DERRYN HINCH: Now Australia's official jobless rate fell to 5.4 per cent in April. It bucked the recent trends and also confounded most of the experts, the so-called experts, most of the economists, I think, a lot of the politicians. They had expected the jobless rate to climb from say, 5.7 per cent to 5.9 and now, as I said, dropped to 5.4. The number of people in jobs rose by 27,000 to 10.8 million and, indicatively, the rise in the number of full time workers was bigger than the fall in part-time employment. On the line now, the Federal Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, good afternoon.
LINDSAY TANNER: Good afternoon, Derryn.
DERRYN HINCH: People running around Canberra saying, what are we doing right, what are we doing right?
LINDSAY TANNER: [Laughs] Look, we're always very cautious about monthly figures Derryn, because they can jump around a bit and I think this possibly shows that the previous month of 5.7, which was a jump of 0.5 from 5.2 to 5.7, might have been a bit of an overestimate, very difficult to say. But I think it does certainly confirm yesterday's retail figures that show that our stimulus payments are having a positive effect that people are spending money, it's keeping people in jobs. But these things are always pretty hard to interpret.
DERRYN HINCH: It was a small, I am told it was a smaller sample which also maybe people would think about but then if it was a small sample and the figures had gone up, everybody would have accepted them so you've got to accept them for what they are.
LINDSAY TANNER: I think that's right but no statistic is ever absolutely perfect and you're dealing with millions of people and people are moving in and out of jobs at any time so it's not an easy thing to do.
DERRYN HINCH: Well, the best news should be that even if there was a bit of a leeway for adjustment, New South Wales, and they must be happy ,because that was the basket case.
LINDSAY TANNER: Yes. Well, New South Wales has been doing it tough over the last couple of years and it's been reasonably good in Victoria so I think as Victorians, you and I can probably take some heart for it because we're responsible for the nation not just Victoria. And so yes, you're right it is heartening to see some degree of bounce back there but again monthly figures can be a real trap, you can find that what looks good in this month's figures can be reversed in the following month, so we're not placing too much emphasis on it.
DERRYN HINCH: Now, President Obama and American experts have been sort of saying, in the past couple of weeks more so than otherwise that maybe there is some light at the end of the tunnel that is not an express train coming the other way. That maybe, bit of - some glimmers of good news are coming out.
LINDSAY TANNER: Look, I think it's too early to make those calls but I am cautiously hopeful, I think the real test of course is the continuing bad news from overseas. We've seen just absolutely shocking figures from the major economies around the world. Most of our major trading partners, just incredible drops in economic activity and increases in budget deficits and unemployment. And there seems to be some sort of flattening of that but it's too early to say and, you know, we have to be very careful and there's no doubt that the rest of the year in Australia, is going to be very tough. We are going to see things get worse because they take time to flow through the system. They don't just hit the economy overnight.
DERRYN HINCH: It's going to be hard too, whether you're right or wrong with this stimulus packages, because you, the other side will say well they haven't worked but your side will say understandably, that we don't know how bad it would have been if we hadn't done something.
LINDSAY TANNER: You're dead right, it's always a problem in these kind of debates is that you never know what would have happened had an initiative not been taken. So you can't measure the two alternatives and compare there, people just have to make up their own minds about who's got a credible argument and who hasn't. There's always scope for reasonable people to disagree on these things. And we face, towards the end of last year and earlier this year, just extraordinary circumstances where you have to take decisive action and where you don't have perfect information. So there'll always be scope for debate but we believe we did the right thing. The International Monetary Fund the OECD, the major international institutions have broadly endorsed what the Government's done and we believe that these are the right steps and we don't claim they're going to solve all the problems, we just believe it will help to cushion Australia against the most extraordinary set of circumstances that we face in generations.
DERRYN HINCH: Yeah. You are the Finance Minister and we have got a budget next week. You're not going to tell me anything but...
LINDSAY TANNER: Sorry, about that.
DERRYN HINCH: ...on superannuation, I mean, you made a promise in the election that you would not touch, I think, very cleverly worded, you would not touch super for people over 60. There's a lot of talk about the - you'll do something with entry taxes or bring back exit taxes. I mean, are they are chance?
LINDSAY TANNER: Look, Derryn, as you say, I can't speculate on specific possibilities and all I can really say to you is that one thing that is absolutely crucial in this budget is that we face a huge challenge to get the budget back into surplus, it's going to take some time and although we have obviously pretty big debt facing us over the next few years, big deficits because of the collapse in revenue, we can afford the - for that to happen over few years we can't allow it to happen indefinitely. And so we can't put off the tough stuff, we can't say, oh, we'll get around to that eventually. We've got to start the hard decisions now and that involves some really challenging choices for us. Now, you'll obviously find out the detail on Tuesday night but I think that's something we tried to be upfront with people about. There's going to be some tough decisions.
DERRYN HINCH: All right, Mr Tanner, thanks for your time.
LINDSAY TANNER: My pleasure, thanks very much.
DERRYN HINCH: Bye-bye. Federal Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner.
- ENDS-
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