E&OE TRANSCRIPT
LAURA JAYES: Joining me now is the Social Services Minister, Minister Pibersek, here in the studio with me. She has a fundamental point there, and I don't think this is all the government's job, to fix this society wide problem. But Chanel's point is that what the government can and should be doing just isn't enough at the moment. Do you accept that?
TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: Oh, absolutely. And that's why we've been working with Teach Us Consent, including funding them around $7.5 million, to work on better respectful relationships education, to work on this issue that Chanel was talking about yesterday around algorithms and what they're doing, and also to work with young people to understand that pornography is not real life. I mean, unfortunately, a lot of young people are getting their sex education from pornography. They're seeing it way too young. It's often being fed to them involuntarily. And when they do seek it out, it's depicting things that are really potentially very harmful and certainly not depicting consensual and mutual relationships.
JAYES: So, what Chanel is talking about is opt in vs opt out. I know you're considering both, but can't we have a default setting where it's just off?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, well, that's what it used to be like. And I think that was the really interesting point that Chanel was making at the press club yesterday. Is what we're talking about is social media as it was just a few years ago, where you would get reminded to have a break. You'd be told that you'd been caught up for the last 48 hours.
JAYES: I don’t even remember that. Did we not have this aggressive algorithm?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yes, the algorithm's become more targeted. Social media has become more addictive because, you know, we are the product, our eyeballs on social media. These are advertising platforms. The more people you've got engaging, the more you've got to sell to advertisers. And so social media algorithms have deliberately become more addictive over time. And part of that is more addictive means more likely to enrage you or capture you in a way. Whether it's angry or fascinated or turned on or whatever it is, it's eliciting emotion in the person who's watching it that keeps them engaged. And that's not always good for us. And we know that for many years, girls have been impacted by this. Algorithms have picked up insecurities in young women. They've been sold products, dangerous dieting advice and so on. Boys are the target in a way that they haven't previously been now. And it's a real worry.
JAYES: If you open a new social media account, Chanel said Yesterday, it takes 23 minutes, you don't even have to put in any of your preferences, three minutes for them to identify that you're a male, a young person, and then feed you misogynistic material. We are starting to see this play out in the real world in terms of the consequences, aren't we?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Teachers will be the first to tell you that they're seeing boys as young as six, use misogynistic language that's common in the manosphere, as young as six. And certainly teachers will tell you that the sexism and aggression is much more common in their classrooms today. Against them as female teachers, but also obviously against female students.
JAYES: Is part of this, Tanya, that these young men are being targeted? Then, you know, we report in the press about how terrible it is for them and then they feel attacked and then there's this kind of isolation point. We've got sons, husbands, brothers. What more do we need to do on the other side?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, well, we've got another program as a government, a $21 million program where we're working to support healthy masculinities. We know that these online influencers can be really harmful to young men, but we know too that the person that they are most likely to get advice and support from is their dad. The second most likely person is their mum. Those real world relationships are really, really powerful. And so young men who have a close and supportive relationship with a father or father figure are 48% less likely to use violence. So, by encouraging those real world close connections, whether it's with dad, grandad, uncle, sporting coach, male teacher, whoever it is, taking that interest in that young man and being someone that they can go to with their problems and their questions, that that is a big part of the antidote.
JAYES: Do you think part of the problem is as well sometimes in the media, sometimes in real life, that every kind of breach or every kind of mistake a young man makes has dialled up to one worst possible category, when sometimes it's just not the case. So, there's this kind of outrage factor sometimes fuelled by social media, when in real life, the reality of navigating that is not as bad as it's kind of blown out to be.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: So, I think one of the really interesting things here is all of us who work in this area have been told about young men and young women who have perhaps been engaging in sexual strangulation. Extremely dangerous practice, can't do it safely. And one of them says to the other one, look, to be really honest, I'm not into this and the other one says, thank God, I've never been into it either. They have learnt these scripts from pornography. Boys have learnt that they should do it because dominating women is what women want. And girls have learnt that they should ask for it or engage in it, because that's what men want to do. We need to actually have really effective conversations about why pornography is not real life, what respectful relationships really look like, what consent really looks like. And you can't do that by not talking to kids. Like, a lot of people think that we're protecting teenagers by, you know, keeping them naive. The horse has bolted on that.
JAYES: Yeah, I think so too, about what you can teach in schools and what conversations can be had. Ok, we won't, we will pick up that conversation another time. Let me ask you about housing now. Last month you said that first home buyers are feeling an enormous sense of relief. We've since had a lot of data, a lot of pressure on the RBA to raise rates as well. Isn't the reality for a young person today with an ordinary job, they still can't afford to buy an ordinary home?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, and we're trying to make it easier in a range of different ways. We've talked about the 5% deposit program and that's already helped well over 260,000 first home buyers into the market.
