TRANSCRIPT - SKY NEWS FIRST EDITION WITH PETER STEFANOVIC

PAUL FLETCHER MP

Shadow Minister for Science and the Arts

Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy

Manager of Opposition Business in the House

TRANSCRIPT

SKY NEWS FIRST EDITION

31 JULY 2023

PETER STEFANOVIC: Let's go to Canberra, the Manager of Opposition Business Paul Fletcher joins us. Paul, you don't want to take up Labor's $40 a fortnight JobSeeker increase but instead allow folks to earn another $300 without it affecting those payments. So what's the reasoning behind that?

PAUL FLETCHER: Well Pete, good to be with you. You know there are over 800,000 people who are on JobSeeker. On average they've been on JobSeeker for more than five years. What we want to do is give people in that situation a stronger incentive to dosome part-time work without losing their benefits. So we want to increase the so-called income-free threshold or the threshold beyond which your benefit starts to get reduced from 150 per fortnight to 300 per fortnight to $150 increase and that is good for people who get the chance to go and do some work. Good for self-esteem obviously improves their income but it's also good for the nation because we've got well over 400,000 job vacancies right now. A lot of small business people are very keen to try and find employers to help them do some extra work. We just think this is much more sensible policy than simply increasing as Labor proposes to do by $40 the amount of JobSeeker and other related working age payments. That's the reason for doing it.

PETER STEFANOVIC: Sure I understand, but the $40 per fortnight increase that's hardly an incentive to stay on welfare though is it?

PAUL FLETCHER: Well what we want to do is give people a stronger incentive to work and if we can have them start by doing some part-time work, in the knowledge that you can earn up to $300 a fortnight without having any of your JobSeeker benefit removed, then that we believe will incentivise more people to do some part-time work, regain contact with the workforce. You know those more than 800,000 people on JobSeeker who've been on average the average length of time on JobSeeker over five years, about 75% of them indeed more than 75% of them are not recording any income from work at all. So we think creating a stronger incentive will be good for people who are on JobSeeker right now but also good for the nation.

PETER STEFANOVIC: Okay if they do get limited work would those folks then be taken off the unemployment rate which is as we know expected to rise somewhere closer to four and a half percent?

PAUL FLETCHER: We're not proposing any change to the definition of unemployment and what we're simply proposing is a change to the rules that apply to people who are on JobSeeker.

PETER STEFANOVIC: How would you define full-time employment?

PAUL FLETCHER: Well again that'll be a matter for subject matter experts but what I would say is that you know the Treasurer Jim Chalmers is very keen on playing with the levers in different ways. We're somewhat sceptical perhaps of the motivations that Mr Chalmers might have. You might remember at the start of the year he promised he was going to renovate global capitalism. So you know he tends to talk a big game. We'd like him to focus a lot more on the basics which is getting interest rates down, getting cost of living down because a lot of Australians are doing it very tough at the moment. We'd like to see more focus on those basics and that again is a reason why we think it's a good idea to be encouraging people who are on JobSeeker to be doing some part-time work with this positive proposal from the Opposition to lift the threshold from 150 to 300 per fortnight. You can earn under our proposal up to 300 a fortnight before you lose one dollar of your JobSeeker.

PETER STEFANOVIC: Okay the Government is trying again with its future housing fund as well. Any chance the Coalition gets on board this time?

PAUL FLETCHER: No this is terrible policy. This is Labor borrowing 10 billion dollars. They go and play the market with it and the idea is if it makes any money then that's what goes into their so-called social housing. But in fact as Michael Sukkar our housing spokesman has pointed out last year it would have made zero money because the markets went down. It certainly doesn't produce a reliable flow of income but the bigger issue is the majority of Australians, the great majority, get into housing through the private housing market. And we've got a big problem in that market because the number of housing starts is down compared to last year the number of new housing approvals is down and the Government doesn't seem to have a plan to deal with it. So we need to see them focusing working with state governments on increasing supply and getting the private housing market working because that is overwhelmingly the way we will get Australians into the housing that they need.

PETER STEFANOVIC: Okay Paul Fletcher appreciate it. We'll talk to you again soon.