: Welcome back to today at 8am, after months of debate, Labor’s highly contentious tax package has officially passed Parliament.
SARAH ABO: For more, we are joined by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Canberra. PM Good morning to you. Good to see you.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Good morning. Great to be with you.
SARAH ABO: Yeah, look, this was a political victory for you, but it’s left you battered and bruised. Voters have lost faith in the Government and turned in their numbers to One Nation. Was it worth it?
PRIME MINISTER: Tax reform is always hard, but we’re in government to make a difference to people’s lives. And this reform will give every Australian a tax cut that is important. That’s now five lots of tax cuts since we’ve been in government in just over four years that we have legislated for. It also will give young Australians a fair crack at owning their own home. The interesting thing about the debate, it’s 45 days since the Budget was handed down, is that no one has said that the housing system isn’t broken. We all know it’s not working. The price of housing has gone up by 400 per cent, more than double the amount of wages since these changes distorted the market and channelled investment towards property and away from other productive sides of the economy. And therefore we had a responsibility, given that had been identified across the board, to do something about it. Now, anyone who has a negatively geared property will currently, will continue to be able to negatively gear that property. No change for them.
SARAH ABO: But you’ve lost significant capital though Prime Minister. You’ve lost significant capital and you’ve lost faith in the voters. Aren’t they the most important thing here? You can’t just change policy on the run without putting it to them first.
PRIME MINISTER: Well, what we’ve done is to identify a problem and then do something about it. And I was elected as Prime Minister not to just occupy the space, but to make a difference to people’s lives. And tomorrow at auctions around Australia, there’ll be young people who will for the first time in a long time, since 1999, if it’s an existing property, they won’t be competing with an investor who knows that they can go an extra $20,000 more or $50,000 more bidding for a home, knowing that any additional outlay will in part be offset by every taxpayer providing them support through negative gearing. And what that will mean and is meaning is that young people are able to get access to the housing market. I don’t want to live in a society where my generation have had access to housing. But the younger generation and generations to come, if you just leave a broken system in place, increasingly they just give up on the opportunity of ever owning their own home. And owning your own home is a key to better health, better education for your kids. All of those things that come from the security of owning the roof over your head. We’re doing something about it, it is difficult.
TOM STEINFORT: You spoke about those auctions tomorrow. We’re here seeing the auction rates, the passing rates going through the roof. They’re saying price prices coming down in Melbourne and Sydney, particularly by 100,000. These are people’s nest eggs. This is their biggest investment. For those people that are now seeing that money disappear, what do you say to them? Is this what you wanted for people to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars on their property?
PRIME MINISTER: No. Well, you’re exaggerating what’s happening there.
SARAH ABO: The auction rates are clear to see though Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER: And when interest rates have risen, what you see is an impact there. There’s a range of impact market. What Treasury estimates is that house prices will continue to increase, but they’ll increase by slightly less than they would have otherwise. And so the big difference here is that young people will be able to get a crack. Some 75,000 additional young people will be able to access home ownership as a result of these changes. That’s a good thing. It’s not a good thing to have that intergenerational equity inequity which is there in the system. And it’s not a good thing. I haven’t seen one commentator. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t know if anyone has been on the Today Show and said the housing system is perfect. We don’t need to change anything. Because what the debate has, has exposed is that everyone agrees that the system isn’t working. And we have a responsibility, given that, to do something about it. That’s precisely what we’ve done. We haven’t made, this isn’t a politically easy thing to do. I remember when the fringe benefits tax was brought in by the Hawke-Keating Government, people said every restaurant would close, every hospitality venue was over. Everyone was going to lose their jobs. It was going to be catastrophic. Guess what didn’t happen. And now that these changes have occurred as well and are implemented and legislated, some of the nonsense that’s out there will dissipate because it won’t hit up against reality. When people put in their tax returns after next week, after July 1, if they have a negatively geared year property, guess what? They’ll still get those deductions. No change for them at all. And that for the there’s around about 2 million Australians will see there’s no change to their existing arrangements at all. And if people want to buy into a negative gear property in future, they still can. They’ve just got to build, it’s got to be a new build, which helps build supply in the system as well, which is what we need.
SARAH ABO: We know a lot of people who are benefiting from those, I suppose, delayed changes of politicians who have multiple investments. But let’s move on because we’ve got to quickly get to this. Before we let you go, Prime Minister, your Government will oversee a fresh tightening of the teen social media restrictions. What measures are you taking? Because it so far hasn’t been implemented all that well among the younger generation, many have been able to skirt around the rules.
PRIME MINISTER: Well, it’s made a huge difference already. We’ve had millions of accounts deleted. This is leading the world. We should be proud of this. Some 16 countries have joined Australia, have followed Australia and Australia’s lead. Now, we always said there will be gaps in that and some people will get around it. We said that at the very beginning. That’s not a reason to not do it. There’ll be people probably tonight, a Friday night, there may well be somewhere in Australia someone who’s under 18 get access to alcohol in a pub. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have those rules and laws in place for good reason. And parents have welcomed this. This came from the bottom up. And what we’re looking at doing is any way that we can further strengthen the laws to make sure as well that if there are legal challenges, then they are strengthened, the opportunity of getting these laws upheld. And also make sure that we continue to hold these social media giants to account is really important. This has been a real change in the way that society operates. We know the damage that’s been done. And it’s been led, of course, by parents who’ve lost children and who’ve taken their grief and channelled it with incredible courage into saying, “we don’t want other parents to go through what we went through. We want to protect our young Australians.”
SARAH ABO: Absolutely. And their safety is paramount. All right, Prime Minister, we’ve got to let you go there, but I’m sure we’ll all be celebrating the Socceroos imminent win at midday, so we’ll tune in to that and catch up with you another time.
PRIME MINISTER: Go the Socceroos!
