JIM CHALMERS MP
SHADOW TREASURER
MEMBER FOR RANKIN

 

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
2SM BREAKFAST
WEDNESDAY, 8 MAY 2021
 
SUBJECTS: Budget 2021
 
MARCUS PAUL, HOST: Shadow Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, says this year's Budget is yet another marketing exercise the can't re-brand the mismanagement and missed opportunities that define eight long years of the current Liberal National Government. I'm happy to say Jim Chalmers joins us on the program. Good morning, Jim.
 
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: Thanks for having me back on your show, Marcus.

PAUL: It's my pleasure. I want to start with this little statistic. Many condemned Labor's debt and deficit disaster when navigating the Global Financial Crisis. The facts are this mob's debt will be more than five times yours. The Liberal's stash was 41 per cent of Gross Domestic Product in 2025. Labor's when you left office was sitting at $184 billion, or 12 per cent of GDP. That's just the debt. The deficit, $330 billion back when Labor was in power, $160 billion or 8 per cent of GDP under the current Government. I mean, Josh Frydenberg can spin all he likes, but I think the figures speak for themselves? 

CHALMERS: Doesn't it just shred their credibility? They've spent the last decade or so saying that debt, a tiny fraction of what they handed down last night, was a disaster. Now they say otherwise. I think people understand that this Government is driven entirely by politics. They just try and win each day's political contests. They're all about marketing and spin and getting themselves through an election. And I think most people will judge the Budget through that light. It was a Budget of missed opportunities. It was long on marketing, it was short on a vision for the country. I think the best example of that, when you mentioned some numbers in the Budget, was the fact that even after racking up a trillion dollars in debt, even after spending $100 billion in one night last night, the Government still expects real wages to have actually gone backwards over the Budget period. What that says is, your listeners in this recovery aren't getting a slice of the action. A lot of people are being left behind. Stagnant wages has been a big problem in the economy, for much of the last eight long years that the coalition has been in Government. And what the Budget said last night is, despite all this money flying around things are going to get worse, not better.

PAUL: Well, let's talk about this. Australians on modest incomes will only receive a temporary tax break before the election and then perhaps be dealt a tax hike afterward. When we talk about real wage growth, gross inflation continues to rise. People are paying more for groceries, they're paying higher tolls on toll roads in Sydney, in particular, but wages have pretty much remained stagnant for many workers, including frontline workers in New South Wales, in particular, for the last 12 to 18 months.

CHALMERS: If you think about it this way, Marcus, many Australians have been through so much together. And the fact that the economy is recovering is actually a tribute to what they've done to look out for each other, do the right thing by each other, and limit the spread of the virus. What the Government said to them last night, was that their big rewarded for all of those sacrifices was a real wage cut over the next few years. So I think a lot of people will be thinking, well if the economy is recovering so well, why am I being left behind? We want the economy to recover strongly. We want jobs to be created. We want wages to grow. We want underemployment to be dealt with. Somehow, the Government managed to spend $100 billion last night without making a noticeable difference to people's lives. There's not enough to show for those trillion dollars in debt. That's even before you get to the issue that this Government has with making big announcements and not following through on them.

PAUL: If I could just pick you up on that point, underemployment, this is something that generally gets lost amongst the hype and the slogans and the front pages of a cash splashing Treasurer and coming to save everybody. Underemployed, a lot of people are counted as employed, and we know the Government wants to drop the unemployment rate below 5 per cent in the next 12 months, but a lot of people effectively will still be only working part time or casual jobs. Why is it that, for some reason these people are included in the official employment stats? Because they're underemployed?

CHALMERS: You would hear this from your listeners all the time, Marcus,. I certainly hear it from right around Australia. That unemployment rate doesn't capture the full story of what's going on in the jobs market. You might only be working a couple of hours, and you need much more than that to support your loved ones. And so the country has had an underemployment problem for some time. That's feeding through to job insecurity, it's definitely feeding through to those stagnant wages that we've had under the Liberals for the last eight years or so. I think people understand that better than their Government does. The Government talks about the unemployment rate. Obviously, we want the unemployment rate closer to full employment but that's only part of the story. If you want to understand the full story, as you do, you've got to understand underemployment, job insecurity, and what that means for those stagnant wages.

PAUL: All of the big spend and all of the announcements depend upon a vaccinated country, and also our borders opening within the next 12 months, neither of which I'm 100 per cent confident on.

