E&OE TRANSCRIPT
JAMES GOTH, OZHARVEST CEO: We're very proud to welcome the Minister here today. We're on Gadigal land, and I'd like to acknowledge that this land was in the custodian of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation for tens of thousands of years. Minister, thank you.
TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: Well, it's wonderful to be here with James Goth and OzHarvest, and I notice we've also got Ronni Kahn here with us today, who is the founder of OzHarvest. I remember when Ronni launched OzHarvest, we were together in Surry Hills with a couple of dozen people and a good idea. And over the decades, I've seen OzHarvest grow into one of the most significant food rescue and food relief organisations in this country. OzHarvest and the other organisations who provide relief to Australians at some of the toughest times in their life provide an incredible service. Of course, they provide food, nutrition, community connection, support. They also do a wonderful job in rescuing food that would otherwise end up in landfills. So, they play a really important environmental role in our circular economy as well.
Today, I'm very pleased to announce that the federal government will commit an additional $4.7 million dollars to food relief and financial counselling to help Australians who are doing it tough. We know that right across Australia there are people who worry about putting food on the table. We want to make sure that we are there to help when that happens. Food relief organisations like OzHarvest will see a significant boost to their funding. These organisations, four of them all together, would normally receive $4 million this year. We're providing an extra $2 million to those organisations. Across Australia there'll also be 70 organisations, particularly in regional and remote communities, that will see a 15% funding boost to their annual funding, and we're providing an additional 1.1 million dollars to the National Debt Helpline. We know a lot of Australians get into trouble, whether it's just struggling to pay the bills or whether there are additional complexities like gambling or debts that have been incurred because of violent relationships. We want to make sure that that national debt helpline is there to assist Australians who are struggling to pay their debts, and we're doing this because we know that there are many parts of Australia where people are struggling with high cost of living. That's particularly the case in regional and remote communities, where fuel prices add so much to price in the supermarkets, and this additional funding will help organisations and individuals at a time of need.
JOURNALIST: Why is it such a priority right now to provide cost of living relief?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, it's always a priority for our government to assist Australians who need a helping hand. This is part of a $460 million program that supports food relief and financial capability and well-being for Australians. We're always there to provide a helping hand when it's needed, it's probably worth saying that when the coalition were last in government, they cut 20 million dollars a year from programs like this. That's exactly the wrong thing to do. We want to help Australians, particularly those who are doing it tough.
JOURNALIST: Have the organisations that have now received the funding have you heard from them that they've seen a rise in demand? Is that the same problem?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, there is absolutely strong demand across the country, and I hear that from my friends at OzHarvest every time I talk to them, and from the other food relief organisations. But I also see it as a as a local member when I'm out in my own electorate, and most particularly, I've been in remote Western Australia this week, visiting some very small communities, talking to people there about the cost of living pressures they feel when it comes to feeding their kids.
JOURNALIST: You mentioned the debt helpline. Has that seen a rise in demand this year?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: The simple truth is there are always Australians who struggle to pay the bills, and we know that there is demand for support through the National Debt Helpline. When I speak to people who work on that debt helpline, they tell me that they'd like to be able to help more people. This enables them to do that. Some of that is exacerbated as people feel financial pressures. But there's always been an underlying demand for this for this service and it's a good feeling to be able to give them a little bit extra help to help the many Australians who benefit from their services.
JOURNALIST: How were the organisations chosen? Which ones were they?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, there's three food relief organisations and Good 360, which provides consumer goods. We've just given them a top up of $2 million dollars, and then the 70 additional organisations that have seen a 15% funding boost on their annual funding. We've chosen organisations in regional and remote communities because we know that the war in the Gulf has pushed up food prices because of the additional cost of transporting that food to regional and remote communities. That's where we're seeing some of the biggest price hikes on already expensive on already expensive food. That fuel price increase for remote and regional supermarkets is something that we really want to help with. When the war in the Middle East, the conflict in the Straits of Hormuz is not something that Australia caused. It's not something that we're involved in, but Australian consumers are certainly feeling the cost of that, not just in their fuel prices, but in the additional prices in supermarkets being pushed up because of the cost of transporting goods around the country.
