PATRICK DORAN, HOST: Hello and welcome to the show. We are back. It is 07:05am on your Friday. And in the studio, we have a very special guest. The Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, joins us. Hello, Anthony.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Good morning. Wonderful to be back in Devonport.
DORAN: When was the last time you were in Devonport, do you think?
PRIME MINISTER: Not too long ago. I was here last year. So, pretty regular visitor. I think this is my 15th visit to Tasmania as Prime Minister. So, yesterday, I flew into Burnie, had a look at the shiploader there, then came to Devonport, had an event last night at Verona restaurant. Very good here in Devonport. And doing a bit today as well.
DORAN: Yeah, no kidding. What's it like getting up this morning with the cold weather? Did you go for a swim for winter solstice?
PRIME MINISTER: No, I did not go. I did not go for a swim. But I've got to say, I live in Canberra these days, so it gets used to it.
DORAN: Yeah. Okay.
PRIME MINISTER: And there's no frost on the grass like there is in Canberra. It can be like an inch thick in the morning.
DORAN: You wait until you see the snow up on the mountains and the park.
PRIME MINISTER: It's a beautiful part of Australia. I had a really, a cold morning here one year, a few years ago. I was doing one of the brekkie TVs from the waterfront there at Devonport. And as the sun came up, the temperature goes down.
DORAN: It's bizarre, isn't it?
PRIME MINISTER: I found that in a very acute way, shivering through this interview.
DANNI BELL, HOST: Yeah, fair enough. Now, Mr Prime Minister, you are not here for the solstice swim, but you were in Burnie yesterday. Tell us a little bit about the shiploader.
PRIME MINISTER: Well, the shiploader. So, we've added an additional $18 million to our funding, which has brought it up to $82 million. And what that's about, put simply, is doubling the productivity so that it can do twice the amount of loading of the resources that previously occurred. And that's obviously much more efficient. But it also is about the nature of what can be loaded. It's about three times the size, I've got to say. I climbed to the top of the shiploader, which is quite a climb. Beautiful view, I've got to say, right up and down the coastline and off into the mountains in the hinterland. It's a great thing. It should be a tourist attraction, climb to the top of the shiploader.
DORAN: Are you knackered then, today?
PRIME MINISTER: No, no, it was good. One of the things about my job is I spent too much time sitting down.
DORAN: Yeah, true.
PRIME MINISTER: And sitting at a desk. So, I always take opportunities wherever possible to walk upstairs rather than catch a lift.
DORAN: Yeah, no kidding.
PRIME MINISTER: And these were quite some stairs. So, I reckon I haven't seen the local paper here this morning, but I hope they captured a pretty good photo.
DORAN: There's a few photos that I saw online of you on Facebook, Instagram, and you look like you were having a good time in the high vis.
PRIME MINISTER: It was great. And it's fantastic because when I was the Infrastructure Minister a long time ago in the Rudd and Gillard governments, we funded over $300 million into rail revitalisation. It was the case that the freight rail system here, some of it had just one track, which means that you could only be going in one direction, obviously just a massive delay. And we really upgraded all of that. So, coming back into government after almost a decade in Opposition, it's been terrific to go to places that we made a difference last time we were in government and actually see the product of the work. Because quite often one of the things about politics, I think sometimes, is that the people who make a decision don't get to see the outcome, particularly when it comes to infrastructure. So much of politics is short term. And one of the things we've got to do is to break the nexus between that short term political cycle that focus on 24 hours to invest in the long term. That's why action on things like climate change is something that doesn't happen overnight, but governments need to do it.
DORAN: Well, on that, Peter Dutton's obviously, you've got the nuclear power plan. What are your thoughts on that?
PRIME MINISTER: Look, this is an uncosted thought bubble, really. It's another excuse for delay. Peter Dutton was part of a Government that had 22 energy policies. Nuclear didn't get included in any of them. They came up with everything, didn't land any of them. We've come up with one policy and we've landed it. 43 per cent target by 2030. We have the best solar resources in the world. We have hydro in places like Tasmania, of course, you have 100 per cent renewable energy here. We have some of the best wind resources, including in the Bass Strait, of course. And the idea that we will go to something that is the most expensive form of new energy and the longest to delay, that we should do nothing until 2040, just continue to not act on climate change and then introduce something that people will pay for, I thought one of the interesting things was that a Liberal Party saying essentially they're going to nationalise the energy system because no one will fund it because it doesn't stack up.
BELL: It is an interesting one. And you have announced some relief for people with their electricity bills. What other tax cuts and things are on the way?
PRIME MINISTER: We have. Well, on July 1, how far away are we? Ten days away.
DORAN: That's ridiculous.
PRIME MINISTER: We are going to have tax cuts for every taxpayer. We're going to have energy price relief, $300 off everyone's energy bill. We're going to have an extension of fee-free TAFE that's made such a difference now, up to 400,000 people now have had fee-free TAFE. We're going to have a freezing of the PBS of pharmaceutical costs. Everyone who's on a minimum wage or an award wage will get a wage rise on July 1. So, people are going to earn more and keep more of what they earn. And that's what we're doing to deal with cost of living whilst we're dealing with those long term issues as well. Peter Dutton has opposed all of those cost of living measures and now he's come up with something that'll make energy more expensive.
