E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC BRISBANE DRIVE
MONDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2020
 
SUBJECTS: Australia Post; Morrison double-standards on ministerial rorts; Clive Palmer text messages.

STEVE AUSTIN, HOST: Let's go to Canberra and speak with Labor's Shadow Treasury spokesperson and also the Federal Member for Rankin, the electorate based in the south of Brisbane here. His name is Jim Chalmers. Jim Chalmers lovely to have you back on. Happy Monday.
 
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: Happy Monday to you Steve, how are you?
 
AUSTIN: I'm doing alright. Are you in Canberra or in Rankin? Where are you?
 
CHALMERS: I'm in Canberra. This is the second week of a sitting fortnight so I came in last night and back home Thursday night.
 
AUSTIN: A lot of reaction over the weekend to the news that the boss of the government owned corporation but independently run Australia Post gifted her executives a brand name watch for getting a good deal for the company. So let me ask you, Jim Chalmers, have you got anything against executives being remunerated or recognised for good work and good service?
 
CHALMERS: I certainly have an issue with how this was done.
 
AUSTIN: That wasn't what I asked though. Have you got anything against executives being remunerated and recognised for good service and getting good business?
 
CHALMERS: It's one thing in the private sector where I think it's fine but this is a public company. It's got two shareholders which are federal cabinet ministers. It's got a board which the Government has stacked with former Liberal politicians -
 
AUSTIN: Both sides of politics do that when it when they get the opportunity.
 
CHALMERS: If you have a look at the board there's eight non-executive spots and four of them are former Liberal politicians and officials which seems to me to be overdoing it. The other issue I think Steve is that Australia Post has been saying for some time now, and the Minister Paul Fletcher has been saying for some time that Australia Post is under a lot of pressure and we've got to make all these changes and we've got to deliver less frequently because there's so much pressure on the business model. I think a lot of your listeners would have been hearing that over the last few years and then seen these pretty extravagant gifts. They’ll think that the two things don’t square and I think that's fair enough. I agree with them.
 
AUSTIN: The reason why they got it according to the head of Australia Post was that they delivered a really great business deal to the financial benefit of Australia Post. In other words by proxy the taxpayer benefits so her executive staff who negotiated the deal get a reward. It's a government owned corporation, and it acts like a business so it operates like a business.
 
CHALMERS: But it's not entirely like a business. It's a public company and it has two shareholders which are government ministers. Well done to them if they've done a good job but that's their job to get good outcomes for Australia Post. I don't have anything against those four executives, I don't know their names. The point that I'm making is that at a time when a lot of Australians are doing it extremely tough and people are being asked to tighten their belts, and when Australia Post has been saying they're under a heap of financial pressure and that justifies all of these cutbacks to services, most people would think it doesn't pass any type of test and I would agree with them. I think it's entirely the wrong time to be giving these those sorts of gifts. I think it's entirely inappropriate.
 
AUSTIN: My guest is Labor's Jim Chalmers, the ALP Shadow Treasury spokesperson. Australia Post have what has what's called a universal service obligation to the people of Australia. The federal government allowed that universal service obligation to be reduced or cut back or changed this year because of the amount of parcels that were coming through Australia Post so they only have to deliver letters or mail every second day by law. I'm told it's even working out to be every third day in practice. Was the Opposition asked about this? Were you consulted about that?
 
CHALMERS: We opposed it. What happened was it became clear in I think about April of this year that Australia Post and the Government had in mind these sorts of changes for some time. Our criticism at the time in April and subsequently was we felt like they were using COVID-19 as a bit of an excuse to push some of these changes through which would have meant less frequent services for a lot of people, as you rightly point out from daily delivery to every second or third day. If you think about sending something from Brisbane to regional Queensland that went from three business days to more like five business days or a week. When these changes were proposed the Government said, oh look it's because letters are down, that's true. They said parcels are up, and parcels are up, but we would have thought that a boom in parcels would have been a reason to have more jobs and more deliveries not fewer of both of those sorts of things so we opposed it.
 
AUSTIN: So when these universal service obligation requiring daily deliveries of mail was put up, you guys said no. So what should they have done? Just hired more staff to deliver the mail?
 
CHALMERS: I've been speaking to some posties about this. I had some good meetings with posties in my local electorate in Logan City and the southern suburbs of Brisbane.  There wasn't the right amount of consultation. There wasn't the right amount of sitting down with the terrific people who work for Australia Post. There wasn't enough of an effort to say look, we've got lots more parcels, we've got fewer letters because of COVID but also because of longer term trends people are buying a lot of stuff online, so how do we use this as an opportunity to build the business, rather than chop it back. There was talk of job losses. There were these changes to the universal service obligations and we just thought if anything the fact that there was a boom in parcel delivery should have meant more jobs and more services, not the other way around.
 
AUSTIN: And you argued that in Parliament?
 
CHALMERS: Yeah we did. I have a great colleague Michelle Rowland, who's our Shadow Spokeswoman in this area and a heap of colleagues kicked up a lot of fuss trying to get this overturned but unfortunately the changes to the frequency of the deliveries is something that we have to live with now.
 
