Transcript - Minister Catherine King radio interview - Lovinglife FM, Mornings with Damo

HOST, DAMO: And I'm pleased to say that she joins me on the phone this morning. Minister, good morning to you.

MINISTER FOR INFRASTRUCTURE, TRANSPORT, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT, CATHERINE KING: Good morning Damo.

DAMO: Thank you very much for your time this morning. And obviously, you're a couple months into being in government and the federal government handed down their budget on Tuesday night, which would you say is a win for the communities of regional Australia?

KING: I certainly would, there's over 760 different initiatives going into regional Australia, 200 of them are new under this Government. So from a massive investment in regional NBN - so improving data connectivity to regional mobile phones, we want to sort that out. We've got a really big study with Australia Post vans and trucks right across the country doing a survey to audit where the actual black spots are. We know, and I live in regional Australia, I'm from Ballarat and I know telecommunications companies are constantly telling us that you've got coverage and you know absolutely when you live there, you do not. So doing a proper audit of where the black spots are. So there's a massive investment there in Minister Rowland’s portfolio.

In my portfolio there are investments right the way across the community. So whether it's in road and rail projects, right the way through to community infrastructure. We've also announced a billion dollars for two new programs that councils will be able to apply for. One which is a competitive grants round for some of the smaller sporting community arts and urban infrastructure. And the other for something we're calling the Precincts and Partnerships Program, which is really about where cities say, look we've got these areas that we want to develop into an education hub or we want to develop it into an industrial precinct. Or we're actually wanting to look at how we combine our library, our child care centres, some senior citizen centres and actually make it an active precinct for everybody and they're bigger scale projects. So we'll have a program again for councils to apply for and combine with universities or with other not-for-profit organisations to actually look at how you might transform your centres, which is such an important card for people coming in for both services and for recreation, labour, and business into communities.

DAMO: So when will the $1 billion program become available?

KING: At the start of next year. So what we're doing in the next few months - obviously, we've only got two months before Christmas, which was a shock to me this morning, it's coming up a bit fast - we're just consulting about the guidelines.

There's been some problems with the way in which regional grants programs were allocated by the previous government. We want to try and clean that up. So I want to talk to some of the peak regional bodies, the local government bodies about the guidelines. I think one of the things that we see, is that a huge amount of effort goes into putting in applications that are never going to go anywhere at all because it's either oversubscribed or there hasn't been enough direction or clear guidance from government about what it is that they're looking for.

So we're trying to make sure that we really narrow down those projects that are absolutely ready for investment and not just shovel ready, because I think that everyone says that, and it's really about are they ready for investment, are the partners there, is it actually viable to start because of where the construction industry is in, soon? What are the sorts of needs right at the moment, so just work those up in a better way. That'll just take us a little bit of time to get those guidelines ready and out and available.

In the meantime there's a small grants program that will come through your Federal Members’ office, the Stronger Communities Program and that's for grants up to $20,000, they'll be out shortly and they'll be available for you to contact your Federal MPs office if you're a community organisation or a not-for-profit organisation.

Again for capital works on, whether it's sporting clubs, whether it's fire authorities or whether it's your local fire brigade or your local SES as well and I know up your way they've been doing a power of work.

DAMO: For sure. And you've said you're going to actually abolish the Building Better Regions Fund?

KING: So there's always been a regional grants program. When the last government came in after Labor was in office they abolished our Regional Development Australia Fund, I remind people in fact what they did is I had, as Minister already administered and made decisions in government to fund things and the incoming government cancelled all of the grants in the Labor seats and kept are the ones in the Coalition seats. So we haven't done that.

What we've done is we've listened to the Australian National Audit Office that said that the way in which this grants program, frankly, was administered was very poor. It favoured obviously, on the outcomes it favoured largely National Party seats, which if you live in a National Party seat, that's great, if you don't not so great. But, what it also did is it it basically had for example, which I thought was a joke when I saw it, it had guidelines that said that Ministers - this secret ministerial panel - could consider things like other matters, and then we need you look down at the dot points of what those other matters might be. It had another dot point saying other matters. So it was pretty loose, frankly, right towards the end.

The round six applications, I know there are lots of people who put in for those, they closed in December last year. No assessments have been done of any of those grants by the time we came into office. So we think it's really time for a reset for those regional grants.

DAMO: And other matters obviously, when Labor went to the election, back in back in May, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that under Labor, our cost of living, will be a lot better, our electricity prices would go down. After the budget on Tuesday, it seems that our electricity prices are going up.

KING: So what we released really early in our term in Opposition is our commitment to a 43% reduction in emissions. And that has now been legislated. The modelling that we did on that, we stand by that modelling, says if you get more renewable energy into the system - and we've got frankly a decade of neglect of trying to drive this change in our in our energy transition to get more renewables in, renewables are a cheaper source of energy - that will make power prices cheaper for people.

People know that when you put solar panels on your roof, when your business does the same thing, when you convert from gas that actually is what happens to you, your power prices go down.

What we didn't know is that the government had legislated four days before the election to basically hide the increase in terms of what the electricity prices were doing. But what we know now obviously is with the war in Ukraine, power prices really are under the pump particularly in relation to gas.

We are absolutely committed to driving down prices down. We know this is the single biggest cost at the moment for businesses and for families. And that is why getting this transition right, to get more renewable energy right the way across the country is absolutely critical for people.

We have provided cost of living relief in the budget in the form of cheaper child care, paid parental leave, you'll see the cheaper medicines - that legislation has now, I think passed the parliament and you know, I know for many older Australians who are having multiple scripts that that is a significant impost on them.

So you'll see cost of living relief in that. Certainly we're driving up wages as well. We know that that's incredibly important. They've started to go up but of course, that's being sucked up by inflation. So we're doing what we can to try and get inflation down, to do what we can to transition the economy and all of those things unfortunately, you know, we can't do in just five months.

DAMO: The fuel excise, obviously that has come off and our fuel prices are going through the roof, $2.42 a litre for diesel, that's in Sydney.

KING: This was about trying to win an election on behalf of the Morrison government. They put in a short term cut to the fuel excise, we supported that. It was always intended to come off in September and that that was slowly going to make its way through into prices. And again, we do understand and I understand particularly for country people, just how difficult that is and the choices you have to make about what you're doing, when you're doing it.

But again, this is all about a couple of things. One, is obviously the war in Ukraine is really driving what's happening globally. We're not the only country who is experiencing this. But the most responsible thing a government can do in this context is try not to add to inflationary pressures, and pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars in cash handouts to people would frankly, drive inflation and actually drive interest rates up so it's a pretty difficult balancing act that we've been left with.

We also want to try and get as much debt paid down as we possibly can because we know in the budget, the thing that is growing the fastest is the government so, taxpayers having to pay down government debt. And that's just a waste of money that could be being able to be used for more productive things in the economy.

DAMO: We really do appreciate you taking the time.