E&OE TRANSCRIPT
Straight Shooters with Clinton Maynard, 2GB Sydney
TUESDAY, 25 MARCH 2025
SUBJECT: Budget, Cost of Living, TV Shows
CLINTON MAYNARD, HOST: Well appropriate for a Tuesday afternoon our straight shooters, political heavyweights in NSW, the Labor MP for Macquarie, Susan Templeman. Hello, Susan.
SUSAN TEMPLEMAN, MP: Hi, Clinton.
MAYNARD: And Hollie Hughes, Liberal senator for NSW. Hello, Hollie.
HOLLIE HUGHES, SENATOR: Afternoon.
MAYNARD: And I say appropriate, because of course, this evening, Jim Chalmers, the good doctor, will hand down the budget, and I know you're in Parliament at the moment. You're both very excited about what's going to transpire tonight. I'll start with ou, Susan, as a member of the government, will there be any surprises in the budget, or has everything already been announced?
TEMPLEMAN: Well, there's certainly been a lot announced and I feel like I know more about this budget at 4:45 on budget day than I have in any other time, except perhaps when I was in lock up as a journalist decades ago. And then I was probably still trying to work out what the hell it all meant.
MAYNARD: Why? Why do you guys, politicians, why do you still lock journalists up when everything is basically announced before?
TEMPLEMAN: Well, there's so many things I could say about locking journalists up there, Clinton, but I think it that what it does do is provide some space as a journo. It gives you some space where there's no pressure from your news editor to be filing a story. So I think that sort of process is really useful for journos, you know, you know what it's like, you’re processing information really fast, but you get to go through it and think about it and talk to other people and ask the Treasurer about it because there are there are a whole bunch of government people in there helping to explain it or to answer questions.
MAYNARD: And So what happens for the uninitiated, the Treasurer will do his main press conference behind the closed doors as part of the lock up. And so the journalists will have, say, 3 hours to go through detail and find some curly questions to ask him and that, you know, maybe that’s when the Treasurer becomes unstuck.
TEMPLEMAN: Even better than that, you know, I think cause I remember as a very young journalist, being able to listen to Paul Keating sort of talk through the thinking behind some of the measures long before we got to the news conference stage. It is, there's a lot to digest and I guess the bits that I'm really pleased to see that we already know are that we have turned the budget around and saved taxpayers 10s of billions of dollars. We're going to see the biggest budget turnaround in a parliamentary term in Australia's history.
MAYNARD: But, Susan, you're not blaming the coalition for that huge debt. And yes, they had big deficits as well. It was racked up during COVID, and both sides of politics were supporting all that spending.
TEMPLEMAN: Well, you can only be responsible for- you can only look after what you inherit. And yes, all sorts of circumstances happen, but their previous government long, long before COVID was never able to deliver a budget surplus. So you know, take COVID out of the equation and we were still dealing with big liberal deficits. We've turned those into Labor surpluses and the forecast that Josh Frydenberg had, we've actually been able to save $60 billion in interest pay payments over the next decade by reducing debt by about $177 billion dollars. So big numbers but, actually, the history shows this is an extraordinary turn around. We have never seen anything like it.
MAYNARD: Well, this this sounds wonderful. Hollie, you must be dancing for joy that your friends on the other side of the chamber have done wonderful things with the numbers.
HUGHES: I had no idea deficits as far as the eye could see – it's fairy land. What an extraordinary interpretation of this budget. We know that Australians are going to be paying for Labor's high spending. They're addicted to spending. They keep talking about savings. There is $347 billion of additional spending that this government has added to the bottom line of the budget and we know that there's also billions of dollars being squirreled and hidden away in off budget promises. Why it's important tonight to have a look at the budget papers is because it's what they don't go out there and sell, what they don't go and make a big deal about. So it's the programs that are being cut. The funding that Australians rely on that's being cut, that we'll be most interested in having a look at.
MAYNARD: Well, Susan, what what's been cut Susan?
TEMPLEMAN: Well, in terms of savings, the Treasurer will talk through where savings are, but one of them for instance is around we're saving on consultants and labour hire. Now we think that's a really good thing to be saving money on -
MAYNARD: But if they were consultants to be saved on what? Why wasn't that done in the first year of Labor government?
