THE HON TANYA PLIBERSEK MP
MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
PODCAST INTERVIEW
THE GUARDIAN AUSTRALIAN POLITICS PODCAST
FRIDAY, 1 AUGUST 2025
Topics: Middle East Conflict; Social Security and Unemployment; Social Media Ban; New Labor Caucus and Diversity in Parliament House.
TOM MCILROY: Hi, I’m Tom McIlroy, coming to you from the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri People in Canberra. Tanya Plibersek is one of Labors most recognisable faces and the Minister for Social Services in the Albanese Government. As Labor considers recognising Palestinian statehood, she joins us to discuss the Middle East crisis, as well as the JobSeeker rate and the Government’s plans to keep kids safe online.
[EXCERPT]
One of Parliament’s most creative cooks, Plibersek reveals her secrets for a good sitting day soup cooking Kransky’s for her team and what’s on her kindle. From Guardian Australia, this is the Australian Politics podcast. Well Tanya Plibersek, welcome to the podcast.
MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES, TANYA PLIBERSEK: Thanks so much. Great to be with you.
MCILROY: We're thrilled to have you. Thanks for making time at the end of a sitting fortnight. You must be knackered.
PLIBERSEK: Oh no. I mean, I love Parliament. I love Parliamentary sitting weeks, and particularly after an election where we've got so many great new MPs listening to their first speeches, it's really energising.
MCILROY: Let me ask you to start off, one of the big issues of the week is, of course, the recognition movement for Palestine and the ongoing war in Gaza and the role of Israel. I'm interested to know your views on where the Government should go. It seems like we're working with international partners, like the UK and Canada, and that the movement globally is towards recognition. The Treasurer said today that he thinks it's a matter of when, not if that Australia would join that movement. Tell me your views.
PLIBERSEK: Well, I've always been a supporter of recognising Palestine and Palestinian statehood. We've been very clear that obviously, right now we need to see hostages released. We need to see a ceasefire. We need to see aid let into Gaza, and we'd like to see a Palestinian state. Our position used to be that statehood would come at the end of a peace process, and Penny Wong made clear quite a few months ago now that we didn't see statehood necessarily coming at the end of a peace process, but as part of negotiations for a long term, durable peace.
Look, I think the Government has been really clear. Of course, we abhor what happened on the 7th of October. We say that hostages should be released, but the conflict in Gaza has taken an enormous humanitarian toll. Every life, every life matters. We're seeing people starved to death in Gaza because food has been denied entry into Gaza by the Government of Israel. It's impossible to allow that to continue. So, we call on aid to be allowed in at much greater rate than we've seen. The last few days has seen a very small easing of restrictions, but we need to see much more aid entering the territories. We know that airdrops are not a particularly efficient way of getting aid to people. There's crossings there. They should have hundreds of trucks a day driving across them into Gaza. And we also know that around 200 Palestinian journalists have lost their lives. There's been a number of international journalists who've been denied access. So, when the Israeli Government says you can't believe what Hamas says about what's happening in Gaza, I think the additional response to allowing aid in is to allow journalists in to independently report what's going on.
MCILROY: Your Labor colleague, Ed Husic this week said that there was a growing tide of moral momentum for recognition and for a stronger response from the international community. Would you say, broadly on the Labor backbench, that's a that's a view that is shared. Is it? Is it inevitable? That we will recognise Palestinian statehood.
PLIBERSEK: I think it's a back bench and front bench position. I think the Prime Minister said it, the Foreign Minister said it, we want to see a two-state solution. Even John Howard said that there wouldn't be peace in the Middle East until there was a two-state solution. The momentum at the moment, I think, is an important next step forward.
MCILROY: Let's come to your Portfolio. You've got a big new job in the re-elected Labor Government, in social services. I think if there's one issue that animates our readership at Guardian, it's the rate of JobSeeker and the push generally for an increase to the rate. Where is the Government up to on thinking in that space?
