Premier speaks ahead of state budget

Well, it’s being spooked as a cost of living budget, but will the measures unveiled today go far enough to ease the financial burden being felt by so many W Australians? To help answer that question, we’re very pleased to say we’re joined this morning by Premier Roger Cook. Premier, good morning to you. Good morning. So the WA economy is booming right now, as we all know and yet so many people are still doing it tough. How will this budget directly help the hip pocket right now? Yeah, you’re right. We’ve got very low unemployment, the lowest inflation in the country, but there are many Western Australians that are doing it tough. So that’s why this budget is focused on three key outcomes, making sure that we provide assistance for the cost of living, continuing to address the challenges in our housing sector and of course continued investment in our healthcare system to make sure WA has one of the best health systems in West in the in the country. So you just mentioned there you want to address cost of living issues premier in the immediate. So in the short term how is this budget going to do that? Well, we’ve already announced some important measures that includes our WA student assistance payment. Already the families of quarter of a million school children have benefited from that assistance payment and of course we’ve announced the increase to the pensioner travel card in for regional Western Australians, continued investment in our our capped regional capped airfare scheme and of course we’ll be looking to other opportunities in this budget to assist people with the cost of living, OK. So housing affordability as we all know has also become a major issue in WA with the lowest vacancy rates on record. So you’ve already committed more than $840 million to social housing. So can you give us an indication of the timeline of those builds and what practical measure measures in addition to that this budget will have for renters? Yeah, we’re starting to see capacity come into our residential construction industry again and that’s led to an increase in the number of approvals for builds. So that’s a pleasing short early indicators in our budget. We’ve already announced significant assistance for the housing industry by continuing to make sure we have 3 fee free TAFE courses for people entering the construction industry, but also assistance for construction companies when it comes to putting apprentices on. That’s brought on 150 apprentices in early this year and we’ve doubled down on that announcement in March as well. So we’re looking at all the opportunities right across the housing sector to intervene to make sure that we’ve got great opportunities to expand our capacity to build more homes. We’ve also obviously announced our rental assistance payments. In addition to that we’ve got our short term rental accommodation and incentive scheme which has brought 150 new rent long term rentals onto the market. The other day we announced $5000 incentive for owners of long term vacant properties so that they can actually have the incentives to bring their properties onto the long term rental market as well. We’re throwing everything out our housing challenges at the moment and this budget will reinforce those measures. Premier electricity credits, they look set to be back. So how much money is this going to save households? And just on electricity prices, are you also going to guarantee that they’ll stay below the rate of inflation for the next 12 months? Yeah, we’ll have more details in relation to other cost of living measures in today’s budget, but we’re very pleased that over the last few years we’ve continued to keep increases in electricity prices below the rate of inflation. That contrast to the experience of many Australians on the East Coast, which saw rental electricity price increases of up to 2526%. So in WA, we’ve maintained the public ownership of our poles and wires, We’ve kept the state’s finances under control and that’s allowed us to continue to make sure that we benefit from low electricity prices. No doubt lots of Western Australians will be hoping this budget provides them with some solutions to the cost of living challenges that so many are facing right now. Premier Roger Cook, thank you very much for your time this morning. Thank thanks for your time Lara.