E&OE….
Topics: Carbon tax repeal, refugee intake, Slipper/Ashby case
MARIUS BENSON:
Greg Hunt, good morning.
GREG HUNT:
Good morning Marius.
MARIUS BENSON:
There have been big changes in the 12 months and in the environment portfolio in particular, the carbon tax is gone, many of the agencies have been changed, reduced or scrapped.
In fact, is it possible to put a measure on the extent of change, simply in terms of staff? How much smaller the number of people involved in the environment area is now than it was September last year?
GREG HUNT:
Well, in actual fact, what you see is that we have, over the entire portfolio, more than 4000 staff. But, most significantly, the real change has been in terms of doing what we said we’d do, abolishing the carbon tax with price reductions actually flowing through to families and to businesses.
People said we’d never be able to abolish it and they said, even if we did, we would never see the prices flow through. That’s actually happening. That’s the most significant change, but also we’ve put in place a Green Army which is going to see an additional 15,000 young people employed a year in the environment space by the time it’s fully rolled out and we’ve seen enormous change in terms of streamlining approvals whilst maintaining standards.
Putting in place a national one-stop shop which will be worth $160 billion by 2025 according to the Minerals Council and clearing almost $800 billion – actually over $800 billion worth of backlog approvals which the previous Government would neither say yes nor no to.
MARIUS BENSON:
On the carbon price impact, the promise was that bills would be cut. It’s a little confused between $550, in terms of power entirely, or down by $250 simply on electricity bills, but the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission looked at that figure of $250 promised, in terms of cutting your bills, and said, in fact, in New South Wales the evidence is now in and the average is a saving of $167, far below the promised level.
GREG HUNT:
Well actually, when you put electricity and gas together, what you see is that precisely what we said would happen is happening. We’ve had over 100 firms put in place price determinations for individual State or Territory electricity and gas.
Let me give you examples, in New South Wales we’ve said nine per cent and we see Energy Australia is offering 8.9 per cent reductions, Simply Energy ten per cent, in Victoria, AGL is offering 8.9 per cent, Power Direct is a 12.4 per cent reduction and you can run through each and every State…
MARIUS BENSON:
Please don’t. Please don’t, I think that’s enough.
GREG HUNT:
…those real reductions of averaging approximately the nine per cent in electricity, seven per cent in gas. In the ACT, for example, it’s eleven-and-a-half per cent for Origin, for electricity reductions and eleven per cent for Energy Australia.
So, we said what we would do. The ALP did everything they could to prevent the election mandate and the reductions to families and small businesses and in the end we got there and those reductions are real, tangible, backdated to the first of July and flowing through now.
MARIUS BENSON:
Greg Hunt, can I ask you about a couple of other things in the news this morning? There’s a column written in The Australian by your Queensland colleague, Wyatt Roy, in which he says we’ve stopped the boats, there is now scope to increase the formal intake of refugees.
Wyatt Roy says why don’t we double it from the existing just under 14,000, double that number? Do you think that’s a good idea?
GREG HUNT:
Well, the first thing is that because we’ve stopped the tragedies at sea and because we’ve stopped the enormous numbers of people who were being brought in by people smugglers, what’s occurred is that there is room within the existing humanitarian intake to bring people from camps, bring those who are most needy, most desperate in the most difficult of circumstances.
We’ve already added over 4000 people to the humanitarian intake from the Syrian and Iraq conflicts so we have…
MARIUS BENSON:
And specifically on Wyatt Roy’s proposal to double the intake?
GREG HUNT:
Look, I’ve got enormous respect for Wyatt. I will let him speak to it, we have an existing policy…
MARIUS BENSON:
Your view? Your view, Greg Hunt?
GREG HUNT:
I’m not going to speculate on somebody else’s portfolio, other than to make this point that, by stopping the tragedies at sea, we are talking about saving 1100 lives over the next few years which on previous patterns would have been lost, we’ve opened up the space to bring in the most needy and the most desperate and that’s precisely what we are doing now.
MARIUS BENSON:
One other topic, James Ashby, the one-time staffer of Peter Slipper, who brought sexual harassment claims against the person appointed by the Labor Party as speaker, Peter Slipper, claimed on the 60 Minutes program on the Nine Network last night, that Christopher Pyne, your frontbench colleague, the Education Minister, had offered him, effectively, an inducement, that he’d promised him a job and legal assistance if he went ahead with those claims.
Christopher Pyne denies that. For people watching that it’s just a matter of he says, he says. Do you see how people can resolve, in their own mind, who’s telling the truth there?
GREG HUNT:
Look, the first thing is, I have to confess, I was putting a truculent five-year-old to sleep last night so I missed the program. The second thing is that my recollection is that there was an affidavit at the time saying that there were no offers, inducements or other items such as that so, I can’t imagine that somebody would say one thing to the court and then another thing privately but I back Christopher’s view on this a hundred per cent.
MARIUS BENSON:
Greg Hunt, thank you very much.
GREG HUNT:
Cheers, thanks a lot.
(ENDS)