PLIBERSEK: Well, we've already raised the rate by $3,600 a year. We've also increased Commonwealth Rent Assistance, so you get about $1,700 a year more through Commonwealth Rent Assistance. So, we're not starting from zero. The people who talk about raising the rate, talk about it as though it hasn't been raised. There's been a very substantial increase since we came to Government. We've also seen, of course, around a $9,000 increase in the minimum wage. So for people who are moving from jobseeker into their first job or a new job, even if it's on a minimum payment, they're already substantially better off than when we came to Government. We absolutely want to see more people get a job, because with unemployment in the low fours, this is the best opportunity, the best time we have, to move people from long term unemployment into work, and we're working very closely in a number of communities around Australia to tackle entrenched disadvantage. We've seen around $200 million extra put into areas where there is high unemployment and intergenerational disadvantage because working is not just good for people's incomes. It's not just good for national productivity. It's good for, you know, our feelings about ourselves. When we're kids, the first thing people ask us when they meet us is, what do you want to be when you grow up? So, I think it is, as well as talking about increasing JobSeeker and other payments, we need to talk about how we tackle entrenched disadvantage and getting people into jobs. I think that's a really good opportunity for us in the next few years and fits very well with our productivity agenda as a Government as well.
MCILROY: Yeah, that was what I was going to ask next. I mean, we're a couple of weeks away from the round table, and productivity is the name of the game across the Government, in different agencies as well. Would a step change in in this part of the productivity pie be a good marker for the Government in its second term?
PLIBERSEK: Well, 100 per cent. We know we've got shortages in aged care. We know we've got shortages in disability care. We know we've got shortages in early childhood education and care. There's a whole range of areas in the workforce where we're struggling to find people. If you look at a program like the National Disability Insurance Scheme, that's distributed right across Australia, early childhood aged care, all of them distributed right across Australia. We need to, wherever we possibly can, where people can work, help them get the skills they need to take those opportunities when they arise. It's one of the reasons that we've introduced free TAFE.
Now, that's not to ignore the fact that some people struggle for a range of reasons to find work. Whether it's where they're living, the local economy where they're living, or whether it's, you know, their age, and they're experiencing age discrimination from employers. There’s a whole range of reasons that it's hard to find work, and people should be able to live with dignity when they can't find work. We're certainly not for a moment saying, you know, “pull your socks up, get out there, that's all you need to do”. So, we'll continue to look for opportunities to increase support for people who are on social security benefits when they can't work. A big part of our agenda, our social services agenda and our productivity agenda, is to create the opportunities for people to get decent, secure employment where they can.
MCILROY: Your department advised you in the Incoming Government Brief that low- and middle-income taxpayers are subsidising the retirement incomes of wealthy seniors. It was some stark numbers suggesting that the age pension continues to be payable to couples with more than $100,000 a year in assets or wealth of more than a million dollars. Younger people at the other end of the career cycle and the tax system are doing it tough. Should we be rebalancing that equation?
PLIBERSEK: We recognise that, you know, older Australians have worked hard. They've saved hard. They've, you know, putting a lot of effort over a lot of years so that they can retire with some assets and income, and what we want to do is make life easier for the younger people. And that's why we've forgiven 20 per cent of the university and vocational education debt. So, for the average uni graduate, that's $5,500. That's a substantial amount in most people's books. It's why we're investing in massive housing building programs to make it easier for people to save for a home of their own, get into their first home, make it easier for people to find a place that's affordable to rent. I don't think we have to be pitting groups against each other. We're looking for opportunities to help at every stage of the life cycle. So, for those young Australians, it's HECS debt relief, it's cheaper childcare when they have a baby, it's getting into a home with a smaller deposit. It's building more homes so that we don't see the extraordinary, you know, fast increases in housing prices that we've seen. It's wages. It's making sure that wages go up. We know that when we came into Government, we saw real wage decline. We've turned that around. We can do both. We can make life easier for people at all different stages of their lives. We don't have to choose
MCILROY: Another area that is gaining some media reporting in your Portfolio at the moment is treatment of old debts to Centrelink and other parts of the Government. I think some of these are decades old debts, and they're often for low amounts of money. Is there a problem here? I believe the Government's considering some way to treat them differently, potentially to forgive those debts.