JAYES: Does that matter that they might be in negative equity now, though?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: People don't buy a house and sell it a month later and move out. They keep their major asset for years at a time. 2019, we saw house prices go down for 15 months in a row. House prices today, like different markets across the country, but in general, house prices today are what they were a few months ago, a year ago, perhaps. What we saw is 400% house price growth over the last couple of decades. We need to make sure that wages can keep up, more or less with house price growth or more young people will continue to be locked out of the housing market. And that is such a foundation for economic security. Young people with an ordinary job should be able to afford an ordinary home in this country. And in recent times, they haven't been able to have the same expectations as their parents and grandparents. We need to change that. And so it is about 5% deposits. It's also about building more homes. We've seen loans for construction go up. We've seen housing approvals go up. We need to build-
JAYES: But not homes loans first home buyers. And when you look at the supply and demand factor, look at Bathla. I mean, Bathla is the canary in the coal mine, isn't it? A lot of builders will tell me that any project west of Parramatta just doesn't stack up. So, all the developments happening in the kind of eastern suburbs of Sydney, that's a real feasibility problem, isn't it? How do you overcome it? We're about 90,000 approvals behind as it is.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, we need all three levels of government working together on that. We need local government, state governments and the Commonwealth. We will do our share. We see a lot of movement in states and territories and a lot of councils as well who are trying to get their acts together. But there's not one lever that we pull here, Laura. There's multiple things that we need to do at the same time. We have to make it easier for people with things like 5% deposits, because why on earth would you be paying rent if you can actually be paying your own mortgage? But we need to make sure that construction is working as well. We've made sure, for example, that we're training more construction workers. Our immigration program has focused on people with construction skills coming into the country under that skilled migration category. We've seen house price construction costs that were running at 17% inflation a while ago, back to like 3 or 4% now. That matters, all of these things need to be done together to make sure that ordinary Australians can afford an ordinary home in this country.
JAYES: Let's talk about tobacco excise as well, because I've watched budget after budget show that this category has, in terms of revenue, has just gone down and down. This is now being controlled by organised crime. The coalition has a plan today, in part, it legalises vapes and it cuts the tobacco excise by about 80%. This is to try and combat organised crime. What's wrong with that plan?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: It will kill people. Like, seriously, we have some of the lowest smoking rates in the world because cigarettes are expensive. And what we've seen is that number come down consistently over time. You can buy vapes in this country. You need to go to the pharmacy with a prescription. So, they are legal, they're just regulated. Regulated. And they should be, because they are-
JAYES: Anecdotally, it is so easy to get these coloured flavoured vapes outside of a pharmacy.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Do you know what's in them?
JAYES: No, I don't.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Nobody does. That's the point. They're made in offshore factories in a completely unregulated way. What we do know is when we test them, the nicotine levels are much higher than it says on the packaging and they are poisonous.
JAYES: But you’re not stopping them come into the country.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, we are. We've seen spent $365 million on blocking more of these at the border—
JAYES: But why are they still so easy to get?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: We've had some very big hauls at the border. The reason that they are easy to get is because state governments are not appropriately policing. Where you see Queensland and South Australia, where they have the toughest rules, where they're actually shutting shops, you're actually seeing a difference being made against organised crime. I'll tell you this as well. If we drop the price of legal cigarettes, what's to say that organised crime doesn't drop the price of illegal cigarettes? Are we really going to be in a race to the bottom with criminal organised gangs making these dangerous products overseas?
JAYES: What’s the solution?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Just one other thing that I want to say. Tobacco is the only legal product that regularly kills two thirds of its regular users. If cars killed as many people as tobacco, people would be outraged about the road toll. This is a dangerous product and giving in to the bikies and the organised criminal gangs from overseas is not a solution to the illegal sale of these dangerous products. These products kill people.
JAYES: So, you think this is just a policing problem?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I think it's partly a policing problem. We need to keep doing what we're doing at the border. We need to keep intercepting large shipments at the border. We need to-
JAYES: But taxes, you know, change a signal in the market. Would you reduce the excise?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, that's not a that's not a decision for me alone to make. But I can tell you that increasing the excise means we have some of the lowest smoking rates in the world. We still do.
JAYES: I don't believe those figures, do you?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, I do.
JAYES: People aren't smoking but they're vaping. And how do you have, how do you have the accurate data when people are buying illegal cigarettes?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: So, smoking rates- because we also, we also track chemicals in water supply and a whole range of other things and people self report and so we're not just going on sales data.
JAYES: There can be problems with that, right?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah. Except there's no, like, if someone's asking you confidentially, do you buy illegal cigarettes? People are mostly fine to say, yeah, I do, I buy the cheap stuff from the barber down the road. But what we've seen is smoking rates continue to come down as policing has been re established and vaping has flatlined which is good. If we make these products cheaper, if we make them more readily available, we know for certain that kids will start vaping more and kids will start smoking again. Even committed smokers, people who are addicted, don't want their kids to start smoking. If we drop the excise in the way that has been suggested by the coalition, that is a guarantee that we will see smoking and vaping rates in this country increase, that will lead to deaths.
JAYES: Tanya Plibersek, Good to see you in the studio.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Thank you.