E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC BRISBANE DRIVE
MONDAY, 17 AUGUST 2020
 
SUBJECTS: State borders; Early access super; Aged care; Paid pandemic leave; Youth unemployment.
 
STEVE AUSTIN, HOST: Jim Chalmers, welcome back to the program.
 
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: G'day, Steve. Thanks for having me back on.
 
AUSTIN: Not sure if you heard the headlines there but the Premier has announced that the borders of Queensland could well stay shut until past Christmas unless community transmission stops in Victoria and New South Wales. Is that reasonable?
 
CHALMERS: Certainly. I think it depends so heavily on developments in other states, and how and whether they're able to get on top of some of the transmission that we've seen, particularly in Victoria. It would be strange I think if the Premier was making those sorts of decisions in isolation from seeing how the situation develops down there. The other thing I'd say about it is that Annastacia Palaszczuk has been bang-on throughout this. She gets a lot of free advice about -
 
AUSTIN: The jury's still out on that. I mean, given what we don't know, the jury's still out on that, isn't it?
 
CHALMERS: So far she's been right, she's been resolute, and if she'd listened to some of those who were urging her to open the borders too early, then that could have been catastrophic for lives and for jobs here. We need to recognise that too. We don't know how it will play out from here. We need to be careful and cautious. We need to make sure that whatever decisions are being taken here are being taken on the basis of the best medical advice. The best medical advice needs to be based on what's happening elsewhere. 
 
AUSTIN: The best medical advice was that we were going to flatten the curve. A number of my listeners are pointing out that no one's signed up to an eradication program. The whole of the emphasis, even at National Cabinet, was to flatten the curve. That's happened. I don't know any medical advice that says we are going to eradicate it, yet this now seems to be shifting. We're almost at an eradication phase. Yet New Zealand and other places would indicate that that's not possible. How do you see it?
 
CHALMERS: Certainly we've been expecting outbreaks of some kind because of the nature of the virus. Ideally you would be avoiding the spread that we've seen in Victoria and to a lesser extent New South Wales. But in Queensland we've done a really good job of getting on top of this, not quite eradication but pretty close at least for the time being - touch wood. That's because Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Stephen Miles, the Health Minister who's been doing a good job as well, have been cautious about it. They've been taking the right decisions based on the right advice. That's going pretty well here. That could change. Until we get vaccinations done on a broad scale, then we need to be vigilant but so far it's been a pretty good strategy here in Queensland.
 
AUSTIN: The public health emergency declaration has been extended until 2 October, extraordinary powers and very strong, restrictive controls over what we would normally regard as ordinary human rights. What's our oversight of something like this? I know other states are doing it. Can you speak to that at all, Jim Chalmers?
 
CHALMERS: Only to the extent that governments are accountable at the ballot box for the decisions that they take. In Annastacia Palaszczuk's case, she's accountable quite soon in the election in October. There's legal oversight obviously, there's the Parliament, there are all kinds of accountability mechanisms. My sense is that even in Victoria where things have been really difficult for some weeks now there have been some positive developments in the sense that the numbers are coming down gradually. People will make their assessments about the actions that governments have taken. They'll be accountable in the usual ways for those decisions.
 
AUSTIN: My guest is Jim Chalmers. Jim Chalmers is Labor's Shadow Treasury spokesperson. Also the Labor member for Rankin here in Queensland. I just want to make sure I understand your position. If Federal Labor was in government nationally, what would you do differently if anything with the Coronavirus management here in Queensland, Jim Chalmers? We're all aware of the Victorian scenario but in Queensland, anything?
 
CHALMERS: Absolutely. Let me give you two obvious examples of really pressing issues. The first one is in aged care. We need to extend the crisis arrangements that exist in Victoria to the other states because aged care still troubles us. Even in states where developments have been positive, we need to make sure that we are ahead of the game there. One of the reasons why aged care has been such an issue is because there has been a lack of preparedness at the federal level. That's one thing that we would do differently. We'd be far more vigilant in aged care.
 
The other one's really important too. I think people understand this. It's the issue of paid pandemic leave. One of the problems in Victoria is that people were making a decision between doing the right thing by their loved ones and putting food on the table, versus doing the right thing by their co-workers. People couldn't afford to stay home. They didn't have sick leave so they did the wrong thing and they went to work when they were sick. We need to avoid that. That's why Anthony Albanese, Tony Burke and other colleagues have been really pushing the Government to have a national system of paid pandemic leave because you need to prevent that workplace transmission, not just come in after there's been some unfortunate passing of the virus. 
 
Those are at least two examples of what we'd do differently even here in Queensland which is travelling reasonably well.
 
AUSTIN: 4:42PM. Jim Chalmers is my guest. I'm not sure it's actually been released today but APRA was due to release their update on how much superannuation money was accessed in the second round. This is the emergency access to superannuation data. On AM this morning with Peter Ryan we learnt that 38 per cent of Australians who accessed superannuation actually had no drop in their income during the crisis, and 21 per cent had their income increase, which is gobsmacking to me. How do you see that data?
 
