SENATOR THE HON KATY GALLAGHER
MINISTER FINANCE
MINISTER FOR WOMEN
MINISTER FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE
MINISTER FOR GOVERNMENT SERVICES
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO CANBERRA
WEDNESDAY, 26 MARCH 2025
SUBJECTS: Federal Budget; tax system; investment in the ACT; Dutton’s cuts to services.
ROSS SOLLY, HOST: Finance Minister and ACT Senator Katy Gallagher now joins us on the program. Senator, good morning to you. Can I run past a couple of headlines from the newspapers this morning and tell me what you think. The Australian says ‘election gamble reveals the death of ambition,’ ‘tactical budget for a poll fails the nation,’ the Sydney Morning Herald says ‘Jim’s Charmless budget cuts the interest in a timid government,’ Katy Gallagher?
SENATOR THE HON KATY GALLAGHER, MINISTER FOR FINANCE: Well, I’ll leave it to the media and your colleagues, Ross, to pass their judgements. I know the work that we put into this and the decisions we took and the attempts that we made to balance up a whole range of pressures and produce a budget that we think gets that balance right.
SOLLY: Is it timid, though? Have you missed – I mean, a few of our listeners this morning saying, and other critics saying, there's an opportunity missed here.
GALLAGHER: Well, I don't think it is timid, and I think you have to look at each budget, you can't look at it in isolation of the ones that have gone before. And in this Budget, you see us building on the foundations that we've put in place in the previous budgets. We've had a lot to do. We've had to repair the Budget, pay down debt, lower the interest bill on the debt, halve the deficit, delivered two surpluses. So, we've been repairing the Budget as we've been going along. But we've also found room for a lot of really important investments in energy bill relief, Medicare, cheaper medicines, HECS debt relief, looking to the future through the Future Made in Australia. A budget has to do so many different things, and I accept, you know, people will pass their own judgment on that, but ours is about setting our future up for a better future, but also not taking our eye off what needs to happen now.
SOLLY: Yeah, doesn't a better future, though, Katy Gallagher, involve at some stage or another a conversation about tax reform? Because a lot of people are saying, when is this going to happen? Everybody knows, I think you would even concede that the tax system at the moment is not as good as it could be. It's not really fit for purpose. When are we going to have that conversation? Why aren't you tackling that sort of thing?
GALLAGHER: Well, I think if you look again since we came to government, we've tried to get quite a number of tax reform elements, like amendments to the PRRT, we've got amendments to high balance super accounts, we've done quite a lot on multinational tax reform, and now we're delivering additional tax cuts to the ones that we've delivered before –
SOLLY: That’s not tax reform though, those are tax cuts.
GALLAGHER: Well, if you look at the tax cuts – well, we are lowering the threshold, yeah. And if you look at the previous tax cuts, we adjusted the thresholds as well and the rate, and that is tax reform. We are constantly being told, what are you doing about bracket creep? So, there is reform in this budget on that. But I also think people have to understand that, you know, even those modest changes that we put for super have been stuck in the Senate for, I don't know, over a year. We have 25 votes in the Senate in a chamber of 76, and so also, we have to accept the reality of the situation we're governing in.
SOLLY: Senator David Pocock was on the program with me earlier this morning, lamenting the fact that there was nothing in the Budget – I know you're going to rattle off all the Medicare and stuff like that, which is great for our listeners this morning – but lamenting the fact that there was no money in there for big infrastructure projects in the ACT, besides some money for roads, which I'm sure everybody will appreciate. But the ACT does seem to have missed out in terms of some big-ticket items and the money we desperately need here in the ACT for a new stadium, for a convention centre, theatre precinct, that sort of stuff, Katy Gallagher. Have you let down ACT listeners this morning?
SOLLY: Well, I’m not surprised that that's Senator Pocock view, but I would completely reject it. One of the biggest projects funded in the Budget, with ongoing funding, is the National Security Office Precinct in Canberra. Like, if you look at that across the nation, that is one of the biggest infrastructure projects. It would definitely be the biggest infrastructure project in Canberra right now. It'll be on a similar scale to what the airport was a few years ago.
