JIM CHALMERS MP
SHADOW TREASURER
MEMBER FOR RANKIN
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
101 FM
WEDNESDAY, 2 MARCH 2022
SUBJECTS: National Accounts; Local flood clean-up; Morrison Government’s Emergency Respond Fund failures; Anthony Albanese; Labor’s National Reconstruction Fund; Pension increase.
IAN ‘BLUEY’ GEORGE, HOST: Oh yes! Here's the guy who is having a birthday today. Good morning Dr. Jim, how are you?
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: Good morning Bluey, I'm feeling a bit long in the tooth today but thanks for your birthday wishes.
‘BLUEY’: Mate, you have a great day, whatever you do, and do you have much planned for tonight?
CHALMERS: I think maybe some takeaway at home tonight. It's going to be a big day. We've got a big day in the economy and obviously a big day in terms of starting to clean-up our community, so I think it'll be a big, long day and if it ends with some red duck curry with the family that'd be a good outcome.
(LAUGHTER)
‘BLUEY’: Red duck curry, there you go! Hey, it's twenty six minutes to ten o'clock. I want to talk about a couple of things and I guess it's always good when I can do the hard yards with you. Are you up to some hard yards this morning.
CHALMERS: Always. Born ready, Bluey.
‘BLUEY’: Okay, here we go. Now, there's an unfolding flood event in South East Queensland and also in Northern New South Wales that's reignited some criticism on the federal government, that virtually has set on its hands with regards to the ERF. What is the ERF? It's the Emergency Response Fund, okay. Now, there's a whole swag of money that they stacked in there, about a couple of billion dollars, they get the interest from that and they use the interest. Now, Dr Jim, they're doing, well, not a lot with the money?
CHALMERS: Well, that's a very charitable description, unfortunately Bluey. They made this big announcement, as they always do. They said we're going to put $4 billion into this fund.
‘BLUEY’: Yep.
CHALMERS: And it's earned $800 million in interest and they've committed about $50 million but none of the projects they've committed to have started. And as my colleague Murray Watt, our Shadow Minister in this area, was talking about earlier today, this was announced three disaster seasons ago. So I think what's making people really angry about it is when the cameras are there, and the big announcement, the big press release, lots of zeros and all the rest of it, but in communities like ours - communities like Northern New South Wales, or Gympie, or Brisbane, and the surrounding areas out west to Ipswich - they're not seeing any of that investment. It's not like we've just realised that our communities are prone to disaster season. We've had a number of floods in the last ten or eleven years that have done a lot of damage. So there's really no excuse for the fact that they haven't followed through on this Emergency Response Fund.
‘BLUEY’: Okay, so here we are with another flood, another natural event, to say the least. I was around in 1974 when the big floods swept through Brisbane and an oil tanker being built by Evans Deakin down at Kangaroo Point got itself wedged across the river, and that caused all sorts of problems. Now, here we are again, we've got barges in the Brisbane River. Sure, they've got to build bridges and things like that, but it comes back to there really needs to be something done. We've just got to stand up and face the music, that's pretty well how it goes. So, in your meetings today, will you be discussing this ERF?
CHALMERS: Of course. This is one of the big concerns we've had for a while now, even before these most recent floods. Obviously, you can't prevent the kind of rain bomb that we had in our area, particularly on Sunday night but for the few days around it, but you can prepare better than the federal government has been prepared. And that's by investing some of this money in mitigation. When Anthony Albanese was here at the beginning of January - he's here again today by the way, and it's his birthday too...
‘BLUEY’: … Listen, I'll tell you we'll do. We'll whip down, we'll take a quick couple of bucks around the office, can you get Albo to come up to the studio today? He's most welcome! Hey, he'll be alright up here, I'll look after him!
(LAUGHTER)
CHALMERS: I don't know if we can do that today, but let me see what I can do on another occasion, he's here all the time.
‘BLUEY’: Yeah.
