E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC BRISBANE DRIVE
MONDAY, 11 MAY 2020
 
SUBJECTS: Return of parliament; The economic impact of Coronavirus; Josh Frydenberg’s Ministerial Statement; Labor’s constructive approach; Anthony Albanese’s vision statement; Domestic manufacturing; Delayed budget; University funding; JobKeeper; New Coronavirus clusters.
 
STEVE AUSTIN, ABC BRISBANE DRIVE: Jim Chalmers is the Shadow Treasurer for the Federal ALP. He is also the member for Rankin here in Queensland. Jim was it hard getting a flight back to Canberra at the moment, hard getting a domestic airline flight?

JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: They are few and far between at the moment, Steve. We got a lift yesterday with the RAAF but flights are pretty rare at the moment.
 
AUSTIN: So, the RAAF is flying pollies back to Canberra?

CHALMERS: That's what happened yesterday right around Australia. We all filed onto a RAAF flight and came down late last night.
 
AUSTIN: You're not going to tell me they put you on a turbo-prop aircraft or anything?

CHALMERS: No, I think they call this one a BBJ. I'm not an airline or an aviation aficionado, so -
 
AUSTIN: Neither am I, but we'll find out what a BBJ is. So, they didn't give you a parachute and say good luck?

CHALMERS: [LAUGHS] No they didn't. We appreciated the lift.

AUSTIN: All right, what's happening in Federal Parliament? What's the plan for this week?
 
CHALMERS: This week is largely about the economy. Tomorrow when Parliament kicks off properly, Josh Frydenberg the Treasurer will give a long-ish Ministerial Statement on the economy and then I'll respond to that. It'll be his opportunity to outline what the plan is going forward. The country's made some good progress on the health front but I think a lot of us, including a lot of your listeners, are worried about what this all means for the economy, and more specifically what it means for people's jobs, living standards, wages and how people put food on the table. We want to hear tomorrow from the Treasurer what the plan is. The Prime Minister has been talking about pulling some of this support out of the economy which we supported going into the economy in the first place -
 
AUSTIN: You're talking about the JobKeeper payment?

CHALMERS: JobKeeper, but also JobSeeker and some of the other support. There's a bit of noise around the building here in Canberra about whether that might end a bit early. For a lot of people out there in the community who are genuinely and with good reason very worried about the next few months in the economy and in their own household budgets, I think that would be a very troubling development.
 
AUSTIN: You were in the office of the Treasurer when Labor was in power last.  You were intimately involved in the planning for the Global Financial Crisis. How does this crisis look to you, Jim Chalmers, for Australia?

CHALMERS: There are some similarities. It is a massive challenge to our economy, as it was a decade or so ago. This one's a bit different in two ways though. The first way is that the challenge here is to try and keep the economy going at the same time as the Government is closing big chunks of it down, which is an unusual and very complex challenge. The second thing, and not to be partisan about it, but 10 years ago there was a lot of political argy bargy about putting support into the economy to save jobs. This time around we're trying to be a bit more constructive than the then-Opposition was back then. That means largely when the Government's taken some of these big steps and made these big announcements to support the economy we've been supportive, we voted for it in the Parliament, and now there are some pretty serious issues which are arising from the implementation of some of those otherwise-welcome schemes.

AUSTIN: Has this bipartisan cooperation been successful from Labor's point of view? Some have argued that because you're the Opposition, you should oppose more. Anthony Albanese in [INAUDIBLE] said look, we don't want to just be an Opposition for the sake of opposing. We realise that these are unusual circumstances and we have a joint interest in a healthy outcome. Has it been successful or appropriate to have a whole National Cabinet process, or do you think that's coming to an end and there'll be a greater critique now of Federal Government actions and announcements?

CHALMERS: A couple of things about that. First of all, on the National Cabinet, we're not part of that. That's the Commonwealth and the States. 
 
AUSTIN: Sure. 

CHALMERS: There have been some good developments there. A lot of people have been pleased to see the governments largely working together. There have been some flare ups from time to time - 

AUSTIN: Sure, but you passed the Government's bills. You've allowed the money bills to go through the House.

CHALMERS: Sure, and I think that approach is warranted. We get a lot of good feedback about that, frankly. People want to know that in times like these the big parties are working together in the Parliament. But the point we've also made is that being constructive, responsible and bipartisan doesn't mean being silent if we think something is obviously wrong. For example, we called for these wage subsidies and the Government came out with the JobKeeper program. We welcomed that and supported it. We said that we had some issues and concerns about how it would be rolled out. Unfortunately, those concerns have been realised. A lot of people are being excluded from the program and so I think we're well within our rights at the same time as we're being constructive about things to point out where things can be done better.
 
AUSTIN: Anthony Albanese, your leader, apparently said in the party room this morning that this pandemic experience was a chance to really revitalise the Federation of Australia and apparently spoke to building a more resilient society, quote, creating more permanent jobs and revitalising high-value manufacturing. Now that's a quote. You were in there. What did he actually say? What's he referring to there?
 
CHALMERS: Well on the specific stuff, he put some ideas on the table. His basic theme was that at some point when this crisis ends, we've got a choice to make. Do we want to "snap back" in the Prime Minister's words to how things were before, or can we do better? Anthony's view is that we can do better. We don't want to "snap back" to those things about the economy that we didn't like six months ago; the insecure work, the wage stagnation, the decline of manufacturing. It was a pretty positive, forward-looking speech that he gave today, a very good one. Some of the ideas he put on the table were how do we revitalise manufacturing, by getting the energy mix right for example; how do we make workplaces more secure; how do we build more social housing because we recognise that construction is about
to fall off a cliff.
 
