Topics: Immigration, Housing, Energy prices

E&OE

LEON DELANEY:

Shadow Treasurer and Member for Hume Angus Taylor, who's on the phone now, good morning.

ANGUS TAYLOR:

G'day Leon, good to be with you.

LEON DELANEY:

Thanks for joining us today. I'm not accustomed to functioning at this time of the day, so if I say anything stupid, just ignore me, okay?

ANGUS TAYLOR:

Yeah, I don't get that luxury!

LEON DELANEY:

You're concerned about immigration numbers and the impact on housing. And I think a lot of people have concerns about that.

ANGUS TAYLOR:

Yeah, absolutely. Our population has increased by more than a million since the election, Leon. But we don't have a plan to deal with that population growth. I mean, we've always been a country with strong immigration. And, you know, we're strongly supportive of that in the coalition. But these numbers are completely unmanaged. And we're seeing new housing starts running at around a quarter of new arrivals, that's just not enough. And we're seeing the outcomes of that where people are struggling to rent houses, and certainly rent houses at an affordable rate. More and more Australians are giving up on owning a home and that's a tragedy, a true tragedy, for younger Australians in particular. And more generally, we're seeing a situation where we've just got a policy that's completely out of whack. And it's contributing, of course, to the cost of living crisis in a very, very significant way.

LEON DELANEY:

It certainly is. But you've also pointed out that if we took immigration out of the mix, Australia would actually be in recession. In fact, I think you said deep recession. And that's true, isn't it? Because we're relying on population growth to deliver economic growth. And unfortunately, the economic growth is not keeping up with the population growth, which means, basically, we're in a per capita recession and have been for some time.

ANGUS TAYLOR:

That's exactly right. So it feels like a recession, from the point of view of many Australian families because the economy is not growing on a per person basis. So the reality of that is what I call a family recession or a household recession. And of course, people are feeling it when they look at their pay packets, or what's in the bank account, it doesn't have the purchasing power it had two years ago. And they feel as though they're going backwards. Well, the truth is, they are. Higher prices, higher taxes, higher interest rates, 12 interest rate increases in that timeframe. And there's a lot of pain there for Australians. Our economy is just not working for it.

LEON DELANEY:

How can we make our immigration system work better, because obviously, we still need to have some immigration or we certainly desperately need skilled immigration, particularly if we come back to housing again, in the construction sector, where there's labour shortages right now, which is one of the impediments to building more homes. So where do we find that balance? How can we make immigration work better?

ANGUS TAYLOR:

Well, first of all, in the short term, we're going to have an immigration rate that's in line with our ability to build houses. You can't allow that to get out of whack. Those two things are hugely important. We also need to make sure we're focusing on the immigrants who are able to make a strong economic contribution. That's hugely important at a time when we're in this GDP per person recession. We need to make sure everyone coming into the country is able to make that contribution and therefore helps us to get things going again. But we're nowhere near that right now. I mean, we've seen a government that's completely lost control of its immigration policies and that's part of the reason why we're feeling the extreme pain in economic terms that we are.

LEON DELANEY:

One of the sectors of immigration that has received a bit of attention recently is foreign students. Now, many of these foreign students will eventually go back home again, but many of them don't, many of them aim to use this as a pathway to remain in Australia permanently. But there's been a lot of attention paid to the idea of low quality education services being exploited in this way as a pathway towards residency. What can be done to address those issues while still maintaining the very important education export sector?

ANGUS TAYLOR:

Yeah, that's a great question. And the truth is that that increase in population of more than a million, a significant portion of that is foreign students. And that's important to our education sector. It's not as though we want to throw that away, it plays an important role. That being said, we've got to make sure that the system isn't being abused or misused in any way. That we do have the number of students coming into the country, and the population growth more generally, that we can cope with. And right now, if you talk to any young student, and I've got three university students in my family, my kids, finding a place to live near a university has become a near impossible task. It's extraordinarily difficult and extraordinarily expensive. And this is, again, it's policies that are out of whack. They're just not aligned, where we've got this huge population growth without the housing supply. Again, it's not about being against immigration at all, but it is about making sure the immigration rate is in line with what we can cope with.

LEON DELANEY:

Yeah indeed. Now, of course, a lot of people are still concerned about energy prices, even though it's my understanding that the Australian Energy Market Operator has indicated that prices are expected to fall in the coming year, but significantly, not enough to actually match the promise that was made by the Labor government.

ANGUS TAYLOR:

Well, that's exactly right. We're not even close to getting to that. In fact, for a typical family, Labor's fallen short of its election commitment by just over $1,000 a year - that is their promise of a $275 reduction. Well, we're seeing increases of over $750, since Labor came to power, so they've got a long way to go. And, of course, what we've seen from AEMO, it's actually just the default market offer, by the way, it's not necessarily the market offer that people will get. Even even if it was to come down a little bit, we're over $1,000 short of what Labor promised. And this is the issue is that Chris Bowen says one thing, and does another. And we are seeing this continuing pain in people paying their bills. And it's not just households of course, it's many small businesses that are really starting to suffer, and have lost a lot of competitiveness as a result.

LEON DELANEY:

What can be done to contain energy costs?

ANGUS TAYLOR:

Well there's short term and the medium to longer term. In the short term, the number one thing, and I said this when I was Energy Minister and it worked - I got prices down by 8 to 10% in the time I was minister - but the number one focus has to be getting more gas into the system, and not over building our poles and wires. They are the two simple and most important things you've got to do. And Chris Bowen is doing the exact opposite, the exact opposite. Then in the longer term, we've got to make sure we replace the base load that's leaving the system. 90% of our base load electricity will leave the system in the next 10 years. And you have to replace that with reliable, affordable energy. And we believe you've got to have the full suite of technologies, including nuclear at your disposal to be able to replace that leaving baseload power. This is unbelievably important. Labor does not have a plan to replace that 90%. And that has to be a central part of the plan. And you have to do it without building 28,000 kilometers of transmission lines. That's not the way to deliver affordable, reliable.

LEON DELANEY:

Okay, on that basis then, if you're in favor of nuclear energy, do you want to have a reactor in your electorate?

ANGUS TAYLOR:

Well, what we've said consistently, is that we should be building nuclear generators where we have closing coal fired generators. And that's kind of obvious if you don't want to have to build 28,000 kilometers of transmission lines. So they're the sites we should be looking at. I'm not going to make an announcement on site locations on your program this morning, Leon, as much as I'm sure you'd love me to but the point here is there's sensible places to put these things because that's where they've been. I would have thought that's common sense. And a little bit more common sense is probably what we're missing in these debates right now, Leon.

LEON DELANEY:

Well, you know, they say about common sense, don't you? It's not all that common. Thanks very much for chatting today.

ANGUS TAYLOR:

Thanks Leon.

ENDS.