JIM CHALMERS MP
SHADOW TREASURER
MEMBER FOR RANKIN
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC BRISBANE DRIVE
MONDAY, 30 AUGUST 2021
SUBJECTS: Afghanistan; War Powers and the parliament; National Accounts and the economy; Clive Palmer and Craig Kelly the marriage of unlimited money with unlimited stupidity; Australians working Scott Morrison out.
STEVE AUSTIN, HOST: Let's speak with Labor's Jim Chalmers. Jim Chalmers is the Shadow Treasurer and federal Member for the electorate of Rankin here in Queensland. Jim Chalmers are you back in Canberra or are you still here in Brisbane at the moment?
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: I'm in Brisbane, in Logan City. It was agreed between the parties in the parliament that we could keep the numbers down this week. Most of the Parliament is operating from their homes.
AUSTIN: I'm grateful you’re coming back on, Jim. So tell me, the War Powers debate has been around for quite a while but for obvious reasons it's sprung up more recently because of Afghanistan. What is Labor's thinking on this question of whether or not it's reasonable to have a cabinet and a Prime Minister send Australians to war on their decision alone?
CHALMERS: You can see where people are coming from and people, in good faith, are trying to eliminate or avoid some of the mistakes that had been made around the Iraq War and other commitments. But I think there are a lot of unanswered questions about a proposal like that.
AUSTIN: What are they?
CHALMERS: You need to strike the right balance, for example, between some transparency and some accountability, with the need sometimes in these areas to be able to act swiftly and decisively. Nobody's really been able to reconcile, in my view, that balance. This has been around since 1985. That was the first time a party proposed this in our own parliament. So that is 36 years ago. One of the reasons why it hasn't been agreed to is because there are a lot of unanswered questions. There are a lot of unforeseen and potentially unintended consequences. So what we would do, we’d do it a bit differently. We think this is a really big deal, a really big proposal, and there are a lot of unanswered questions, as I said. So maybe the best way to do it, if you want to involve the parliament, is to use one of the Foreign Affairs parliamentary committees, which do often work pretty well, in a pretty bipartisan way, to have a proper long look at this stuff and have hearings and consult all the experts and academics that you referenced in your introduction, to see if there is a way to reconcile those tensions between being able to act decisively and being accountable to the parliament. I think the other unanswered question, is it's not for certain that the parliament would necessarily make better decisions than a cabinet or an executive of a government. So that remains to be seen as well. How do you make all the intelligence available? How do you do all of those sorts of things to make it work?
AUSTIN: War is always a failure of diplomacy in a sense, isn't it?
CHALMERS: Of course. And there's nobody who sees the commitment to war or conflict as anything other than a pretty horrible last resort. It is necessary sometimes. There have been whole libraries written about the concept of just and unjust wars. Mistakes have been made and in some instances commitments have been made for the right reasons and successfully carried out. If people from any political party or any part of our community think that there's a better way to make these momentous decisions, we listen to that respectfully. But I think there are a lot of unanswered questions and until or unless those questions are answered satisfactorily, I think we'll continue to be on the path we're on, which is to not resolve this.
AUSTIN: I recall when George W. Bush, then US President, addressed both houses of the Australian Parliament, and Simon Crean, who was then your federal leader, got up and gave a speech, making it very clear that the Labor Party opposed the war in Iraq. That was very respectful. I actually have to say it was one of the finest moments of Simon Crean and probably the Labor Party. It was a very reasoned, dignified, courteous, but strongly put argument as to why the Labor Party didn't support the Iraq War. Perhaps history has vindicated you, I'll leave that for others to judge, but it's interesting to me that if we had the situation where the whole of parliament had to say whether or not Australia goes to war or not, that would have been a very interesting first test.
CHALMERS: I think you're right about that and I think history will judge Simon kindly on that. I remember at the time, I was just a young whippersnapper at the time in the Labor Party, but I remember the commentary was not kind to him at the time. And in the War on Terror, language which was considered and nuanced wasn't that well rewarded in the commentary of the day.
AUSTIN: It's still not, Jim Chalmers.
CHALMERS: I think, particularly in the kind of fevered atmosphere of that part of the War on Terror, I think especially so. The system, we're getting a bit kind of deep here Steve, but I think the system generally doesn't reward that kind of nuance and considered thinking, and the recognition that there are so many grey areas here. You want people who can argue, like Simon did in that case, and like others have in other areas, you want people to understand all of those nuances and all those complexities, but unfortunately, the incentives in the system, they typically reward people who are kind of bombastic in either direction, both extremes get far more attention than the sensible centre. So I think there are issues there, not just in terms of whether we commit ourselves to conflict or not, but more broadly, as well.
AUSTIN: My guest is Jim Chalmers, the Shadow Treasurer and Federal Labor Member for Rankin. This is ABC Radio Brisbane. Steve Austin is my name. So it's been put to me that the reality is that because of technology, and the technologies involved in war, having a parliament requiring to debate it in both houses, the parliament will be annihilated before a decision was made. In other words, that because of you know, what we've wrought with our technology, we actually need to think and move quickly rather than slowly as would suit us perhaps.
