E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC Radio national
THURSDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 2026
Topics: Migration; Child Support; Plymouth Brethren.
SALLY SARA: Tanya Plibersek is the Federal Minister for Social Services and joins me in the studio this morning. Now, Minister, welcome back to breakfast.
TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: Great to be with you.
SARA: Tony Burke was supposed to give this speech six weeks ago. What's changed since then?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I'm not going to talk about Cabinet processes. What I will say is that we have consistently been bringing net overseas migration down since coming back to government. It's down by about 45%. But we want to have a sensible policy as a government that recognises that some migration is still very important to this country, we certainly need skilled workers. We know that there's plenty of country towns that wouldn't have a doctor or wouldn't have an aged care workforce or wouldn't have an agricultural workforce or someone to work in the abattoir if we don't have skilled migration. And we also, Sally, want to make sure the debate retains at its centre the reminder that Australia has been built on migration. My parents migrated here after the Second World War as refugees and I think they made a pretty great contribution to this country and many, many generations like them. So, getting that balance right is worth putting some time into.
SARA: In an interview with the Nine newspapers this morning, Tony Burke says he's worried about Australia becoming, quote, a guest worker economy. Do you share that concern?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I think what Tony and the whole cabinet is clearly saying is if we've got people who are coming here because we need and they put down roots here and become Australian citizens. That's traditionally how our migration system has worked and that's enriched us as a nation.
SARA: Do you think Tony Burke's last minute cancellation of his press club speech six weeks ago, which revealed disagreements within the government over migration, has that been damaging for the government, in your view?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I really think the idea of disagreements is overstated. We've been having sensible, detailed conversations because that's what a mature government does. You don't make an announcement without any economic modelling, which seems to be what One Nation's done. And that is the difference between being in government. We need to work through every detail and make sure that we are dotting every i and crossing every t.
SARA: Will the government release its modelling about the economic impacts of migration cuts?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: These are all questions for the Minister. He'll be at the press club today. I'm sure that you'll be queued up at the press club with all your colleagues to ask all of these questions.
SARA: You're listening to Radio National Breakfast. My guest is the Minister for Social Services, Tanya Plibersek. Let's move on to child support. The Government will introduce legislation later today that it says will make child support systems safer. How will this legislation stop family and domestic violence perpetrators from manipulating the system to cause harm to children and current or former partners?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: So, in the last budget, we set aside $183 million to do the biggest changes to our child support system in many decades. There's two problems that we're essentially trying to fix. The first is that there's a lot of child support that's not being paid and that's terrible for kids.
SARA: What's the number, the dollar figure on that?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: $2 billion in outstanding child support debt. And we've got 200 cases where parents owe more than $150,000 and one case where a parent owes more than $2 million in child support. That's just not fair and it's terrible for kids and it's terrible for families. The second problem that we're trying to fix is the fact that the child support system is often weaponised. Look, in most cases, when people break up, they are happy to cooperate and support their children, and breakups are hard, but they can do that in the best interests of the kids. And what we know is that some families, unfortunately, that's not the case. And former partners can weaponise the system against their ex by doing things like putting in constant, vexatious claims that the person's circumstances have somehow changed. The child support agency has no power to refuse to consider those. That comes with a lot of paperwork, a lot of stress, a lot of heartache and a lot of worry. We're giving the child support agency the power to refuse to consider vexatious claims.
And the second really important thing we're doing is we're reducing the amount of information that has to be exchanged every time there's a child support reassessment. So, at the moment, if you know that your ex has got a promotion at work or they've re-partnered or something's changed in the circumstances, which means that a recalculation should happen, you have to give all of your private information over. They have to give all of their private information over. A lot of that information is irrelevant to the question at hand. But for example, if you've been the victim of domestic violence, you've been stalked and harassed, you might not want your ex to know where you're now living, where you're now working, where you're now shopping. That sort of information is in most cases irrelevant to the claim, but has to be mandatorily exchanged now. So, we're getting rid of that. The way the system is misused sometimes runs up family tax benefit debts. I know it's kind of complicated, but you know, the hundreds of thousands of people who've experienced this know what I'm talking about. We're making sure that doesn't happen. And we're also making it easier for children who are living overseas who have an Australian parent to receive child support. That's a very important change.
This is the first part of the legislation we're doing. The next lot of legislation we do will make it much easier for child support to be taken automatically in the same way as pay as you go tax and the same way as your super is automatically transferred, your child support will be able to be automatically transferred. And the other thing that we'll do in that second piece of legislation is automatic travel bans for anyone who's got a child support debt of more than $10,000. There's a range of other things we're doing, like better resourcing for the tax office so that there's more automatic checking of information about the claims you make, about what you're earning and so on. Every part of the child support system will be improved by these changes, and they're the biggest changes in many decades.
SARA: On a separate issue, yesterday the government called on the opposition to explain what it knew about alleged actions of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church at last year's federal election. The group has previously denied allegations it secretly paid people to disrupt Labor's re election campaign last year. What's the government concerned about?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: We are concerned about the sort of behaviour that we saw with people linked with far right Nazi organisations.
SARA: Are you conflating that with the Brethren?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Turning up, being paid by the Brethren to turn up and disrupt press conferences and public events. But certainly I was on polling booths with my colleagues like Sally Sitou. I was out there in Reid with her in those last weeks of the campaign, standing there for hours at a time. She would be surrounded by men a foot taller than her, stopping her physically talking to or giving information to voters. I was with Andrew Charlton at one of his polling booths. Very strong and very obvious Brethren presence there that would get in between the Member of Parliament or candidate and physically block the handing out of information and so on. It was really quite intimidating behaviour.
SARA: Is it illegal under the electoral provisions?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I saw it myself. Well, I don't know. I mean, that is a question, really, for a lawyer and that's why there is this parliamentary inquiry underway. But I would think secretly paying known right wing figures to disrupt events and pretend that they are just disgruntled citizens having their say is certainly immoral, if it's not illegal. And physically intimidating Sally Sitou, who's a head shorter than me, with big blokes standing around her, physically stopping her, talking to voters, I think that's pretty troubling and it's certainly not what we want in our democracy.
SARA: Tanya Plibersek, thank you for coming into the studio this morning.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Thank you, Sally.
ENDS
