BELINDA KING, HOST: Now, the dust is beginning to settle on the Federal Budget with Treasurer Jim Chalmers announcing sweeping changes across Australia's tax regime in coming years, with negative gearing gone and capital gains discounts set to go. The budget papers do include some sweetness for taxpayers, cuts to the NDIS recipients, and big spends on housing and energy security. What's in it for North Tas? Well, we've got the Federal Labor Member for Lyons, Rebecca White, joining us this morning. Rebecca White, morning.
REBECCA WHITE, ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING: Good morning, BJ.
KING: Let's start with the hard stuff first. Labor has broken major election commitments around negative gearing and capital gains tax. How can you justify that?
WHITE: Well, it's about responding to the circumstances we're faced with and housing is a big pressure, and that's not just the case for young people. I talk to many people across different generations who are telling me this is one of their key priorities for government to tackle, which is what we're trying to do. It's about making the tax system fairer. There are grandfathering provisions – so I heard you say that negative gearing in capital gains tax are gone. That's not the case for people who currently have properties who are using those provisions, they will remain the case. And it's also not going to be the case for new builds, because what we want to do is incentivise construction of more homes. So some of those incentives will remain in place, but what it will do is remove the negative gearing and the capital gains tax concessions for those people who are looking to invest and essentially compete with first-time buyers or people who are trying to get into the market to actually have their own home. It's about levelling the playing field and recognising people have worked hard and they've put their money into property and those things will be respected, but we want to give young people a fair go, especially to get into the housing market. So we have done those things in this budget. I wouldn't frame it the same way you just did, BJ. I think it's about a responsible government responding to the circumstances we're facing, and I hope that people can understand that.
KING: That's an ABC hangover for me, Bec, you've got to forgive me.
WHITE: [Laughs]
KING: All right, now I wanted to have a chat with you about health, because it's always front of mind here. What does this budget deliver for Tassie's hospitals, GPs and mental health services, particularly in the regional areas?
WHITE: It delivers a lot, and we have committed to increased funding and that was an election promise we made, and all of that is delivered in this budget, plus more because we've struck an agreement with the Tasmanian Government for hospitals funding. So across the course of the next five years we're going to see a significant uplift in health funding in Tassie, which is good news. So not only are we maintaining support for our Urgent Care Clinics, which become a permanent feature now of the Tasmanian health landscape, but we've also increased funding for health. It's around a billion dollars in health and hospital funding, increasing to 1.1 billion by 29-30, I should say. So this just means the hospitals can run hopefully better, reduce some of those waiting lists.
And in the north of the state, there's funding there for the Northern Heart Centre, which has been announced recently going out to tender by the state government, but that's a federally funded initiative to support access to those services in northern Tasmania.
KING: So that Northern Heart Centre funding, is that new funding or is that a re-announcement of an existing commitment from the Federal Government?
WHITE: It's a $90 million commitment for the Northern Heart Centre, which is an uplift in funding. So that is a commitment that we did make at a previous election and we are delivering on that, to ensure we can get it built.
KING: Is that a similar situation with hospice? I believe there's about $5 million earmarked for Northern Hospice.
WHITE: There is money also for the hospice there, that's right, BJ, because we know that that's been a really important initiative that the community advocated very, very strongly for over a number of years now. That was Ross Hart, who was the federal member for Bass at the time, who secured that commitment from the Labor Government.
KING: Now, there is a little something in it for small business, a tax lifeline, loss carry-back. Can you shed a bit more light on that for us this morning?
WHITE: So that's true. For businesses who've got quite a significant turnover, they will be able to access that loss carry-back, along with the 20,000 instant asset write-offs being made permanent. So this was something that had been a once-off, it's being made permanent. It just helps to deal with some of the cash flow issues that businesses are facing at the moment, especially when you think about the global uncertainty and inflation that's flowing through the economy as a result of the war in Iran. It's just helping businesses continue to manage their cash flow pressures and for some of these measures, making them permanent.
KING: We need easier names for some of these schemes. We're both tripping over them this morning. Oh, my goodness. Now, the Tasmanian electricity consumers, I believe we're going to get some federal support to offset Project Marinus Link cost increases. There's something, I believe, like $361 million in Marinus Link funding in state. Do we have any suggestion on how that might be utilised yet, how that might flow through to electricity consumers in Tasmania?
WHITE: Yeah, so the total is $361 million across the forward estimates of the budget, and this is for the infrastructure component of Marinus Link. People may remember that there was a final investment decision reached by the Tasmanian Government and the Australian Government and Victorian Government collectively in August last year, and so what this funding does now is help support the continuation of the investment in infrastructure. So the offsetting costs for Tasmanian consumers really is to defray the increased costs that they would have otherwise been facing because of the transmission line upgrade. People in Tasmania know we rely on the economic regulator to set electricity prices and it would factor in increases in transmission costs because of increases in infrastructure costs. It's all very complicated, basically what it means is that we can build Marinus Link and there won't be an increase in cost to consumers because the Federal Government is offsetting that impact because of the way the energy regulator assesses the market. So it's not going to be something that shows up in people's electricity bills saying here's some extra money thanks to Marinus. It'll be no change to their bill because of the infrastructure investment. So we're just trying to make sure there is no impact on Tasmanian consumers because of this investment in infrastructure.
Now, we know that when Marinus is online, we will see downward pressure on Tasmanian power prices because we have to have more generation on island. We haven't got enough power being generated in Tasmania, and this will assist us to address that challenge.
KING: Lucky last question for you, Bec. What are you most proud of in this budget?
WHITE: For me, I think it is the way we are tackling the need to increase housing. It is really vital that we build more houses and we support more people into housing. I've long been a champion for investment in healthcare and I'm really proud to see what we're delivering in that space, and you and I have talked about that a lot. But housing is an area where my office and I regularly have conversations with people about some of the challenges they're seeing. So not only are we changing the tax system to make it fairer, but we're also investing in more ways to get more houses out of the ground. And we recently made an announcement in Tasmania with the Minister O'Neil, Minister for Housing, to see an extra 4000 homes built just for first home buyers, a majority of those will be just for first home buyers in Tasmania. Those are things I'm proud of because they will make a significant difference for people in our community who need to get a roof over their head.
KING: Rebecca White, Federal Labor Member for Lyons, thank you for joining us this morning.