JIM CHALMERS MP
SHADOW TREASURER
MEMBER FOR RANKIN
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
ABC AFTERNOON BRIEFING
WEDNESDAY, 1 DECEMBER 2021
SUBJECTS: National Accounts; Climate policy; Christian Porter and Greg Hunt.
PATRICIA KARVELAS, HOST: Just in some breaking news Christian Porter has announced on Facebook he's quitting politics and will not contest the next election. Dr Jim Chalmers is the Shadow Treasurer and my next guest. We will get to the National Accounts figures. But Jim Chalmers, this is breaking news. Now he has put on his Facebook a very long statement that he will not be recontesting the election. We will bring our viewers that full statement in a moment but what's your reaction to the news that he's not recontesting?
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: Hi, Patricia. Look, I haven't seen the statement, I've been in here, but I understood this was coming. I think most people will be thoroughly unsurprised by this news and also by the news that Greg Hunt might be also quitting. Let's hear them clarify their plans, but I don't think anyone's especially surprised.
KARVELAS: Not especially surprised, but Labor has been pursuing Christian Porter's blind trust through the Privileges Committee, and, of course, that is kind of still ongoing. What does that mean for that process given he's clearly not going to recontest the next election and be in the Parliament anymore?
CHALMERS: I'm not sure what it means for the mechanics of the specific Parliamentary process but we've said all along that this is an issue of the Prime Minister's integrity. Whether or not he's been prepared to defend and accept a situation where a Member of Parliament taking up to a million dollars in secret donations, obviously, that doesn't pass any kind of test, but Scott Morrison has been bizarrely silent on that. So whether Christian Porter stays or whether he goes I think there's an ongoing issue for Scott Morrison who has not said strongly enough that taking a million dollars in secret donations is completely and utterly unacceptable.
KARVELAS: The economy shrunk by 1.9% in the September quarter, it's a lot smaller than some economists predicted, and New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT were in lockdowns. Things could have been worse, right?
CHALMERS: I think that's cold comfort to the small businesses and working families who got absolutely crunched in the September quarter because those lockdowns were made necessary by the Prime Minister's mistakes on quarantine and the initial rollout of the vaccines. I mean, that's why we have the third biggest downturn in a quarter in the history of the National Accounts today. It's why we are the 28th best performing economy out of 28 OECD countries that have reported. We are the worst performing economy in the September quarter of any of the OECD countries that have reported and that's because Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg made big mistakes with pandemic management and that meant that big mistakes have been made with economic management. We've seen that in today's figures.
KARVELAS: The Treasurer has talked about the fact that that households, because they were locked down, managed to save lots of money. Obviously, the households who are still working and also government support is part of that and that the advice he gets from Treasury is that that will lead to a recovery because there's money to spend. What's your response to that?
CHALMERS: Well, we hope that's the case. I mean, certainly the household saving ratio is very, very high and there is the opportunity for families to spend down some of that money. We hope that it finds its way into the small businesses of this country around Christmas and after that as well. But never forget, Josh Frydenberg was saying the same thing this time last year. He was saying the same thing in the May Budget. And he was so complacent about things that they forgot to order enough vaccines and they didn't build purpose built quarantine. So when he was talking in the Budget about the economy roaring back, instead, he gave us the third biggest downturn in the history of the National Accounts and that's because they were too complacent about it. The lesson for them now and for all of us now is we can't be complacent about this recovery. You know, it's complacency that stomped on the green shoots of the last recovery and delivered us the worst performing economy in the OECD in the September quarter. So we need to be careful. There's a new strain of the virus out there. There's a lot of families at risk of being left behind. 200,000 Australians lost their jobs in the last two months, we've got a lot of unemployment and underemployment still, we've got skill shortages, we've got a whole bunch of defining challenges which have been left more or less unattended, not just for two years, but in many cases for eight years. So we can't be complacent about this recovery. We want it to be a strong recovery, but it's not a strong recovery if working families are left behind.
KARVELAS: That point you make, we've got a new strain, of course referring to Omicron and we're still waiting for more information about Omicron. But there is a resistance even from state and territory leaders and the Prime Minister to kind of going the hard lockdown approach on any of this. What's your thinking on this given the economic damage we've seen, particularly in the two big states in relation to lockdowns? Is that the right approach that we need to learn to live with Omicron?
CHALMERS: I think obviously lockdowns are damaging to the economy and probably more so when they could have been avoided like the lockdowns that we've seen for a big chunk of the last year which delivered this economic carnage in the September quarter. So obviously, we don't want to see lockdowns for even one day longer than is necessary. The secret all along, the best way to approach this is to hew closely to the health advice. That's what the premiers have been doing as they try and make these difficult decisions in quite unpredictable and uncertain times. We want to see that continue, we want to see the best advice, and the best decisions taken for the right reasons about how we manage this thing. It's unpredictable. There's a lot of uncertainty. But we approach this new period of uncertainty from a position of weakness because of the complacency and the mistakes that have already been made by the Federal Government.
KARVELAS: Just finally, there's a report that Labor is about to dump its proposal for fuel standards for motorists. This is in response to a potential, you know, fear or scare campaign by the Government. But fuel standards has been Labor policy. Do you think we need to have those fuel standards so that we don't become the dumping ground for fossil fuel cars?
CHALMERS: Well, first of all, we said about a range of policies, not just in this area, that obviously a political party doesn't take exactly the same agenda to one election that they took to the last election. We've said that right across the board, including in my portfolio. But when it comes to climate policy, we will announce a comprehensive plan to get our emissions down, but also to get our energy costs down to get that cleaner and cheaper energy so we can grab more of the jobs and investment and opportunities that come from the right approach to climate change.
KARVELAS: But if Labor thinks fuel standards are a good policy approach, so we're not the dumping ground, don't you need to take that to the next election and stare the Government down on its claims that it will lead to, you know, the consequences it talks of?
CHALMERS: We will have a comprehensive plan for climate change and all of the policies which are necessary and we will make that clear in the coming weeks. It will be led by Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen and the Shadow Cabinet and I'll make my contribution there. But we will strike the right level of ambition which grabs those jobs and that investment and the opportunities which have been going begging for much of the last decade of missed opportunities because we believe in doing something meaningful here. We can do something which shows that good climate policy is good economic policy. There will be different components of that plan. It won't just be like a pamphlet that the Prime Minister handed down a couple of weeks ago.
KARVELAS: We're out of time. Thank you.
CHALMERS: Thank you.
ENDS