CHALMERS: I think that is right. I mean, that's one of the big kind of tensions, I think, in this proposal. How do you act swiftly? How do you act in crisis times in emergencies? We've seen, even in the last few weeks, and we had a good yarn about it last week Steve, how do you make these decisions about getting people out of conflict zones quickly? Where do you draw the line between something that has to be debated in the parliament and not? These are all good questions. I'm not dismissing them. I'm not saying that because they're hard to answer they should be ignored. I'm saying they should be properly looked at. But we've spent a lot of time on this question, for some decades as I said, without necessarily resolving it, and that's because it's difficult.
AUSTIN: This is ABC Radio. Jim Chalmers is my guest. So that won't pass the Senate, so we'll move on to another matter. Just a quick thing that intrigues me. Today's Newspoll figures were interesting to me. The polling showed that voters are disaffected with the coalition. That is, coalition support is dropping. But the vote is not heading back to Labor, it's heading to the minor parties. As a member of Labor, why do you think this is Jim Chalmers?
CHALMERS: Well, I'd have to have another look at it, Steve. I obviously noticed it this morning but I didn't have a really good read of it. But my understanding was that some of that coalition vote in that poll, right or wrong, did go to the Labor primary. But I think the issue around the minor parties is a serious one.
One of the big fears that I have, frankly, about the next election is the capacity for the Clive Palmers and the Craig Kellys of the world to spread misinformation and to capitalise on that politically. The getting together of Clive Palmer and Craig Kelly is the marriage of unlimited money with unlimited stupidity. But that doesn't mean that people aren't vulnerable to that kind of messaging.
I genuinely didn't give that much more than a glance this morning. But if there's a growth in the other parties, I think one of the things we need to be careful about and vigilant about is the capacity for misinformation to influence the next federal election campaign. That's clearly what those two fools are trying to do.
AUSTIN: I understand that there's a high likelihood of a significant number of minor parties at the next federal election, which is why the parliament moved to change the membership requirements, requiring a minimum of 1,500 formal members as opposed to 500 as it was a couple of days ago?
CHALMERS: Yeah, that's my understanding, Steve. This is not kind of core busines for me, I've been in pandemic and the economy world, as you'd expect in my portfolio. But it has been raised with me. It's normal that we try and come up with the right kind of robust arrangements for the registration of political parties and that's what I think that bill was all about from the Government.
AUSTIN: You mentioned money, the national accounts are out on Wednesday. Do you think they'll show that Australia is in a recession like Saul Eslake said in the Saturday Paper on the weekend?
CHALMERS: Some economists aren't ruling that out, that the June quarter figures for the economy might be especially weak. Some of them can't rule out a negative quarter. Most of them think it will be a soft quarter.
I think regardless of what the numbers say on Wednesday, it's clear the economy’s shedding hundreds of millions of dollars a day and billions of dollars a week because the Government didn't get vaccinations and quarantine right. So that's the price that the economy's paying.
Whether the number on Wednesday is a small positive or a small negative, I don't think it changes the fact that people are hurting in this economy right now. Small businesses and working families are doing it tough in many parts of Australia. And that's because we've turned, as a country, what was the beginnings of a recovery at the beginning of the year, it's hostage to incompetence on vaccines and quarantine, and unfortunately that's compromised the recovery. So that's what we're seeing regardless of what the specific number is on Wednesday.
AUSTIN: Which is surprising, given how the company reporting season is underway. Well, it's nearly ended. And Australian companies are reporting best ever profits and shareholders are getting their best ever returns in Australian corporate history.
CHALMERS: Some businesses are doing really well. And some parts of the country are doing really well. It's a patchy recovery. It's uneven. It's coming in at different speeds. It's not hard to imagine the impact on the economy of these most recent lockdowns in Sydney in particular, but also Melbourne. Not that long ago our part of the world was in lockdown. Adelaide has had lockdowns. And Darwin. So that hurts the economy and hurts small businesses and workers within the economy at the same time as some people are going okay.
We won't get a strong, broad, sustainable, inclusive recovery and the kind of economic growth we need until we get those vaccination rates up. We have a good reason to go beyond the lockdowns. And we start to recover the right way. And unfortunately, that process, people were hopeful about at the start of the year, that's been delayed because the vaccines programme was bungled and the purpose-built quarantine hasn't been built. So we're behind where we should be and the economy's weaker than it should be.
AUSTIN: Ten to five, news at five. I should just mention Jim Chalmers, that in those Newspoll numbers that I mentioned just a moment ago, Anthony Albanese, your Leader, did get a lift in his approval rating. Does that give you heart?
CHALMERS: I'm not pretending nobody notices these polls, but I think the lesson from the last election is that if an opinion poll can't pick the result three or six days from an election, it's probably not going to pick the result of an election three or six months out. So I think we need to introduce that perspective to the conversation.
But even absent the polls, one of the things I've noticed in my own community is that people were prepared to give the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, the benefit of the doubt last year. And I think this year, they're really kind of working him out. The feedback I get about him the most is he doesn't take responsibility when things are tough, but he tries to take the credit when things are going well. I think people are kind of working him out. That impacts on their judgments about the relative leaders, Morrison or Albanese, Liberal or Labor.
I think one of the big things that's changing in the community is that people are working Morrison out and they're not as prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt as they might have been last year.
AUSTIN: Appreciate your time, Jim Chalmers. Thanks very much.
CHALMERS: Thanks very much, Steve.
ENDS
