3 June 2025
Topics; Nuclear energy, Housing Market, Future of the Coalition, Values-led rebuild, Labor’s Super tax.
Steve Austin
Ted O’Brien is a Queensland LNP, MP, commentators have said that he can bridge the divide between the Nationals who, under Peter Dutton, pushed the Coalition away from the Liberals’ market based instincts towards a more interventionist approach. We’ll see if that unfolds. What intrigues me is that Ted O’Brien, the Shadow Treasury spokesperson said, and I quote, a strong economy is not the end game. He also says Australia is becoming poorer, weaker and more dependent. Ted O’Brien is the Deputy Leader of the Federal Opposition and Shadow Treasury spokesperson, member for Fairfax here in Queensland. Ted O’Brien, morning to you.
Ted O’Brien
Good morning, Steve.
Steve Austin
Why is Australia becoming poorer, weaker and more dependent Ted O’Brien?
Ted O’Brien
Steve, it’s because Australia is going in the wrong direction.
Steve Austin
That’s obvious!
Ted O’Brien
Everyone who’s probably listening today, everyone’s doing it tougher. The last election was very much about a cost of living crisis. So households are doing it tougher, but this is just symptomatic of something far bigger, which is happening to Australia as a country compared to our peers. We are going backwards, especially when it comes to economic measures like productivity. We are not growing fast like we used to. We are de-industrializing a lot of our key industries, and as a result, as an economy overall, we’re just getting poorer. And it might sound crude to some, Steve, but in a very volatile world, if you want to be strong, well, you have to be rich. And if we continue down a path of poverty as a nation, then not only will we be poorer in the future, but we will be weaker and we’ll be more dependent on foreign powers for our supply chains. That’s the wrong direction for Australia. And so a fundamental shift is needed to return Australia so that when it comes to our kids and theirs, we bequeath them a nation which is actually prosperous, strong and fiercely independent. That’s the end goal for me. Now, a month down from the federal election, why weren’t you able to prosecute that argument during the federal election, Ted O’Brien? Steve, I think we’ve got a lot of lessons to learn from the federal election. There’s no doubt that the Liberal Party was hit and hit badly, and we can’t look around and point the fingers everywhere else. We’ve got to learn our own lessons with that. I think there were some arguments we didn’t prosecute strongly. There were some lies by the Labor Party that we were not effective in dismantling. And I think we need to be very clear about a positive vision for the country. We need to be more values led as a political movement. We need to be future focused. And more than anything, we have to have an agenda which puts a strong economy at the centre. That’s our approach moving forward, I believe Steve.
Steve Austin
Has the review into your loss started yet?
Ted O’Brien
Yes, it has.
Steve Austin
Who’s doing it, do you know?
Ted O’Brien
There’s going to be different components of the review. And so each of us, individually are doing our own reviews within our own seats. I’ve been doing that going around my own electorate on the Sunshine Coast in a very formal way, and my colleagues are doing likewise. There will, in addition to that, be a formal review that formal review has not yet started. Of course, there are a lot of discussions at the moment scoping that up, but that will ultimately be decided by the federal executive of the Liberal Party.
Steve Austin
Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister, has had a major coup or a win, in my mind today, when they when Labor has managed to coax a Greens Senator from Western Australia to join the Labor Party. I haven’t checked the figures today, but I think that means that the Labor Party has total control of both the lower house and the upper house – the Senate. Would that be correct?
Ted O’Brien
Well, I was looking up that exact same thing, Steve about five minutes before we spoke. It certainly does lift Labor to to 28 I believe. But I think it’s still short.
Steve Austin
It’s still short in the Senate.
Ted O’Brien
Yeah, I believe so. But don’t take my word for that, because I was only myself looking trying to look that up myself five minutes ago.
Steve Austin
I haven’t done the numbers myself. But it’s I mean that shows, in my mind, the confidence and the strength of the Albanese team at the moment, Ted O’Brien.
Ted O’Brien
Well, it certainly does from a numbers game. It also speaks to the natural affinity between the far left of Australia, the Greens, which really are an anarchist protest party, and the Labor Party. You know, you don’t defect, jump from one party to another without having hand on heart alignment, and that’s what you do have between the Greens and Labor.
Steve Austin
Ted O’Brien, sorry, Ted O’Brien is the Deputy Leader of the Federal Opposition. He’s Shadow Treasury spokesperson and also the member for Fairfax here, based here in Queensland. Ted O’Brien you in a statement, I think you released it yesterday, you observed that gross debt in Australia will hit $1 trillion over the coming year. Isn’t the main reason for this gross debt. Gross debt is because former LNP Prime Minister Scott Morrison did something in conflict with Liberal values. He splashed cash around during the pandemic, did a widely condemned GST deal with West Australia State Government, something that even now Queensland’s treasurer has strongly criticized. In other words, isn’t that an own goal for the opposition?
