Wednesday, 30 September 2026

Topics: inflation; interest rates; credit card surcharges.

E&OE……………………..

Steve Austin: Tim Wilson, thanks for waiting on the line. Just before I get to the implications of the RBA decision, from tomorrow no business can charge customers for card use. How do you think this will affect small business in Australia when they'll have to find a way of passing on whatever they're charged by their provider?

Tim Wilson: Thanks Steve, and we know what the impact will be. The banks will pass on the cost to small business, small business will pass the cost on to consumers, and it means that prices will rise. This is one of these decisions where nobody likes paying fees, I get that, but if anybody thinks we can avoid fees to run these merchant facilities, they're missing an understanding about how important this is as part of the backbone of the economy. I just hope that the banks are giving the same treatment to a small business as they are to the discount deals they do for supermarkets, and large retailers who get benefits of scale and volume, where a small business has to foot the full bill and therefore consumers have to foot the full bill.

Steve Austin: Thank you for that. Tim Wilson is my guest, he's the Shadow Treasury spokesperson. This is 612 ABC Brisbane. Early this morning your leader Angus Taylor said this about the Reserve Bank rate increase:

Angus Taylor: If all of the spending that the government has committed to since they've been in government was offset, we would have a $22 billion surplus right now.

Steve Austin: How do you offset the spending, Tim Wilson?

Tim Wilson: Well, you make sure firstly you don't increase the volume of spending, which is what they've been doing, and you make sure that you pair back or pull your belt in. So, we've already announced a series of measures where we're getting rid of bureaucracies like the bureaucracy that for housing that doesn't build a single new home, bureaucracy around net zero which is focused, it doesn't actually cut any emissions and of course a lot of corporate welfare schemes that aren't growing the future of the Australian economy. But there's another part to the conversation, Angus Taylor is right, that we then need to go on and make sure that people invest in the future of the Australian economy, and that frankly isn't happening, particularly off the back of the last federal budget where small businesses, investors are being told, don't invest in the future of this country because we're going to take half of everything you earn.

Steve Austin: Tim Wilson, Australians seem to want Treasurer Jim Chalmers to spend. They want the National Disability Insurance Scheme, they want aged care, they want Medicare, they want all of these things. They seem to say okay, it's costing a lot of money, but that's the price we pay. What am I missing?

Tim Wilson: Well, I think you're missing the corruption and fraud that the government has allowed to tolerate in things like the NDIS. When I started talking about this a while ago, the government simply dismissed it and said this wasn't a problem. Now they've ultimately changed legislation to start the crackdown on organised crime and corruption in the NDIS system. I don't think honest taxpayers want their honest money going to organised crime or corruption because not only is an abuse of their tax dollars, it also an inflationary impact. So, I think that's the part of the conversation you're missing. Everybody understands…

Steve Austin: Corruption and fraud was happening when the Coalition was in federal government as well.

Tim Wilson: And that's part of the problem. We tried to cap to stop it and uh Labor blocked us, then when um Bill Shorten took over as Minister of the INDIS, he tried to stop it and Anthony Albanese the Prime Minister said he wouldn't allow Bill Shorten to fix the problem. Eventually they've been brought to heel, the problem with that money going towards corruption is that in the meantime it's been inflationary and that's why we're in the myriad of problems that we're currently in as a country. It's been one of the biggest problems that we've had with government spending is simply public money going to dishonest ends and being inflationary at the same time.

Steve Austin: At the moment in Australia, the figures show that we're spending more on paying interest payments on our debt than we are on public hospitals. Now these are individually, or we're spending more on interest payments on our debt than on Medicare. So, this indicates the high levels to at least to me, the high levels of this debt is costing us if we're spending more on just on the interest payments than the whole of the Medicare system. What could have been done differently to get this down? Because the Treasurer rightly says that he's still paying back the debts that was raised during the pandemic.

Tim Wilson: Debt servicing is now the biggest growing area of the budget, and the government has projected deficits out to the next 40 years. So, we need to make sure that we pull the belt in, but before we turn to Australians to tell them to put their belt in, the government needs to do the same. Spending is currently still at a 40-year high outside of a pandemic, and we need to make sure that there's prudent management of taxpayer's money. There's two things we need to do there: one, we need to make sure we get the balance in the budget back into a sustainable position, but the second part is we actually need to grow the productive side of the economy. Instead at the moment, we've got the government kneecapping the productive economy, making it harder for people to want to invest and build out future jobs, while they spend with reckless abandon on more public expenditure, so they're compounding the problem and making it worse.

Steve Austin: My guest is Tim Wilson, Shadow Treasury spokesperson. This is 612 ABC Brisbane, Steve Austin's my name. I want to ask you about the Reserve Bank itself. So, they made the decision yesterday and they're responding in a normal way you think a Reserve Bank would respond to inflation. But when it was when it was reformed by Treasurer Jim Chalmers, he dropped one of their responsibilities off in simple terms that their third role they no longer have was to I think, I forget how it's phrased, but you know make sure life was better for most Australians. I can't remember the exact…

Tim Wilson: Economic wellbeing of the people of Australia.

Steve Austin: Thank you. Thank you. I forgive me for not getting that right. But now they don't do that now. Michele Bullock, when she was at the Economics Committee of Federal Parliament a couple of weeks back, said it's not her job to tell a politician or the government what they should be doing, and so here we seem to have what's been described to me by economists as one foot on the economy break and one foot on the economy accelerator. And as a result, we're spinning, you know we're anaemic, the economy is constipated. Here we are. Would you do anything different with the Reserve Bank, Tim Wilson?

Tim Wilson: My focus wouldn't be on the Reserve Bank because the Reserve Bank's hand is being forced, or as you put it, their foot is being forced, they're trying to put their foot on the brake because of the structural problems of what the government is doing. They're not really speeding up the economy, they're just speeding up spending. You know, currently we're spending 26.9% of GDP whereas the tax revenue is based on only about 24.1%. So, we've got this imbalance of what they're raising versus what they're spending, and they're not spending in any way for the productive part of the economy and we're also not seeing the private sector investing in the productive part of the economy. You know, my big fear is that this takes us to a position that's unsustainable and they're going to break the private sector of the economy. It's only when we get private investment for sustainable jobs growth that builds out industries that will actually get the economy growing again enough to support public spending. At the moment, we're in a vortex which is only speeding up.

Steve Austin: If you cut government spending during the cost-of-living crisis, aren't you stripping away support payments from families who need it, Tim Wilson?

Tim Wilson: The short answer to that is no, that won't be the target of our focus. Our focus is making sure that we get rid of waste and corruption. I don't believe that money going to organised crime is designed to help, or corruption is helped designed to help households. What are you talking about there, illegal tobacco sales or CFMEU questions, what are you talking about there, Tim Wilson?

Tim Wilson: The fact that you have to ask me how many different forms of corruption we currently have in the federal government is endemic and reflective of the problem. Yes, I'm talking about public money going towards organised crime through the CFMEU Labor cartel. Yes, I'm talking about the problems of organised crime and corruption in the National Disability Insurance Scheme. It doesn't seem to matter where we turn, we're having this constant problem where the government has created honey pots which people are taking advantage of, and the dishonest actors. What we need to get back to is prudent financial management, control of the budget, but then we've got to grow the private economy because as we move more people towards a private sector job than from a public sector role or public sector dependence, you need jobs that are going to create economic growth and support households.

Steve Austin: Tim Wilson, thanks for your time.

Tim Wilson: Thanks Steve.

[ENDS]