TEMPLEMAN: Well, we had a huge amount of savings in our first two budgets. And that really showed that there wasn't much discipline from the previous lot in the way they did their budget, because we were able to do really significant savings and we're continuing that. There's about $2.1 billion of savings in tonight's budget. But you know, there's other good stuff. Hollie talks about spending money. I'm thrilled that we are investing in Medicare. Because the Hawkesbury is going to be 1 of 50 places to get a Medicare urgent Care Clinic. And you know, that is a cost to government, but it saves our emergency departments and it also more importantly saves people with someone in their family who's ill, time and money.
MAYNARD: And the Coalition's also matching that the spending on Medicare, I just want to talk about another spending initiative and that's the $150.00 energy bill rebate that'll be in force for the second six months of this year. Hollie, do you think this should be means tested?
HUGHES: Look, what I do know is the Prime Minister told us 97 times before the previous election that our power bills were going to go down by $275. And what we've actually seen is an increase of over 30%. So that was a miss truth that was spoken by the Prime Minister almost 100 times. This rebate, and we won't stand in the way of a rebate but, people need to understand this is taxpayers dollars coming back to you, because energy costs are out of control. Australians have experienced the greatest decline in standard of living under this government in history, and how anyone in this Labor government can stand up and say, look how good we are, I mean I would ask them to go out and ask their constituents, are you better off today than you were three years ago? And you would be very, very hard push to find anyone who says yes.
MAYNARD: Survey indicate that the majority say no. Hey, just before we go and we'll obviously have full coverage of this this evening on 2GB from 7:00pm.
TEMPLEMAN: Clinton, just let me say that though, but the cost of living measures are because we know that despite all the hard work we're trying to do to get a solid future happening, it's still tough now and that's why we need to give every household that rebate.
MAYNARD: It absolutely is tough. Everybody's saying the same thing. Just on a lighter note, Netflix has released some statistics about the use of their skip intro button when you're watching programs that you're streaming. So, in this day and age, we have the luxury of being able to jump through the introduction to a television show that we're watching. According to Netflix, the skip intro button is pressed 136 million times a day. This is right around the world. It saves viewers a cumulative 195 years every day. Hollie, do you skip the intro if you watch a TV programme?
HUGHES: Every single time. My husband just sits there laughing at me going you are so quick on that remote to get rid of the intro. I will even fast forward on some of the other streaming services, but don't let you skip and try. I find it an unnecessary wasteful period of time when you don't get that time very often. So I am a big skip intro person.
MAYNARD: Susan, do you skip the intros?
TEMPLEMAN: Oh, absolutely like Hollie, so time poor when I do get to sit and watch something, especially if I get to sit and watch more than one episode at a time, I'm just jumping through them to get to the main game.
MAYNARD: Yeah, that's the nature of binge watching. But it then means you miss watching some classic television intros. Do you have a favorite Hollie, a favorite TV theme or TV intro?
HUGHES: Well, I mean, I think the friends intro is sort of an earworm that once you get it into your head, that's that's stuck. I think any one of our generation would know the Seinfeld one without a second thought. But I must say the one that probably does get watched at my place through more often is the White Lotus one because it's very clever. Their intro, is very clever. If you look at the drawings in there of all the storylines that are coming.
MAYNARD: This is The White Lotus intro. I think I'm the only one in the country. I've not seen a single episode of White Lotus. Hollie, am I missing something?
HUGHES: You're missing out. Oh, I'm so dirty that they've started doing this drop an episode a week. It's like look, when it comes back I want the whole series so that I can binge it if I've got time. I don't need this waiting for an episode per week.
MAYNARD: OK, I'll put it on my list. Now, Susan, what's your favorite TV theme or intro?
TEMPLEMAN: Well, unlike you, I've never watched White Lotus, but my favorite is West Wing. It's an oldie but it’s a goodie.
MAYNARD: Now that takes us backwards to the early 2000s, I think that was around wasn't it?
TEMPLEMAN: I think we call it turn of the Century.
HUGHES: My children were breastfed to it, one episode was one breastfeed. So my daughter was breastfeed for the whole 7 Series.
TEMPLEMAN: I reckon it's just that sweeping orchestral scene. It literally sweeps you into the show. So and yeah, it gives me goosebumps. And my chief of staff has it as his ringtone on his phone, so I still get to hear it multiple times a day.
MAYNARD: You are political tragics. So good luck tonight, Ladies, with the budget being handed down in federal parliament. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Hollie.
ENDS