PLIBERSEK: I know that's been reported in the Australian Financial Review. It's not quite right. The reason that there's a bit of a backlog of debts is because we've had this issue called income apportionment, which has been running, which most people's eyes just glaze over when I say the words income apportionment. This is an old practice. It's a historic practice that was used from, you know, around the 1990s around the time Nelson Mandela was released from jail to about 2020. So, it's never been used by the Albanese Government, and it hasn't been used for some years. But, what used to happen back in the day before you were born, was you're a casual worker, you'd get an envelope at the end of your fortnight of work, and it would have cash stuffed in it, and it would have something written on the front, and quite often, it would have your weekly earnings, or your fortnightly earnings. It wouldn't tell you which days you'd earnt a particular amount of money. So Centrelink would get that information, and instead of going back to the worker and saying, we need to know exactly what you earnt exactly every day, they would just say, “okay, across the fortnight, let's just treat it as though you earnt the same amount every day, even though you may have worked three days one week and two days the next week.”
We have discovered several decades after this practice being used that it's not lawful under Social Security Law. So, there's several million debts that are potentially affected by this. About a third of them, people were actually better off under the way the calculation was done. So, we're not going to, we're not going to forgive debts where people were better off. We're not going to, ignore the fact that – I mean, these debts were legitimate debts that were slightly miscalculated around the edges. And so, there are some people saying, “well, we should forgive all of them.” In almost every instance there was a debt, and the debt was slightly higher or slightly smaller if you used the calculation method that the Federal Court has just found legal, the calculation method that we use now. So, it's at the margins. We're not going to forgive millions of debts, most of which have already been repaid, most of which people have forgotten they had because they were slightly miscalculated around the edges. So, we're just right now considering our response to that Federal Court ruling, and we'll make an announcement when we're ready.
MCILROY: Is it fair enough to go after money that could be years and years old, like sometimes from decades past, as you described?
PLIBERSEK: I think this is the other misunderstanding. These debts have been paid years ago. You wouldn't get that from the reporting, I think that's why people are a little bit confused. The vast majority of people would have got a bill years ago. They would have paid it. They might have been actually charged less than they owed because of the calculation method. So, it's some people got slightly higher bills, some people got slightly lower bills, but they had a debt that they've paid and discharged, like you say, in many cases, decades ago. But we're looking at, we're looking at our Government response right now.
MCILROY: Perhaps one of the thorniest issues in your portfolio, one of the biggest challenges for Government and for all sections of society is domestic and family violence. Are we starting to turn the tide there? Is there reason for optimism about cultural change that's necessary to protect women and children?
PLIBERSEK: The Commonwealth Government, since coming to since we came to Government in 2022, has invested $4 billion in 122 different measures. If you had told me that issues of family, domestic and sexual violence would achieve this kind of attention and this kind of funding – if you told me about 30 years ago, I would have struggled to believe it. So it’s a great thing that this is now on the national agenda. There's unprecedented investment and unprecedented effort. But I'm still worried, because when you look at sexual violence in teenagers and even amongst children, you're still seeing high and even increasing rates in some areas. And so, I think we really do need to look at what you know? What's happening for young men, that sexual violence is becoming more common in teenage relationships, for example, that domestic violence is becoming more common in teenage relationships. And what does this mean for long term trends in this country?