AUSTIN: Is there a belief in Labor that we need to bring the tools of production back home from overseas? In other words, are there certain industries, certain sectors that we must produce in Australia for reasons of national security or something else?

CHALMERS: There is. In fairness that's a view quite broadly held now, whether it's protective equipment or other crisis goods that we need to be able to churn out at short notice. But there's a longer-term piece there as well, Steve. If you think about what Anthony was talking about with smart manufacturing today, that relies on getting energy right. It relies on getting research and development, science, commercialization, and skills right. That's what Anthony is really on about. If this is a big reset in our economy, and it is, what do we want the place to look like afterwards? How can we do better? How can get investment going? How can we be more productive? How can we create better jobs that are most secure and better paid? The best way to do that is to get some of those things right that I've just run through.
 
AUSTIN: 4:42PM. News at 5. My guest is Labor's Jim Chalmers. Jim Chalmers is the Shadow Treasurer and ALP member for Rankin here in Queensland. This is ABC Radio Brisbane. It would have been Budget Week this week, wouldn't it? What would normally be happening about now?

CHALMERS: Yeah, it's a bit strange actually. As you said before I've been involved in budgets on both sides of the House and this week is usually just choccas. It still is but in a very different way. I don't know if your listeners would know but the budget's been pushed back to October -  
 
AUSTIN: Are you happy with that?

CHALMERS: Look, we copped it. It's not ideal but we said we understood the circumstances. We don't think that that means that the Government shouldn't release some numbers about where they expect the economy and the budget to go. We can't be flying blind here.

AUSTIN: So, you're expecting that tomorrow, I assume in Josh Frydenberg's speech?

CHALMERS: Yeah, we do expect that. The Reserve Bank started last week. They put out some detailed forecasts. The private sector did it today. There's an opportunity there for the Government to take the people into their confidence about what they're expecting. Even if we don't get a full budget, we should get a proper, comprehensive sense of where things are headed.
 
AUSTIN: Alright so there will be tomorrow, at some point, some clarity about the headline figures of where Australia's economy is today, and where it will be next
year?

CHALMERS: That's what I'm saying should be in there. It's effectively a speech from the Treasurer at noon tomorrow.

AUSTIN: Okay.
 
CHALMERS: We don't yet know what's in it, but ideally it would have some detailed forecasts for the future.
 
AUSTIN: Myrtle from the Gold Coast wants me to ask you about universities and your thoughts about funding universities here in Queensland while they decide not to fully service their students. The University of Queensland is not opening up at all this year, it's entirely online. There's been a real debate about overall funding of universities given that their business model was so reliant on overseas students. That's now fallen through. There are some universities this week who are about to do major cutbacks. Big universities like the University of Queensland are not even bothering to have students turn up this year, it's going to be all online. What are your initial thoughts about funding for higher education?

CHALMERS: I think you're right that this has really shone a light on just how dependent universities are on foreign students to fund their teaching and research activities. 

AUSTIN: Have we relied on them too much, or have universities relied on them too much?
 
CHALMERS: At a time like this clearly the model didn't turn out to be robust enough to survive a serious event like this. The Government said that they'll guarantee the domestic part of universities' funding but for a lot of universities that's nowhere near enough. The other thing it's taught us is that universities are crucial for students, for educating people for vocations and all that sort of thing, but they're also really important to the economy. They're a massive part of our export mix - 

AUSTIN: They were.
 
CHALMERS: They were, and we hope they will be again. There's an industrial side to this too. When we think about those hundreds of thousands of people who will be joining the unemployment queues unfortunately, there will be a lot of university staff in there partly because university staff aren't eligible for this JobKeeper payment with the way the Government's designed it.
 
AUSTIN: I was surprised to learn earlier this year, maybe it's just me, but universities through a quirk of Australian law are regarded as charitable institutions in Australia?

CHALMERS: Yeah that's right and when the Government came out said that they had some concessional arrangements for not-for-profits, universities were quite happy about that. Then the Government had to come in and clean up their legislation to exclude universities. There's all kinds of casual workers at universities, as you probably appreciate, who thought they were going to get a JobKeeper payment who are not able to access it. Obviously, they're not happy.

AUSTIN: My guest is Jim Chalmers. I think there's only three actual sitting days of Federal Parliament between now and August. Is that enough?
 
CHALMERS: Absolutely not and our view all along has been that as long as arrangements are put in place to be as safe as we can be here, that the Parliament should sit on its original schedule. We're talking about the allocation of hundreds of billions of dollars. There needs to be scrutiny of that. I don't think the Government's come up with a good excuse to decide week-by-week whether the Parliament sits. I think the Australian people expect us to sit, to scrutinize the money that's being spent here, and to debate the big ideas about how we deal with this massive health crisis which has become an economic crisis. Ideally we'd go back to the original schedule. It makes no sense to me whatsoever that the Government is stuffing around with that.
 
AUSTIN: What's Labor’s thinking if there is a second wave of the COVID-19 virus? How should we respond and adapt? That's clearly in the mind of health planners at the moment?

CHALMERS: I think there's some good expert advice there. The National Cabinet, the Premiers, and the Federal Government, I largely agree with the approach that they're taking which is to carefully reopen the economy but also to make sure that we've got capacity, because we're likely to see clusters come up. We've seen some of those in North-West Tassie, in the aged care home in Penrith, and in the meatworks in Victoria. We need to have the capacity to recognise very quickly where these clusters are coming up and to lock down that part of the community. I think that is in theory a really good approach. We need to make sure that we execute it well. That means making sure that we're still listening to the experts.

AUSTIN: I'm being told by listeners that a BBJ is a Boeing Business Jet, basically a modified 737 apparently. 
 
CHALMERS: That makes sense. 

AUSTIN: Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. 

CHALMERS: Thank you, Steve.
 
ENDS