Ted O’Brien
Steve, I think if you look at different governments over the years, I think it’s not hard to try to point to any particular point in time and say, well, that has contributed to Australia’s debt levels. Did we increase our debt obligations through the pandemic? Yes, we did. I would argue, nonetheless, that that was done for a reason. It saved lives, it kept businesses in play. And there’ll be a lot of listeners today who were beneficiaries, especially of job keeper. We were able to keep individuals with… but nonetheless, yes, debt went up. What is of more concern to me is outside of times of economic shock, such as a pandemic or a GFC, we have an enormous uplift in spend. And we are seeing debt climb higher and higher. That’s what’s happened over the last three years in the absence of any major economic shock. And in the year ahead, we will see debt hit $1 trillion which really is, I mean, Steve, look, you and I, we might carry the burden of that a little bit, but really it’s the young, the young people today. It’s kids who are, you know, now being born. Effectively, what government is now doing under Labor is they are going on spending sprees, and they are using the credit cards of Australian children who will be lumped with this in years to come in and this goes to my earlier point. This is why, in the future, we are going to be poorer and weaker as a nation unless we restore fiscal discipline. Debt and deficits matter, and it’s not just a matter of hard headed economics. There is a moral argument here. This is about intergenerational equity and not lumping our children and theirs with an impoverished country because we can’t control our spending. I believe that’s what’s happening at the moment, and the job of the opposition, especially under the leadership of the Liberal Party, has got to be to restore the discipline around fiscal responsibility, and that’ll be certainly one of the things with which we’ll be charging ahead over the next few years.
Steve Austin
Federal Shadow Treasury spokesperson Ted O’Brien, is my guest.Then for the next generation, for my children, my listeners children, they are being shut out of the Australian housing market. Australia once known as the place where it was easy to buy a house. Can you explain to me what’s wrong with the housing market? The more governments talk about improving supply, the less there is, the slower it goes, whilst demand is continuing to increase, what’s wrong? Explain to me, the housing market, as far as you’re concerned?
Ted O’Brien
Steve, I think you mentioned the two biggest pieces, supply, demand. On the demand side, we’ve got to be very careful that we do not continue as Labor is – letting go of any control levers when it comes to immigration. Australia is an open society. I’m proud of that, and we need to continue to be so. However, we have had the most enormous number of new people coming to Australia, and of course, they all want they’re in the market. They all want a home. We have also been too loose as a country over recent years, with foreign investment coming in, tying up properties which are not even lived in, in some cases. But when it comes to the supply, that’s the main game. It has to be increasing supply, and I felt it on the Sunshine Coast. Even in particular, the sunny Coast has been either the first or second highest destination of people moving out of cities around the country. And on the Sunshine Coast, I’m seeing it. Young families are having to move out because they cannot afford the prices anymore. So it is all around supply. Unfortunately, the measures introduced by the Labor Government three years ago, have not delivered so much as one new property and the number one economic measure that Jim Chalmers is moving ahead with in this new term of government is a tax on unrealised capital gains in superannuation. Now what’s going to happen here, according to the experts, is you have self managed super funds, about $1.1 trillion in these self managed super funds, they’re going to now be taxed far higher. So what the experts are saying is they’re just going to reallocate the money out of those super funds, and about $150 billion will go into property. Now what that means is, again, property prices go up. And this is where I think the problem with how some people run economic policy is they don’t come from a background in the real world of understanding the importance of of second order effects. The academics call it behavioral economics. If you are going to introduce a major new tax, people don’t just sit back and passively cop it. They change their behavior. So the first measure in this new term of government will actually be one that will drive property prices up even higher and won’t solve for additional supply. So I think, Steve, there’s not one easy solution to it, but we have to improve land release. We have to improve approval processes. Obviously, there’s a real responsibility on local councils for density around key transport hubs. But from the federal level, we’ve got to avoid the unintended consequences of increasing taxes, which will only spike property prices.
Steve Austin
The Federal Labor team say they don’t want house prices to come down, and they’ve been quite clear about that. They don’t want house prices to come down, does the opposition?
Ted O’Brien
I don’t think it’s a matter of, you know, where do you want the prices to go overall. I mean, obviously nobody wants to see assets suddenly fall in a way which is not due to straight economics. What we want to see is houses become more affordable, and the best way to do that is to get more supply into the market, if we if we can have any market flooded with more product, well, the price of those products are lower. Which is a different argument from saying, well, if you own your house today, we want the price of your asset to go down. No. I mean, I think that sort of argument stays with people who don’t believe in growing the pie. And I believe that Labor is in the game of not growing the pie. It’s dividing it, which is why, you know, they’re very focused on, you know, the prices go up or down of existing assets. We want new assets. We want to grow the pie. We want to grow the Australian economy. We want to grow the property market.
Steve Austin
My guest is Ted O’Brien. I have to go to news headlines in a moment, but I just want to get clarity around something for you. The new nuclear policy of the Coalition is what, in simple terms, Ted O’Brien, what’s the new federal policy?
Ted O’Brien
So we will be taking out time to work out the detailed energy policy what we have agreed as Liberals and Nationals as part of our Coalition agreement is a principle that we will start by lifting the moratorium for nuclear energy in Australia, but as for the building, the owning, the operating, the financing, the details of that policy we will take our time to work out. But at least on that in principle agreement, we are saying that we still see an important role for nuclear energy in Australia’s future energy mix.
Steve Austin
Does the Queensland LNP Premier support the new federal policy on lifting the moratorium on nuclear energy?
Ted O’Brien
Well, as we go through formulating that detailed policy, Steve, we of course, will be engaging very closely with our colleagues, not just in Queensland, but around the country. The starting point, though, to be honest, is listening to the Australian people. They sent us a message on the third of May. We need to be humble enough to listen to engage, while also being sure that we are focused on what’s in the national interest, which is why we’ve taken that in principle position that nuclear energy should not be illegal in this country, it should form part of the future energy mix, but we’ll engage closely with the Australian public and key stakeholders including State Governments as we formulate the details of our new energy policy.
Steve Austin
Ted O’Brien thanks for your time.
