Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came under pressure from Sunrise hosts Nat Barr and Matt Shirvington in a tense interview on Friday, as the backlash from the budget continues to mount.<\/p>\n
The interview came amid weeks of heated reaction to Labor’s budget, which saw Labor break key election promises by announcing reforms to capital gains tax and negative gearing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked by Barr whether Australians still trusted him after the budget, Mr Albanese defended the reforms, arguing the housing system was “broken.”<\/p>\n
“What we’ve done here is do something about it … if you want a negatively geared property, you certainly can, but it’s got to be a new build rather than an existing property,” Mr Albanese said.<\/p>\n
Barr challenged the rollout of the reforms, asking whether announcing the changes before consulting the public was “a good way of governing”.<\/p>\n
“That’s not what happened, Nat, to be clear,” the Prime Minister interjected.<\/p>\n
The Sunrise host continued to press the Prime Minister.<\/p>\n
“For 45 days, people have been angry and confused,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have been running to their accountants. They don’t know what’s happening. Do you think you’re out of touch?”<\/p>\n
Mr Albanese rejected the criticism, insisting there had already been extensive debate before the budget and that existing negative gearing arrangements would remain unchanged.<\/p>\n
“I’ll tell you what’s out of touch. What’s out of touch is saying the housing system is broken, but the government shouldn’t do anything about it,” he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the nonsense and scare campaigns will dissipate because people will be confronted with the reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said fixing the housing system was worth any political cost.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere has been a lot of misinformation. Now people have to debate the reality. And the reality is the system was broken,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that’s why I, as Prime Minister, have a responsibility when something is identified as broken, to do my best to fix it, even if there’s a political cost of that.<\/p>\n
“My job is to do the right thing for the nation.”<\/p>\n
Shirvington said the government was paying a political cost, arguing concerns raised by viewers showed the backlash went beyond political scare campaigns.<\/p>\n
“Each and every day people are saying the same thing. Your integrity is dropping, your trust is dropping, your popularity is dropping,” he said.<\/p>\n
Mr Albanese dismissed the criticism as “complete nonsense”.<\/p>\n
Shirvington then suggested the budget had left the government “unravelling”, asking whether the Prime Minister was frustrated with how it had been handled.<\/p>\n
“Jim Chalmers has put you in this position with his budget that every single day looks like it’s unravelling,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Every (day) there’s a new campaign about it. It’s not just housing. It’s a death tax. It’s exemptions for small business.”<\/p>\n
Mr Albanese defended his Treasurer and denied claims the budget would affect inheritance arrangements.<\/p>\n
“Jim Chalmers is doing a great job. And, Matt, some of the things that you’ve raised there are the things that are just not true,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We’re making no changes to people’s inheritance arrangements. None. None.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came under pressure from Sunrise hosts Nat Barr and Matt Shirvington in a tense…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1869,483,22,990,21,4957,24025,3180,31932,31931,489,2850],"class_list":["post-39033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-albanese","tag-anthony-albanese","tag-au","tag-australian","tag-austrlia","tag-cgt","tag-housing-tax","tag-jim-chalmers","tag-matt-shirvington","tag-nat-barr","tag-prime-minister","tag-sunrise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}