I'm particularly worried about the fact that a lot of kids are getting their sex education from violent and misogynistic pornography, and that a lot of the sort of you know, male influences that are being pushed out to young boys – like if you look up soccer scores and fast cars, the algorithm works out you're a 14 year old boy. The next thing you're getting Andrew Tate in your feed. It's really profoundly troubling that we are in a world where algorithms pump out misogyny into kids' smartphones when they're on their own in their bedroom, and it is having an impact on the attitudes that young men are bringing into relationships. We need to change that so that's why I'm such a supporter of the social media ban for kids under 16. It's why I wish I hadn't given my own kids a smartphone till they were much older. But it's also why I think we seriously need to have honest conversations about the type of pornography that is so ubiquitous. Like I'm not a ‘wowser’. I know people will look at pornography. Does it have to involve choking as commonly as it does? Like we're seeing a huge increase in the volume of women, the number of women turning up in hospital with choking related injuries. We know that choking, traditionally, is the most common predictor to someone's partner killing them was choking.
MCILROY: Now it's being normalised.
PLIBERSEK: And it's being normalised in pornography as though it's just a normal part of sex and it has long term implications, brain damage, you know, all sorts of things. What kind of relationships do we want to raise our children to have? We've got to be talking really honestly about this with kids from an early age. There's a lot of parents out there who think if they don't talk to their kids about pornography, they won't look at pornography. That there's, I think, one survey I saw recently, about 15 per cent of kids said the first time they saw porn they were 10.
MCILROY: It's terrible.
PLIBERSEK: So, before they've had their first kiss, they're looking at, really, in many cases, very violent imagery. It's changing them.
MCILROY: Are you confident that the social media ban will work?
PLIBERSEK: Well, look, kids aren't allowed to drink till they're 18. Do some kids drink before they're 18? Yes. Kids aren’t allowed to buy cigarettes. Do some kids get cigarettes? Yes. The difference is setting a social norm that helps parents say, “we're not we're not going to let you do that until you're 16.” It's not that no child will ever find a way around it. Like, I was pretty naughty as a teenager, I found ways around what my parents told me I wasn't allowed to do. But having a free for all, like we've got at the moment, that's damaging. This helps parents set some boundaries. It helps kids say to other kids, “my parents won't let me”, which is a pretty powerful way of not doing something that you don't want to do.
I think this sort of stuff from the social media companies about how hard it is to get the tech right. I'm a middle aged woman who constantly gets ads for sensible shoes and herbal menopause remedies. Like, I've never searched for herbal menopause remedies, the algorithm knows you. Frankly bullshit notion that the tech bros who make gazillions of dollars by targeting advertising – like they will tell you any day of the week why your advertising dollar is well spent with them, because they can exactly target the demographic you're after. But hang on a minute, they can't protect the demographics that we want to protect. That's bullshit.
MCILROY: Is it time for governments to join together to encourage and require platforms to take down more of this material that is so damaging?
PLIBERSEK: I would love it if we could do that. But the truth is, there's such a volume of harmful online material already, I think a big part of the job is helping young people understand that this isn't real life. We funded Teach Us Consent to do some great peer to peer education with young people and the Teach Us Consent materials have had about 12 and a half million impressions. Five and a half million people actually looking at it properly, and more than half are boys. Boys are really interested in getting good information about consent. So, the Teach Us Consent ethos approach it's very sex positive. It's saying that that consent is about intimacy and fun and it's sexy, and I think that's a really healthy message. You don't have to be anti-sex to say that consent is important. In fact, the message that consent is sexy is a really good message for teenagers to adopt.
MCILROY: Let me ask you one last important question about the building that we're in today. Is Federal Parliament's culture improving? Is the diversity that's coming into the parliament, including through the Labor caucus, improving the standards around here. And do you think that Jenkins, the Jenkins report, and other progress in this area is improving safety for staffers and for MPs and other people in this building?
PLIBERSEK: Well, I think it's certainly improved since I started here in 1998 and I definitely feel the changes. Is it perfect? No, no workplace is. There's still problems that you would want to see fixed, and there's individuals who behave badly. I mean, I was, I was pretty shocked this week to hear the Member for Longman, Terry Young, say that women, essentially, women like jobs like nursing and hairdressing, and men like jobs that have maths and are more physical. And the reason that there's more men who are parliamentarians on their side is because women like jobs like hairdressing and nursing. Well, I think the 1950s want their attitudes back.