CHALMERS: When he was here in early January, he was saying, even then, let's use this Emergency Response Fund - or let's use the earnings from it - to make sure that we are getting in ahead of some of these disasters. Whether it's building levees, or building evacuation centres, or cyclone shelters, or whatever it might be, all around Australia but particularly in Queensland. The absence of that preparation means that our communities are more vulnerable than they need to be. Things are tough enough as it is, as you know Bluey, and we shouldn't be making it harder for people by not getting this money out the door.
‘BLUEY’: The basic idea of the ERF is a great idea to take some money, put it aside, use the interest, and spend the money, spend the interest. Because you still have your principal involved, and that sits there and that keeps generating revenue to do these things. Now, we go long times between drinks on this sort of natural disaster, and that's going to build up and build, but $200 million is the is the top end of the of the scale that they're allowed to spend.
CHALMERS: Spend each year, yeah.
‘BLUEY’: So that's got to be looked at too?
CHALMERS: We should be getting it out the door but also we should be getting in ahead of things. We're supportive of that fund for the reasons that you just mentioned, but they think about it in terms of everything goes bad and then you come in and use some of that money for recovery, and obviously we want to support people in the recovery.
‘BLUEY’: Sure.
CHALMERS: But what we've said, is it would make a lot more sense to be building some of this resilience in our communities ahead of another flood event. That would be a good use of taxpayer money. Unfortunately, that hasn't been happening, and so our communities are more exposed than they need to be. Obviously Bluey, you know, I don't come on your show to always make partisan points about this kind of stuff, but I am angry about it. Because we have been saying for three disaster seasons, the fund is there for a reason. Let's use it for flood mitigation and for bad weather mitigation. For whatever reason they haven't done that, and we've seen in different communities how that makes people less safe.
‘BLUEY’: Well, for people up in the Ipswich area - Gatton, Grantham, even up as far as Toowoomba - they would see this mitigation as being almost an essential spend.
CHALMERS: Of course it is. I mean, of course it is.
‘BLUEY’: So what's wrong!
CHALMERS: What better use of taxpayer money then helping to keep communities safe, particularly some of those communities that have been to hell and back when it comes to extreme weather.
‘BLUEY’: Grantham was a great example of flood mitigation going wrong, without a doubt.
CHALMERS: Yeah, and we've had opportunities to learn from that. We've had opportunities to learn from what happened in 2011. In our local area, as you know, we had a big one in 2017 around Tropical Cyclone Debbie. The Logan River today, a few hours ago, was actually higher than it was at the peak of Cyclone Debbie. So we should be learning from these events, and one of the ways that we should be learning from it is to think ok, how do we make ourselves more resilient ahead of time? How do we use this money that's supposed to be set aside for emergencies to get in and make communities safer?
There's thousands of people in our area without power. We've had a lot of SES callouts, and I want to thank the SES - particularly the volunteers - for all the work that they've been doing. We've had a couple of hundred roads closed. I went to the Logan Metro evacuation centre yesterday to speak to the some of the families that have been displaced down to the south west of Logan. We've been through a lot in 2017 and in the last few days as well, the least that a federal government can do is to be there with people when the situation is like this and to get in the head of it. We know, and you know, that people are there for each other, we just need the government to be there for them too.
‘BLUEY’: Just a couple of quick ones before you got to go and do morning tea this morning. I think they've got the bushfire brigade on call, just in case the candles take off.
(LAUGHTER)
CHALMERS: I just assumed we were rolling you in and you were jumping out of a cake or something, Bluey?
(LAUGHTER)
‘BLUEY’: Not a chance in the world, OK! I did talk to Edna our tea lady and she said that she'd be only too happy. Edna's 94 and she'd be only too happy to jump out of a cake at you.
(LAUGHTER)
‘BLUEY’: And I also told her that Anthony Albanese would also appreciate that as well. Anthony of course has lost a few kilos in the last couple of months.
CHALMERS: He's looking trim, isn't he? He's looking very trim.
