Interview with Ashleigh Gillon on Sky News

‍Subjects: Liberal Party, Telstra Outage, Housing Crisis, Migration, SMSF Changes

E&OE.........

Ashleigh Gillon

Joining us live now is the Shadow Housing and Environment Minister, Andrew Bragg. Good to see you, thanks for your time. Were you pleased to see your leader, Angus Taylor, taking a tougher stance against Pauline Hanson and One Nation?

Senator Bragg

I thought it was a good speech. I think it set out very clearly the choices before the Australian people, and the choice of Labor is really more of the same, more stagn… stag… how do you say it, stagnation. And then under One Nation, I think you just see chaos and not real progress, and in fact, a huge amount of risk to our long-term standing as a nation. And then we've got the Coalition option, which I think definitely presents the best way forward for Australia.

Ashleigh Gillon

Pauline Hanson in response has said that she wants to work with the Liberal Party. Is that a partnership you could get comfortable with if it looks like it could lead to electoral success?

Senator Bragg

Look, I don't think so. I think the main game here is for the Coalition to be seeking to form majority government on the basis that a platform can be put forward to solve the nation's economic woes and to get the nation moving again. Because we have very low productivity, or negative productivity, we have low growth, anaemic growth, we have high inflation, high interest rates... we have a very sick economy.

Ashleigh Gillon

I wanted to ask you about Telstra. I saw some comments you made in reaction to that outage saying that people have to get used to this in Australia because it's becoming the new normal. Is that a bit alarmist or do you really think Australian telco customers are in real strife here?

Senator Bragg

I think we have a sclerotic economy, and one of the reasons for that is because this government has constructed a high-tax, high-regulation, anti-innovation, anti-consumer model, where effectively people have to hope for the best. Because it's very hard to get a small business off the ground, it's very hard to get new ideas into the market because of Labor's economic architecture. And I think this is now appearing to be a pattern of behaviour where these telcos have these outages, and I think the Government should take some responsibility for that.

Ashleigh Gillon

We saw the Minister, Anika Wells, accusing the Opposition of politicising this crisis over the recent days. There were—well, we've seen the reports of someone on your side calling triple zero just to test it out in the middle of the crisis. A South Australian Liberal Senator suggesting a person had died as a result of the outage, which was refuted by police. Is that what the Coalition was doing here? Just playing politics for the sake of it?

Senator Bragg

Well, the company owes an explanation, which it is doing, and it is accountable to its shareholders. But I make the point that Australia has never had this before. We have never had these sort of outages on a regular basis. Now it is happening. And I think this is the result of having a socialist-style economy. That's my view.

Ashleigh Gillon

Let's look at your portfolio. I understand since Parliament wrapped you've been doing a deep dive into the impacts on the housing sector of prohibiting self-managed super funds from investing in residential property. Tell us more, what response are you hearing from the sector? The move does seem to have left plenty of people scrambling.

Senator Bragg

It seems bizarre to me that the Government have sought to cancel new houses, which is what is going to be the result of the SMSF ban, because up to 30% of a new apartment building can be formulated through SMSF investment. So the Government have sought to ban that. No wonder we have not enough houses in this country, because the Government don't like SMSF investors in this case. And we're working through all the problems that this is going to create, with a view to hopefully getting the Government to fix this mess they've made. I mean, they've already had four changes to their Budget, so why not have a fifth?

Ashleigh Gillon

And in terms of the real-life impacts we're seeing on the ground in the housing market since the Budget was delivered, what is your analysis in a snapshot of what that has really meant so far?

Senator Bragg

Well, we have higher taxes on housing. We have no effort to address the productivity issues. We have a large migration program still. The ABS data this week shows supply is falling. So we're going to have a massive problem with housing affordability going forward. These taxes are going to make the problem worse, not better. And the taxes on negative gearing and Capital Gains Tax, even according to the Treasury, will reduce supply by 35,000. But now there'll be even more houses reduced because of the SMSF changes. So the Government have a deliberate design feature to reduce housing supply, and that is going to impact affordability, and I think the Government is hopeless and incompetent, and they've really buggered up housing.

Ashleigh Gillon

Andrew Bragg, appreciate your time. Thank you.

Senator Bragg

Thanks a lot.

[Ends]