DORAN: And that's a practical way where you can tackle the cost of living, especially across the northwest coast. That's something that there's a lot of talk about. There's a lot of people kind of sleeping rough. So, that's a practical way by which we can kind of handle that, I guess.
PRIME MINISTER: Absolutely. And here as well, there's a lot of people who are on either minimum wages or low wages. And so that's why we, we changed the tax cuts. So, we're going to be, someone like me was going to get $9,000. Now I'll still get a tax cut. I get $4,500. But because we're doing that, it means that everyone, including all those below $45,000, will get a tax cut and the big beneficiaries will be middle income earners on around about $73,000.
DORAN: Yeah, that's good. That's good to hear as well, especially around here because a lot of people are on that.
PRIME MINISTER: Absolutely. And the idea that you have a big tax cut measure worth $107 billion over the next four years and you just leave out low income earners is, in my view, something that led us to take the difficult decision that we have to change the tax cuts.
DORAN: It's Gavin Pearce who is the Member for Braddon. He's not going to be recontesting the next election. Who do you think is going to take his place? Do you have any thoughts on that?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I've met up with a couple of people here while I've been here, but Senator Anne Urquhart, of course, does an amazing job representing the community and she's our chief scout, if you like, for a candidate here in Braddon. And so, we'll have a candidate pretty soon. And what we want to do, obviously, the fact that Gavin Pearce, and I wish him well in whatever he does in his future career, but that makes this seat vacant and that is a real opportunity for Labor to return to this seat. We had Justine Keay and Sid Sidebottom, of course, had a couple of stints and was a terrific local Member here. So, I think when I look at this community and I look at issues like the tax cuts, I say, this community needs a Labor Government, doesn't need a government that looks after people just on the top tax rate, it needs a representative and a Government that looks after low and middle income earners, working Australians, and that's what my Government's determined to do.
DORAN: Yeah, really important stuff.
BELL: Yeah. Now, we did have a call through a little bit earlier this morning with someone wanting to ask a question about child care.
PRIME MINISTER: Sure.
BELL: Because they have a worker that is from overseas, she's from Malaysia and she was looking to apply for permanent residency, but because she's not applying for a teacher position, she got knocked back. So, they're finding that they've got this wonderful worker that is going to be not able to stay now. Yes, lower prices of child care and all of that is wonderful, but the availability of child care is a massive problem at the moment. What plans are there to fix that problem?
PRIME MINISTER: Oh, look, one of the issues with child care is pay, and we'll have more to say in coming months about that. We have had negotiations with the union because we recognise, just like in aged care. So, aged care workers got a 15 per cent pay increase on top of all of the other award wage increases last year, and that was a cost of $11 billion. But we need to pay people properly if we're going to keep people in the industry. And areas like aged care and early learning, child care, which are feminised industries, they're the ones that were underpaid. So, we now have the gender pay gap at a record low. We've got it down to 13 per cent. We consciously changed the legislation so that the equal pay, gender-based pay is a priority and objective of the Fair Work Act. And we're also, of course, we changed the child care subsidy arrangements, which has led to an 11 per cent decrease in child care costs. There's a productivity commission report coming to us about universal child care. In some countries, there's just a payment a day. Canada's introduced a payment of $20 a day. And so, we need to look at child care as something that benefits not just the individual family, but benefits the whole society and benefits the economy as well, allows people to work. I'd say to the caller who rang in, they should get in touch with Senator Urquhart's office, because we need, if we have good workers, we can see what we can do about that. Certainly, we don't want to lose people. Some of the system is pretty dysfunctional, I've got to say, that we inherited. In my local area, very early on, I was contacted by a local constituent. This was someone who was a nurse. We need nurses in hospitals. And they were told they had to, time on their visa had expired. They had to go to Singapore to reapply, to come back, even though they had a job here as a nurse in an area where there are shortages of skills. So, we need a migration system that works properly, that brings in skilled workers. We need to bring the numbers down, and we're doing that. But where there are people with those skills, it seems common sense should tell you that, that we need them.
DORAN: Yeah, well, we'll have to leave it there, but really quickly. Are you going to go for a swim tomorrow for the winter solstice?
PRIME MINISTER: I don't think I'm quite that brave.
DORAN: Okay. But it's good. It's a cold plunge. It's good for you.
PRIME MINISTER: You'll be there?
DORAN: Yeah, I'll go. Yeah, I'll go if you go. Let's do it.
PRIME MINISTER: No, that's not the deal. I'm a visitor here for this one.
DORAN: That's what they all say. Well, thank you for joining us live in the studio, Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese. It's been an absolute pleasure.
PRIME MINISTER: Fantastic.
DORAN: Thank you very much.