‘BLUEY’: Mate, he's looking like a basketballer out of work!
CHALMERS: I've known him for about twenty years and he's in, easily, the best nick he's ever been in.
‘BLUEY’: Just in the nick of time, too!
(LAUGHTER)
CHALMERS: That's right.
‘BLUEY’: Two more quick things for you. This is one. A local company called Tritium. They were listed on the NASDAQ in New York in about the last week or ten days. Big Joe Biden got up and said what a great idea it is there this company from Australia investing - in Tennessee - in building domestic electric vehicle charging units. Now, we make 5,000 a year in Australia for the local market and there has been no funding for this company - as a start-up company - to help do this. Secondly, they're gonna make 15,000 of these units in a brand new factory in Tennessee, in the United States, for their market and the European market as well. Now, what does that tell you about creating jobs, and local manufacturing here in Logan City and in Southern Brisbane. When is it going to stop?
CHALMERS: It says two things, doesn't it. It says, firstly, that we are capable of amazing things in this country if we put our mind to it. I sat next to the Trillium CEO at lunch, I think last week or the week before, and we were talking about how she presented to President Biden about their company and their ideas. They are a tremendous success story in the US, and I think in Europe as well. They are here to some extent, but the tragedy of it is they don't have a federal government that's on their side when it comes to a future made in Australia. You and I have spoken about this before - the vast opportunities for our community in Logan, and in Brisbane, and right throughout the country - but what it requires is a government that believes in some of these new industries like electric vehicles, believes in the local workforce to be able to to build components or whatever it might be, or fast chargers like they do at Tritium, at that great company.
‘BLUEY’: Yep.
CHALMERS: To believe enough in people and in communities to say let's have a crack at this. We've got policies on electric vehicles that we've spoke about before. We've got a big co-investment fund called the National Reconstruction Fund, which is all about how do we partner business up with governments to make sure that we're creating new jobs, and new industries, and diversifying our economy - particularly in places like ours - so that we can be part of the boom in electric vehicles, and fast charging, and more broadly as well, hydrogen and all the rest of it. All it needs is a government that believes our community and its people to say that we can do this.
‘BLUEY’: And we could be!
CHALMERS: Absolutely we can.
‘BLUEY’: I have one other quick question before you go for your morning tea, for smoko. Could you tell me what the new pension rates are going to be? Because they come out on the 19th or 20th of March and I for the life of me cannot find anywhere where the new rates are being published.
CHALMERS: Yeah, I'm just on the run at the moment Bluey, I've got that but I'll have to text it through to Lynn and you can read it out on your show this morning.
‘BLUEY’: I'd love to do that, because I get calls and I talk to people, and they say what's the pension going up by? And these are people who have got disabilities, and just mum and dad retirees on pensions, just wanting to know whether they can afford another cup of coffee every week. I know it's a big ask, it's a big ask.
CHALMERS: The March and September increases are just the indexation, so I wouldn't want your listeners to think it's going to be a massive increase. Right now if you're single you get $882 I think a fortnight. If you're a couple, I think, it's $665 each a fortnight. I'd have to do the calculation, but there'll be a little indexation adjustment in March and September. It'll be a few bucks I would have thought, but I'll check it and I'll text it to you so that you can read it out on air.
‘BLUEY’: Dr. Jim, always good to have you on the program. It's a real pleasure because you shoot from the hip and most of the times you get it right.
CHALMERS: Thanks Bluey.
‘BLUEY’: Are you sure you're 44 today? You got that right?
CHALMERS: I am 44 today. I'm definitely 44, I can do the maths on that.
‘BLUEY’: You can do the math. I'm glad you could do the math because you're the Shadow Treasurer!
(LAUGHTER)
‘BLUEY’: Heaven forbid if you can't do the math! I'm going to play a song for you, Dr Jim. Dr. Jim Chalmers is the Shadow Treasurer for the federal government and he's also our local bloke just down the road.
ENDS
