JIM CHALMERS MP
SHADOW TREASURER
MEMBER FOR RANKIN
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC BRISBANE DRIVE
MONDAY, 19 APRIL 2021
SUBJECTS: Business Council Dinner; Labor's National Reconstruction Fund; Royal Commission Into Veteran Suicide; Reinstating of Meritorious Unit Citation; Scott Morrison’s vaccine rollout failures.
STEVE AUSTIN, HOST: My guest is Jim Chalmers who, as you know, every Monday joins me to talk federal politics from a Labor perspective or from the Federal Opposition perspective. Jim I believe you're in Sydney for the Business Council of Australia dinner tonight. Who are you sitting next to? I reckon it's very revealing who they sit you next to at the table. Do you know who your companions are?
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: I do have a sense of who my companions are but I won't out them. They send you a list of the table in advance but as you probably know the Prime Minister is speaking and the Treasurer will be there so I suspect I won't be at table number one put it that way.
AUSTIN: Have you ever said please don't put me next to that person, can you put me at another table?
CHALMERS: No, in all seriousness Steve it's a really good gathering and I want to work closely with the business community as does all of our show under Anthony Albanese. We want to work with anyone who wants more jobs and more opportunities for more people. That is overwhelming the story of the business community, the union movement, community groups and the Federal Labor Party.
AUSTIN: Is the timing significant? Because I noticed in today's Australian, you wrote a piece saying that you feel the government is underwhelmed about getting to full employment and you floated Labor's idea of a National Reconstruction Fund. I wondered whether there was any significance in the timing of that?
CHALMERS: Well Labor's National Reconstruction Fund, which Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles announced not that long ago, is really about how we partner with the private sector to make sure we turn around one of the big problems we have in the economy that has been hanging around for some years now which is a lack of business investment. One of the things we want to work with business on is there's a lack of energy policy certainty, which is part of the problem, and a lack of policy certainty more generally. So what that Fund is designed to do is to invest in jobs but also to try and diversify the economy, revitalise the regions, and all these sorts of objectives that we share with the business community. There's a lot of capital floating around ready to be invested but we need to get certainty in areas like energy, skills and training, research and development all of those really important areas. Again these are areas where we want to work closely with the business community and others to make sure we can get the economy going better after COVID-19 than it was before.
AUSTIN: You criticize the government in your piece for saying they're not ambitious enough about full employment, how much more ambitious could they be? I mean they've spent billions and they're doing nothing but pointing out the rebound of the Australian economy, what more could they do?
CHALMERS: Well as that pretty remarkable support comes to an end, including JobKeeper which was cut last month and was the main big spend in the budget, I feel like there's a lack of a plan now for jobs after that. They've got a couple of policies which have more or less failed like the JobMaker hiring credits which they said would support 450,000 jobs but instead is supporting something like 609 jobs. So our point is let's be more ambitious about jobs after the worst part of the recession. That means the budget needs to be a plan for jobs and we need things like the National Reconstruction Fund, we need our plan for childcare, we need to get more apprentices on government jobs, the list goes on. Because as it stands, and the reason I don't think they are ambitious enough on jobs, the Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said as soon as we get unemployment comfortably below six per cent we'll take our foot off the pedal. What most economists think, including the Reserve Bank, is that full employment's got a four in front of it. If we don't get closer to that we won't get wages going again. Wages growth has been really slow, it's been the defining feature of the economy for much of the Coalition's time in office. So we need to be more ambitious about jobs because that'll get wages moving again.
AUSTIN: This is ABC Radio Brisbane. It's twenty minutes to five. My guest is Jim Chalmers. Jim Chalmers is the shadow Treasury spokesperson for the ALP and he's also the Labor member for Rankin, a federal electorate on the south side of Brisbane. Steve Austin is my name. Well let's move to what is for many the story of today with the federal government announcing a royal commission into the causes and reasons behind and around veteran suicide rates in Australia. The figure I saw was astronomically high. Something like two times the average male suicide rate in Australia which is distressing. What is federal Labor's position? Do you support or will you support the royal commission announcement?