CHALMERS: I think the way that this early access to super has rolled out has been a debacle. It's meant that a lot of people have been raiding their retirement incomes unnecessarily. That's a pretty confronting; four in 10 people had no drop in income. I don't know if your listeners are aware this Steve, but you can actually access super without anybody checking whether you're actually in hardship. This tells me that this from the Morrison Government's point of view isn't actually about hardship. It's about undermining super. They're using this crisis as an excuse to do that.  
 
AUSTIN: But people have to have some personal responsibility, though, don't they, Jim Chalmers? Surely, the data showed that people were spending money not on essentials, but on what you might call non-essentials or luxuries. 38 per cent of people saw no drop in income and 21 per cent had an increase, and they still accessed their money.
 
CHALMERS: It's very concerning, Steve. You're right. Something like two-thirds of the money spent was spent on non-essentials. That teaches us that this hasn't been a program about genuine hardship, which is what the Government's been pretending it is. Our issue isn't with people accessing this scheme. This scheme changed and people have taken advantage of it, rightly or wrongly. Our issue is with the Government who have been looking for ways to undermine super and along comes the Coronavirus, and now they're using that as an excuse to do that. That's going to have devastating consequences for people's retirement incomes.
 
AUSTIN: But people knowingly did it. In other words, they don't seem to care. My fear is that Australians think, oh that's alright, the government will bail me out when I'm 60 and give me a pension anyhow so I might as well spend the money now. Extraordinarily reckless. 
 
CHALMERS: One of the consequences is that the Commonwealth will have to spend more on pensions because people will have run down their superannuation. Something like 600,000 people have totally eliminated their super. It's not hard to imagine the way that this can is going to be kicked down the road. It's a real problem. It's a real debacle Steve, because people aren't being checked to see whether they're in genuine hardship, most of the money is not going on essentials, and there's a heap of people who are accessing it even though their income hasn't dropped. The Government's not especially troubled about this because their aspiration here, their objective, is to undermine the superannuation system. The last point I would make about this Steve is that the amount of money that's coming out of super is heading towards $40 billion. That's around the same amount of money that the Government is spending on the JobKeeper program. They like to talk about how big a program JobKeeper is, and it is tens of billions of dollars, but as it stands right now people are pumping around the same amount of money into the economy from their own superannuation. That will be really costly into the future.
 
AUSTIN: This says to me though that Australians just think that they'll always be bailed out. It's not clear to me that the Australian Government's trying to destroy super. The Australian Government's position is that they're trying to give people choices because they're the best managers of their own money. But on the basis of the data, they either don't care about the future or think that someone else will pay for them down the track.
 
CHALMERS: All the language around choice is basically a marketing exercise. It's the sort of spin that your listeners don't typically enjoy. It tries to obscure the fact that even before Coronavirus the same Government was looking for ways to freeze the Superannuation Guarantee, change the way that you could access your super  in all of these various ways trying to diminish superannuation. The truth is they've never really believe in it. They've always looked for ways to undermine it. They're using this crisis as an excuse to do that. 
 
AUSTIN: They say they look for ways to give Australians more choice over what happens to their money.
 
CHALMERS: It's just spin, Steve. It's just marketing. They don't like super for ideological reasons. They don't like that it was a Labor creation of Paul Keating, in terms of compulsory superannuation. They're not into it. Now they're pretending they have these high ideals when it comes to super. Occasionally the masks slips and they fess up in one way or another that they're trying to fundamentally change the system of superannuation, which isn't just about looking after people in retirement. That's the most important objective but it also means trillions of dollars of investment into our economy, into local jobs and into growth in our economy. That's another reason why it shouldn't be undermined. 
 
AUSTIN: Before I let you go, Jim Chalmers, a couple of my listeners are asking when was the last time you visited the Gold Coast? They're saying that it's a ghost town. Given the unemployment situation here in Queensland, youth unemployment is nearly at 20 per cent, just below that, equal highest in Australia. As the Shadow Treasurer in Australia, when was the last time you visited the Gold Coast?
 
CHALMERS: I'm not sure as Shadow Treasurer, but I went there as a dad two Saturdays ago to try and support the local economy by buying too much ice cream for my kids! 
 
AUSTIN: Was it a ghost town?
 
CHALMERS: It was pretty quiet, yeah. Yeah, it was pretty quiet. Not totally dead, but quiet. It was troubling. That's because one of the hardest hit industries are tourism, accommodation and the like. It's very troubling. But I do get to the Gold Coast a lot. I like to think I understand the issues there. Youth unemployment clearly in pockets of Australia is going to be a problem for the foreseeable future. We don't want to see a lost generation of workers. That's why we have to get not just JobKeeper but also training, labour market programs, and all of the rest of it right if we want to avoid pockets of extreme intergenerational disadvantage.
 
AUSTIN: Thanks for your time.
 
CHALMERS: Thank you, Steve. 
 
ENDS