AUSTIN: My guest is Jim Chalmers. Let’s move on from that. We'll see how this unfolds. How do you feel about the Prime Minister rapidly asking the boss of Australia Post to stand aside after hearing about the gift of the watches to the executives?
 
CHALMERS: I think that's fine but what I don't like about that is that a number of his Ministers have been sprung doing far worse than that and they're not asked to stand aside. So the CEO of Australia Post does what I think was the wrong thing and the Prime Minister gets all angry about it and puts on the big performance in Question Time. I think a lot of people are entitled to ask okay well if that's the punishment for $20,000 in expensive watches, what's the punishment for the Ministers involved with paying a Liberal donor $30 million for a parcel of land that was valued at $3 million. You know what's the penalty for people who -
 
AUSTIN: That's being investigated so they might be punished but it might be a criminal charge. That's being investigated currently isn't it?
 
CHALMERS: So is the Holgate Australia Post issue, she was asked to stand aside and the Prime Minister got all angry and said how inappropriate it was. Sitting behind him in the Parliament, I was looking at them today thinking how strange it is that the Prime Minister can get so angry about that but not some of these far worse rorts like sports rorts and forged documents. The Treasurer got sprung sitting for five weeks on information that the chair of ASIC had overclaimed his expenses by more than $100,000. The Treasurer kept that quiet for five weeks then pretended he only just heard of it. All of these things I would have thought warrant just as much, if not more, anger from the Prime Minister.  But instead he largely ignores that and tries to get everyone focused on the CEO of Australia Post.
 
AUSTIN: What would you do about the head of ASIC getting tens of thousands of dollars for tax advice, written off, what would you do instead?
 
CHALMERS: Well, I wouldn't have sat on it for five weeks. So he found out about it -
 
AUSTIN: That's easy to say when you're in Opposition but what would you've done about it instead? What would you have proactively done about it?
 
CHALMERS: I would have started the process of properly investigating it as is happening now. He found out about it on the 15th of September, he put out a press release saying he found out about it on the 22nd of October, total rubbish, which he conceded in the Parliament today was wrong. There's been five weeks where the Treasurer of Australia has known that the chairman of ASIC overclaimed his expenses by more than $100,000. He kept that quiet for five weeks and now we've got a bit of a process. I think the process should have kicked in earlier and people had a right to know better earlier.
 
AUSTIN: 11 to 5, news at 5. Labor's Jim Chalmers is my guest. He's the ALP Shadow Treasury spokesperson, also the Member for Rankin. Before I let you go Jim Chalmers, let me ask you something that is appearing on mobile phones today. Many of my listeners today sent me screenshots via Twitter saying that Clive Palmer sent them a text saying you guys are planning a death tax. When's it coming in?
 
CHALMERS: Total rubbish. I feel restricted by the language rules on ABC Radio to say what I really think about it. I got my text at 11:52am today Steve. I was going to forward it to you but it sounds like others did. It's total, complete rubbish, absolutely wrong, and he knows that. I think Australians should just delete it, and vote for Anastasia Palaszczuk who has been right and resolute throughout this whole crisis and deserves another term.
 
AUSTIN: Although it needs to be pointed out that you guys were doing the same thing when you said the Coalition was going to sell off Medicare.
 
CHALMERS: They set up a Medicare Privatisation Taskforce, Steve.
 
AUSTIN: Lots of people have working groups though don't they Jim? People examine options but it's still not happened. It's never happened. It sounds to me like it's the same thing except from a different player.
 
CHALMERS: No it's not the same thing Steve. They set up a taskforce to examine it. We kicked up a stink. If it's not going ahead that's a good thing. This Clive Palmer effort, which by the way comes from his company Mineralogy, it's got the text that you read and it's got a link that you can click on. I say to every single one of your listeners, don't be fooled, it is complete rubbish, he's taking you for a mug. Just ignore it.
 
AUSTIN: The ALP up here is saying that Deb Frecklington has a plan to sack 30,000 workers. When I asked Stephen Miles if they had a copy of the secret plan, he said they didn't have a copy of the secret plan, they were just trying to add it up. Doesn't that indicate that this is simply the thrust and parry of state election campaigns and the ALP up here have been making up things about the Opposition as much as Clive Palmer is about the death tax?
 
CHALMERS: No it's not the same thing Steve. I'll very quickly explain how they get to that. Deb Frecklington says that she's going to get the budget back into surplus. The only way that they can do that is to chop back on public servants. That's what they did last time they were in office when she was working for Campbell Newman.
 
AUSTIN: They don't have to chop the back they just don't have to promise to hire as many in the first place.
 
CHALMERS: They're all jobs Steve and they all matter. Queenslanders should be fearful of a rerun of the Campbell Newman era. Think about what that did to my community and Queensland more broadly. In my community it was devastating, all the job cuts. If Deb Frecklington becomes the Premier of Queensland we'll see it all over again.
 
AUSTIN: Thanks for coming on.
 
CHALMERS: Thank you Steve.
 
ENDS