CHALMERS: Of course, Steve. This is something that we've been campaigning for, fighting for and arguing for since 2019. We've stood alongside some really quite courageous and resolute affected families as they've also fought for this outcome today. It's later than we would have hoped. We would have hoped the government got on board sooner than now but they've done so now and that's a good thing. We're prepared to work with the government on the terms of reference now to make sure, not just that we have a royal commission but that it gets the right kind of answers that government and the community can actually act on.
AUSTIN: We seem to have a lot of royal commissions in Australia at the moment. We had the Aged Care Royal Commission, the Disability Royal Commission, the Banking and Financial Services Royal Commission. I'm pretty sure there's one I've missed. Does it indicate something about Australia?
CHALMERS: I think it indicates that we've got some serious issues that have piled up over the last six or eight years. There was a Banking Royal Commission before that as well. A lot of the most pressing problems in our society and in our economy have been left more or less unattended, and when they get to this stage where we've lost more veterans to suicide than to combat, then clearly something serious needs to be done. That's been obvious to us for a couple of years now, and clearly obvious to affected families, and members of the crossbench in the Senate and others who probably can't understand why the government has taken so long but probably like us at least welcome the announcement and the outcome today. But it's not the announcement that matters, it's the actual royal commission itself. We want it to be effective, we want to have the right terms of reference, so that we can get to the bottom of this really important problem and act to address it.
AUSTIN: I noticed today that the new Defence Minister Peter Dutton, also a Queensland federal MP has overturned a decision, I think by Angus Campbell, the Chief of the Defence Force, to strip honours from Australian Special Forces soldiers who served in Afghanistan. You might recall Jim Chalmers that he recommended the Meritorious Unit Citation be revoked for the Special Operations Task Group after allegations of a couple of people involved in war crimes. Mr Dutton's position is the vast majority of ADF personnel did nothing wrong and served their country well. He's now overturned that decision and announced they will be able to retain their citations. What's Labor's position on this given the Brereton Report's findings?
CHALMERS: First of all, clearly we need to take the Chief of the Defence Force’s recommendations seriously. But my personal view and I think Labor's view is that this was the right decision today, taken by the Defence Minister. There have been some horrible things happen, of course and anyone who's caught doing the wrong thing should be punished for it. But I'd prefer to start from the basis that Australians who serve overseas do so honourably. I think that's a better starting point then the way that was recommended so I think it was the right outcome today. It was right to clear it up to provide some certainty after a period of uncertainty. But also I think the right outcome in terms of our soldiers, and as I said if people have done the wrong thing they should have the book thrown at them. But we should assume that people are serving our interests with honour.
AUSTIN: My guest is federal Labor's Jim Chalmers. He's the Federal Labor Member for Rankin, an electorate on the south side of Brisbane. He's also the ALP shadow Treasury spokesperson. Jim Chalmers are you getting many people walking into your office expressing concern about the vaccine, or any of the issues around the vaccine? Normally they'd raise it with their doctor but I'm just wondering whether you're picking up anything in your electorate office.
CHALMERS: Every single day including today. Our office is next to a pretty busy bus stop and I normally wander out there at least once a day and see what people are talking about. There's obviously a lot of concern about the vaccines and vaccinations broadly but I say to people to take the advice of their doctor. We should have confidence in the vaccines. It's the most important way that we can properly reopen our economy and our communities. So we want people to have that confidence. There have been some monumental stuff ups in the rollout, but that doesn't mean that people should doubt the efficacy or the safety of the vaccines themselves when it's based on their doctor's advice, and getting the jab so that we can vaccinate as many people as possible.
AUSTIN: Jim Chalmers, best of luck for your business dinner tonight. Thanks very much for your time.
CHALMERS: Appreciate it, Steve. Thank you.
ENDS