SOLLY: Yeah, but that’s not something everybody can use. Yes, I get that, and it's going to have lots of jobs and stuff like that –
GALLAGHER: Yeah, and economic benefit that flows, including for small business here. So, it, you know, I've been around the traps a while now, and business here will say we need one big infrastructure project that underpins economic activity in the ACT. The light rail is certainly part of that, and we are a partner in the light rail with the ACT Government and the National Security Office Precinct is another project that will underpin economic activity in this state. Plus, the AIS arena – sorry, redevelopment – which is underway now. Another quarter of a million dollars to revitalise the AIS. Like, let's be serious here. The ACT was forgotten, when I was Chief Minister, and all that time in the ACT, we were ignored by the Liberal Government here. At best ignored, at worst punished. And since we've come to government, we have systematically ensured that we are dealing with pressures in the ACT. Now, that's not to say there isn't more to be done, and I accept that. I've been working with Andrew Barr on that for some time, and –
SOLLY: Well, some time, some time is right. We're talking a bloody long time for things like the stadium and that. There just seems to be nothing happening there.
GALLAGHER: Well, I don't agree with that. And, you know, we've –
SOLLY: Well, where’s the money, where’s the plan, where's the – I mean, we've got another feasibility study. I know that's not your area. That's, that's the local government.
GALLAGHER: Well, we are supporting getting the convention centre project to where it needs to be to understand the full cost, and we've already provided that support. And I continue to work closely with Andrew and his team about all of those areas for improvement. There is, you know, obviously the money that we're putting into light rail. There's the road improvements, as you say. There's a new Medicare Urgent Care Clinic that will open in Woden this year, that’s funded in the Budget. I don't think you can dismiss some of those other investments and just say, oh, well, yeah, we get those too. There is a lot happening in the ACT, and it's a lot more than what used to happen, Ross, as you would remember.
SOLLY: Yes, I do. Just on the level of the public service, because we know this is going to be a hot button topic during the election campaign. The Opposition has already said, 35,000, is 36,000 too many. You've now come out, Katy Gallagher, and said, well I'll take your 36,000 and raise you another four or five thousand. I mean this is obviously – and already last night, Angus Taylor saying, yep, we're going to get rid of all those as well, 41,000. Do we really need another five thousand, four thousand, whatever, public servants?
GALLAGHER: So, the vast majority of those, Ross, are already working, they're just working under expensive labour hire arrangements as a hangover from the former government. So, of the new jobs, about 80 per cent, 75 per cent of those are conversions from expensive labour hire into permanent public service jobs in the NDIA. So, actually dealing with clients through the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Now, you know, I think they've talked a lot about all the job cuts they're going to do, and then they've said they're not going to cut any frontline services, and all the job cuts are going to come from Canberra. Well, if they do that, that would be half of the public service here, so it would decimate our local economy. But aside from that, I'd be very surprised if they can actually do that. But the jobs will be in the frontline –
SOLLY: They say, they say they want it, sorry Katy Gallagher, they say they want to reduce it to the figures that was there when they left government. So, obviously it was working then?
GALLAGHER: No, it wasn't working then, Ross. If you remember, we had Robodebt. We had 42,000 unallocated Veterans’ Affairs claims. Veterans who weren't getting their payments because their claims weren't being allocated. We had terrible outcomes in Services Australia. We had environmental approvals that weren’t being done, and we have changed all that. Plus, can I just add this, they say they kept the public service low. They had 54,000 external labour hire workers for the public service. So, I don't even accept it that they kept the public service low. In the official books where they report, perhaps. But when you actually look beneath that and looked at external labour, that's where they had a hidden shadow workforce that they didn't want to talk about.
SOLLY: Let’s get this election underway. This weekend, I believe Katy Gallagher, is that right it’s going to be called?
GALLAGHER: I have no idea, Ross, I –
SOLLY: Oh, come on. Come, yeah, all right.
GALLAGHER: Well, the Prime Minister keeps telling us that the election will be held in May. That’s all I can provide you and your listeners with.
SOLLY: I know I have to let you go, Senator Katy Gallagher, thanks for your time this morning.
GALLAGHER: Thank you.
ENDS
