that this is a bit of a personal story for you, but I’ll first say that today the government’s announced a $42 million investment to improve the lives of autistic Australians. How do you see this really helping issues like unemployment and a lack of support services for autistic Australians, particularly younger autistic Australians?
SENATOR THE HON KATY GALLAGHER, MINISTER FOR FINANCE: Morning, Amelia, thanks for having me on. Yeah, this is a personal issue for me, but importantly, this first National Autism Strategy is about ensuring that we’re looking after all people with autism across the country and really honing in on those areas, as you say, like economic inclusion, community support, better facilities and being conscious, I think, of the needs of autistic people. As a parent of a young woman, I always think of her as a child, with autism, I know first-hand how hard it has been to have the right tests done, the diagnoses done, and how, in a sense, without all of that, how lost I think she felt for many years as we navigated that path. So, trying to make that easier for parents and autistic people themselves is really important and Amanda Rishworth has done an incredible job on this. I’m really pleased to have the first Strategy out there now.
MOSELEY: But Minister, how do you see that $42 million actually really turning into those services and you know, creating more employment for people with autism?
GALLAGHER: Well I guess, that’s not the only funding that goes into providing support for people with autism. This is funding that underpins that Strategy, which sets those key criteria. It is about looking at ways to open up, as you say, better employment opportunities, greater inclusion for people with autism, better understanding of how people with autism navigate the world, but obviously that’s only a small part of the other supports that are available for autistic people across the country. But you know, this is really in a sense for many people with autism been a bit of a hidden condition, where we’ve forced people with autism to navigate the non-autistic world and that’s difficult for many of them and so this is, I think, a real step in providing greater community understanding of how autistic people navigate the world that non-autistic people live in and how we can better support them to do so.
MOSELEY: Okay. Well, changing topics now, with Labor, all the announcements at the moment, it looks like an election campaign, it sounds like an election campaign, is it an election campaign, Minister?
GALLAGHER: Well, we’re heading into that season, that’s for sure. I mean, the day and the formal infrastructure around that is a decision for the Prime Minister, but you know, it’s no surprise that the first half of this year, I think it’ll be a contested space. And we’re rolling out our plans to build a better future across Australia. Part of that has been the announcement yesterday on the NBN, making sure we’re getting rid of all that old failing copper and putting in place high-speed broadband for those premises that don’t have it already. It’s important economic infrastructure, it’s important for our productivity agenda and you know, we’ll get the job done with this investment. It’s sort of unfortunate that we’re retrofitting the copper network that the former government put in place, but this is a really important announcement that we made yesterday. Minister Rowland, obviously, led that work, but it’ll finally build the broadband that Australia needs and those premises need. More working from home, small business who use the National Broadband Network – it’s a very important economic investment.
MOSELEY: Speaking of the NBN though there Minister, is this too little too late? We have a lot of people talking now, including the Coalition, about people changing to Elon Musk’s Starlink, for example. Is the technology moving faster than we are?
GALLAGHER: Well, it’s really important that we have fixed broadband services across Australia. As we know with other technology like 5G that people use – I guess the speed and capacity of that is contingent on how many people are using that technology at a particular point in time, and so having the National Broadband Network as a publicly-owned economic infrastructure, we believe, is really important. That gives people choice, it gives them reliability and affordability, importantly, to use broadband as they need to. And we know that most households now have over 20 connected devices to the internet and we know that that’s only going to increase. So, I think high-speed fixed broadband to premises is a really important part of the technology mix.
MOSELEY: Minister, thank you so much for your time this morning.
GALLAGHER: Thanks for having me on.
ENDS