CHALMERS: Nor am I, Marcus, which is a real shame because you can't have a first rate economic recovery with a third rate vaccine rollout. But the Prime Minister has comprehensively stuffed up vaccinations. The Budget last night was an opportunity for them to come clean on the costs and consequences of that vaccines debacle. It didn't take that opportunity. People who understand the economy know it can't get properly going again while the vaccine rollout has been delayed as it has. There were some words in the Budget about hopefully getting people vaccinated by the end of the year, but then it doesn't assume the economy opens up until well into the following year. So I think people are none the wiser about what the Government's doing to actually fix this mess they've made of vaccinations. And that has economic costs and consequences. 

PAUL: Aged care as we know, Jim, has been a major issue. We've just gone through the expense and the heartache of a Royal Commission. Will the 17 odd billion dollars announced last night go anyway to securing a better future for Australians in aged care?

CHALMERS: Aged care has been a disgrace for some time now. And what that Royal Commission showed was some horrible stories about maggots in wounds and people going malnourished and without meals. So this problem has been around for some time. The Royal Commission shined a light on the issues there. We'll go through what the Government committed last night in the Budget, but it is a fact that what they committed falls short of what the Royal Commission recommended. We'll go through it in detail. My colleague Mark Butler is already doing that, and we'll have more to say about it. 

PAUL: Now also, we talked about wages growth, I mean it's at record lows, let's be honest, chronically high underemployment. What about creating secure, opportunities for Australians in the future?

CHALMERS: I think that's that should be the primary objective of a Budget. If we think about how do we make the economy and our society stronger after COVID than it was before. The key to that is making sure that more Australians get a slice of the action. And that means making sure they've got secure, well-paid jobs with fair conditions. The difference between us and the Liberals, is they spend all this money, and there's all this spin and marketing, but at the end of the day real wages still don't shift. In fact, they go backwards. Under us, what we said, is getting unemployment down is part of the story, but we also need to do something more substantial on childcare, skills and training, and industrial relations. We need to deal with the fact that disadvantage is concentrated in this country and cascades through the generations. There are a whole range of issues, which are preventing people not just from grabbing the opportunities of work, but to make sure that that work is secure and well paid, so people can feed their families on it. That's the difference, in lots of ways, between our approach and the Government.

PAUL: All right. Now you say that the Budget would have racked up less debt without the Morrison Government's slush funds, rorts, dodgy land deals, advertising and JobKeeper payments to already profitable businesses that don't need it. I've spoken at length with your colleagues about the JobKeeper payments being kept by big companies that made profits and used it for dividends and shares and all the rest of it. The waste, it all adds up doesn't it Jim, over the years?

CHALMERS: It really does. And what people probably don't realise yet, as they eat their breakfast this morning and listen to the program, is that there are something like 21 slush funds in the Budget that was announced last night. So new slush funds or slush funds that have been topped up with billions of dollars poured into there for the Government to allocate for political reasons to get them through an election. I think this makes people angry. They feel this debt, they see these massive deficits, they see the hypocrisy from a Government that's been campaigning on debt and deficits for much of the last decade, and they know that the Budget would be in better nick if the Government wasn't spraying money around for political purposes. They've been sprung doing that, but they haven't learned the lesson. And we know that because the Budget’s got even more of these dodgy funds. 

PAUL: All right. Now of course, in fairness, we will have a Budget in Reply speech. Obviously, you can't disclose all the details of that, but I think it's a fair point to ask, what will Labor do differently? I mean Anthony Albanese right now is on the television spruiking perhaps what Labor would do differently, but you're the Shadow Treasurer. If you were giving that speech last night as Treasurer of this country, what would you have said we needed?

CHALMERS: I think we've made our priorities pretty clear. I mean I won't pre-empt what Anthony will say tomorrow night. I encourage your listeners to tune in, but clearly, we've got a bigger priority on a long term vision. That includes cleaner and cheaper energy, including renewable energy. Obviously, we've been more focused on getting wages and secure work going. And we've already had some things to say about that. We've got a National Reconstruction Fund which is about getting more jobs, and advanced manufacturing, so that we can revitalise our regions and diversify the economy. We've got a policy on more apprenticeships on big government projects. So we've had a range of proposals out there already, which show people what our priorities are. We want the economy to be stronger after than it was before COVID. We want to make sure that there are more jobs, and more opportunities, for more people. That's what Anthony will be talking about in the next couple of days.

PAUL: Thanks for coming on Jim, I really appreciate it.

CHALMERS: I appreciate it, Marcus. Thank you.

ENDS