JOURNALIST: So, a few questions on other topics for the day. Just on the ATO banning credit card payments, businesses want a long-term solution, which is to say they want the decision reversed. Is it your expectation the ATO will negotiate a rate it finds acceptable with credit card companies within the next eight months and reverse the ban.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: The delay in the ATO implementing its decision to ban credit cards gives us plenty of time to work out a sensible solution here. But I think it's worth remembering what exactly is driving this issue. This is an effort to reduce cost of living for Australians by banning those expensive credit card charges that really were unnecessarily high, the banks were making a killing on credit card surcharges, and you know businesses really will save almost a billion dollars, and consumers will save close to 1.6 billion dollars a year because we're getting rid of those credit card charges. So we need to focus on what this delivers for businesses and consumers, and and actually make sure that businesses and consumers see the full benefit of that.
JOURNALIST: From 2003 to 2020, the government gave $442 million to breast cancer, $184 to prostate cancer, but Ovarian cancer only received 82 million. Do you think that this is adequate, considering that ovarian cancer is the deadliest woman's cancer in Australia?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: We'll always continue to work with the ovarian cancer organisations that have done such a terrific job in raising awareness of this very deadly type of cancer. One of the issues with ovarian cancer, of course, is that people often mistake the symptoms, and it's not picked up until it's too late. Raising awareness of ovarian cancer is a priority for the government, and we will continue to work with organisations representing the ovarian cancer patients and researchers and medical professionals who work in this area to make sure there's more attention and more support for dealing with ovarian cancer. I've had one friend who survived and one friend who died from ovarian cancer. I'm very well aware of the deadly nature of the disease, and I'm very well aware of how often the symptoms of ovarian cancer are mistaken for something else until it's too late.
JOURNALIST: $84 million over the next four years would really help with treatment and research. Is this something that you would possibly support?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I've always been a supporter of attention and funding support for ovarian cancer. But I'm not going to make funding commitments off the top of my head today. I'd say this is a government that has strongly backed greater investment in ovarian cancer and will continue to do so.
JOURNALIST: Just one on the ATO bans. Would you like to see the ATO continue to keep accepting credit card payments beyond next July?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I think it's a matter for the ATO to work out with the banks a common sense approach to this. But of course, if small businesses want to be able to pay their bills with a credit card. I think it should be possible for them to do that.
JOURNALIST: This week, Parliament is expected to debate Labor's digital duty of care laws, which the Trump administration says would amount to foreign censorship of protected speech. Is Labor considering carveouts for U.S. social media companies?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: This is not at all about censoring what people say on the internet. People will still be able to say all sorts of things that we don't agree with in a million years. This is an effort to keep children safe from some of the most harmful elements of social media, like is it really important for people to be able to see child pornography on the internet? Is it really important for people to be able to see material promoting anorexia or promoting dumb stunts that kill people. Is that really the sort of thing we want our children seeing on the internet? And is that really a free speech issue? It is just such nonsense. Also, I'll just say this, the idea that the tech bros who are defining our algorithms, who are feeding harmful content to our children, are the arbiters of free speech in this country. What nonsense that is. Like you get an algorithm that's designed for you by big tech. What is their interest in it? Their interest is keeping your eyeballs glued to it, so they can sell more advertising. That's not free speech. It's actually very expensive speech because they sell the advertising to advertisers. That's how they make their multi billions of dollars. It's a product, social media is a product, and if you're getting it for free, you are the product. It's an attention economy. The reason that the tech bros don't want to be regulated is because it might minusculely interfere with the massive profits that they're making.
Well, that's not good enough. We see the harmful impacts of this on our children. We know that if you set up a social media account as a teenage boy, an adolescent boy, it takes an average of 23 minutes for you to be fed misogynist content online. We know now that about 60% of young people say that they've experienced strangulation in their sexual relationships. There is no safe way to strangle someone. Is it a coincidence that strangulation has become huge in online porn, and the algorithm is feeding it to people? A couple of decades ago people weren't standardly strangling each other in their sexual relationships. Now they are. What's changed is being fed to them through porn and social media. That's just not good enough. A hands off, who cares, attitude is just not good enough when we know that the harm that is being caused to our young people, and you know, put on top of that, the rates of adolescent suicide we've seen, even children committing suicide, and the links that those children's parents will tell you to social media in the online environmen. It's a nonsense argument to pretend that this is about political censorship, it's about safety.
JOURNALIST: If there are no carve-outs for those companies, do you accept that that decision may attract tariffs?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I'll tell you what: we will always stand up for Australia's children, and we will deal with the consequences.
*The published version of this transcript has been edited to exclude some non-portfolio matters.