We're at 57 per cent female representation in the Labor caucus now. When I started, it was 27 per cent it feels different. It feels better. I remember the first time I was in a Shadow Cabinet meeting, and I said to Penny Wong, “that was a really good thing that you did this week, Penny, when you did whatever”. Kim Beasley was the leader, and he looked at me like really gobsmacked that I would take the opportunity of praising a colleague in public. And, that to me now, I see that amongst my colleagues all the time. Like the culture changes because, women are used to boosting other women in the workplace.
I came in with Julia Gillard, Anna Burke, Kirsten Livermore, Michelle O'Byrne, a bunch of us all came in, Nicola Roxon, and all came in together. And two or three of us would be talking in the hallway, and the and the blokes just couldn't help themselves. They be, “Oh, ho ho, the ladies are taking over the place”. You don’t get any of that anymore. You know, it's normal. We've got women of all different ages, professional backgrounds, ethnicities, religion. Our caucus looks like modern Australia, and I love that so much. It feels better. And the most important thing is we make better decisions. Because when we make decisions with the input of people of all different backgrounds and characteristics, you get better decisions. Like, if we're making decisions for all of Australia, then all of Australia should be represented in our Parliament.
MCILROY: Well, it's the end of a sitting fortnight. I'm eager to ask you about your life outside of politics, but before I do, I think I have to ask you about the famous pressure cooker. This is going viral. Tell us what's going on in your office with the pressure cooker.
PLIBERSEK: Well, I mean, I actually need a new pressure cooker. The old ones, the old ones really feeling the wear and tear. It's a really good way of making lunch really quickly. So, throw in the few chicken thighs, tinned tomatoes, whatever vegetables you've got some flavouring. Sometimes I use red curry paste, sometimes I use the classic Vegeta, which all the ethnic kids would recognise. It's mostly MSG I think, anyway delicious, tastes good. And, I make a soup, and it honestly is quicker than walking to the cafeteria, and it feeds the whole office. So, every now and again, we have soup. Sometimes we have Kransky day. I have to cook them in batches in the pressure cooker. Just lid off, boil them in the pressure cooker. Squishy white bread roll, little bit of horseradish, delicious.
MCIRLOY: That sounds amazing. I'll come for one of those days.
PLIBERSEK: Yeah, I don't have time every day to cook, and sometimes I don't eat at all because I don't have time, but when I do have time, just to throw a few things in the pressure cooker, it's very – it's nourishing physically, but it also feels good to eat with the people you work with.
MCILROY: And I know you're a big reader. Tell us about relaxation when you've got a free moment. What's on your reading list at the moment? What's coming up?
PLIBERSEK: Well, I read every night. I love the Kindle. I quite often read at 2am and 4am when I can’t sleep. I'm reading that really good Ghost Cities book at the moment that won the Miles Franklin. And I've been, I've been on a bit of an Australian book reading jag. I red the Dominic Amerena book, I Want Everything. That was really good, and Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, that was really good. But I also really like – I start a series, and then I have to read the whole series. So, I just read the Shard Lake series, which is about this, you know, hunchback lawyer in the Middle Ages and then that set me off on another series by SJ Parris, and that's a similar sort of ex monk arrangement. And he travels around, you know, London, Prague and so on. I liked the Chris Hammer series. There's a really good series that's set in in Canada that I've, of course, I've forgotten the name of now. Oh, Louise Penny, that's right, she's the author. Mick Herron, the Slow Horses books. I can't wait for the next one of those to come out.
MCILROY: Well, Tanya Plibersek, I've so enjoyed our conversation. Thanks for coming on the Australian Politics podcast.
PLIBERSEK: Pleasure to talk to you.
ENDS
